It's a small world...
When lunch came around, Bernard decided that he was tired of having nothing to do, and his roommate did not even come in to check on him. The word ‘invisible’ entered his head again but he felt that it was not exactly accurate this time. No, this more fit the description of ‘out of sight, out of mind.’ So, Bernard removed a contact to see what color his eyes were now. They looked like a dark thunderstorm that no one wanted to be caught up in. Bernard smiled. It would not be long until he was fully sorted.
He was right. Bernard had gone to lunch, sat with his friends, and then gone to classes. No one noticed that he did not say much other than a greeting. He and his roommate were walking back to their room together after dinner, and his friend looked at him seriously. “
Are you alright?” he asked. “
I mean, I know you were feeling sick, but you’ve been really quiet all day…”
“
Never been better,” Bernard answered, giving his friend a small smile to reassure him. His friend did not say anything in response, and the two let silence come between them. It felt a little awkward, but it was not enough for Bernard to want to try and fix it; in fact Bernard found that he rather preferred the silence to talking when it was not necessary.
It was that way for a few days; until Bernard totally sorted. His roommate got uncomfortable having him around, and went to the office to ask to be moved into a different room. Bernard was on his own almost all of the time. His wardrobe changed too, black almost all of the time; and he grew taller over the next couple of months, and lost his acne. He still sat with his old friends during lunch, and because they were noticing the changes in him because it was near impossible to hide, he put some effort into talking to them like nothing but his fashion sense and height had actually changed.
Bernard discovered that it took humorously little for people to change their opinions of him; before he had been the unsorted geek that wrote for the school newspaper and wore his shirts tucked into his pants. Now, however, he was still unsorted but tall with a new wardrobe and gave up the school paper for the yearbook committee. Actually, it was not so much that Bernard
gave up the school paper, more that no one actually read the thing and the teacher in charge left on maternity leave, so the teacher in charge of the yearbook took over the class and put them on the yearbook committee instead.
The switch made it so Bernard was primarily a photographer, trying to catch the life of every day students, and it made it so he was able to delete his own photo from the yearbook so no one would remember who he was. It was strange to go from invisible and striving to be cool to cool and striving to be invisible again. Nonetheless, Bernard was sure that people would have a vague idea who Bernard was three years after graduating, try and look back and find his picture in the yearbook only to decide that it was his former roommate that they were thinking about.
It seemed as though it was merely a week before summer started and they were all going home, and Bernard was left with a choice, to go home where his parents would realize that something was very different about him; or to disappear. Bernard did not make his final choice until the day before he was supposed to leave for home. He called his parents.
“
Hey,” he said. “
I wanted to let you guys know…” he had planned on saying that he would be spending the first week of the summer at a friend’s house so that they did not need to pick him up, but instinctively changed his mind. “
That I’m going through a weird phase.” That sounded like the dorky thing that the old Bernard would have said. “
Yeah, black cloths, I don’t say a lot anymore…I just didn’t want you guys to freak out when you saw me. I’m perfectly alright though, don’t need you to send me to a counselor or anything, okay?” and he hung up knowing that the first thing that his parents would do after seeing him the next day would be to call a counselor.
Bernard was not disappointed. Over the summer he grew another few inches taller, he had weekly appointments with the counselor who determined after four of them that Bernard was right—this was probably just a stage—but should remain in counseling so that she was sure to have a steady pay check for a while longer. Between appointments Bernard’s parents would do ‘bonding’ trips. Usually this meant a weekend trip to somewhere that none of them had ever been too before.
One time it meant going to some obscure town in Montana where Bernard’s cousin—Mom’s sister’s daughter—lived. Turned out that Bernard and his cousin both went to the academy, but his cousin was a year below Bernard and even more obscure than Bernard had been. But, it turned out that she had sorted pretty quickly and while she was not the first in her class she was one of the first. In fact, she admitted to Bernard, she had been the one that threw the flaming bowl of chilli at her now ex-boyfriend.
“
You’re a friend of Larissa’s?” Bernard’s mind boggled at the concept of the super small world that he was now aware that he was living in. He had not been able to stop thinking about her since that night on the roof, and now he might have a way of contacting her. His fire magia cousin could help him.
“
I should say so,” she answered with a shrug. “
We’ve only been roommates since we were both going to the academy. She doesn’t even live too far away, and during the summer she and her friends have a band that isn’t bad. In fact, they are going to be here tonight at a coffee shop…”
“
Want to go?” Bernard asked before she could ask him.
“
You want to?” she responded, eyes wide in surprise. “
Mom wasn’t going to let me go because you guys are in town and we didn’t think that you would enjoy it that much.”
“
I’ll enjoy it fine,” Bernard assured her.
...after all, it's a small, small, world
