Under the Surface

Day One

So far, it had happened twice today, and now Jeremy Steinberg was going for three. He wasn’t really doing anything out of the ordinary, just strolling along to his next class, a high school freshman standing five-foot three and carrying a 30- pound backpack. And through the hundreds of students that populated the halls he saw only the four of them approaching, the wide, stupid grins on their pimpled faces, the eyes lusting for his pain. They undoubtedly read his fearful expression and were encouraged by it, and they walked slowly, savoring the moment.

A rough hand on his shoulder and he was forced onto the locker behind him. A padlock bruised his side and he winced into the wild eyes before him.

“Well, you made a hat trick today, Steinberg,” the tallest one, Dylan, said to him, a little too loudly. The dread rose up inside Jeremy again, the feeling of inadequacy and of inferiority, and the adrenaline began to flow.

Don’t run, he told himself.

“Use your common sense and look out for yourself, you dumbass Jew,” Trent Vincent jeered from behind swollen lips. As he approached, the sharp scent of pot filled Jeremy’s nose. Jeremy wasn’t Jewish, and he rarely went to church. But that made no difference. He was just Jeremy Steinberg, and if Trent and his gang said you were Jewish, then that was the end of it- you were Jewish.

Don’t run. Show them you’re not afraid.

Trent threw a fake punch. Jeremy knew it wasn’t real, but he couldn’t help being betrayed by instinct. He turned around and ducked. The laughter increased in volume. Jeremy was cowering before them now, awaiting the inevitable.

This time the punch was real. It caught Jeremy just underneath the ribs and knocked the wind out of him at once, and he fell to the floor in pathetic gasping fits. And in the rush to make their last class on time, no student noticed the crumpled boy coughing in the corner of the hall. Nor did they pay any heed to the hysterically laughing figures disappearing down the staircase.

Jeremy was late to biology. He sat through the 50 minutes of droning lecture from Mr. Walting, not able to concentrate, dreading what he was sure would happen when the last bell rang.


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At three o’clock Jeremy was pushing through the double doors as fast as he could, to hit Norman Drive before anyone else. His gut still hurt a little, and he was still dwelling on his bitter resentment and hatred for Trent and his gang. He took a quick glance over his shoulder. Groups of five or six girls were gossiping and laughing about ridiculous things, the jocks were shoving each other, the punks were picking up their skateboards, and everyone was in the middle of their after-school routine. And his assailants were nowhere to be found. The rest of today, he decided, would be a special day. He had only English homework, and that wouldn’t take him too long, and then he could chill for the rest of the day.

Minutes passed. His thoughts had drifted away from him and the cool breeze snapped him back. He looked up to see that he was entirely alone on Norman Drive and ready to turn right onto Baker Avenue. He could go directly home that way, past the house of the crazy old woman with the savage dog, and maybe running into the disgruntled postman who thought that since he had known the Steinbergs since they moved in, he could complain tot hem about whatever he wished.

“Hey Jem! Tell your ma not to leave the old papers out on the porch. It pisses me off.”

But the sun was warm, not hot, and Jeremy was feeling generally good about the remainder of the day. Aaron had football practice, Laura had orchestra, and Dad was taking David to the local Father-Son Banquet. A rare hour of peace awaited him.

'What the hell', he thought, 'I’ll take the long way.'

So Jeremy leaned to his right and turned onto Ronan. The breeze was now at his back, gently swaying the trees overhead. He stepped more slowly, savoring the warmth of the late summer sun on his face and the smell of the smoke rising from a nearby backyard. Steaks on the grill. Looking up, he could see the thick foliage of the oak trees over the sidewalk, the golden sun forming a halo between the leaves. And over from the tall grass to his left, he could hear the gentle rushing of the river.

In a minute Jeremy was down on his knees on the gently sloping bank. He dipped his hands in the water and brought them to his face. The water was cold. It spilled over his shirt and ran into his mouth. And just before he opened his eyes, Jeremy became dimly aware of a soft pressure against his face, a presence in front of him. He opened his eyes and jumped back in shock.

A girl was standing in front of him, with her icy hands still pressed against his cheeks. She had appeared seemingly out of nowhere- but it must have been from the river itself. She wasn’t moving, just gazing at him through empty gray eyes that screamed with pain. Her skin was almost white, and her hair was long and black. And to his horror, Jeremy found that this beautiful girl was translucent and surrounded by a thin haze.

Slowly, from pale lips and frozen tongue, the girl began to speak.

“Angels become demons…as the purest of wisdom is shunned.”

“What?”

She removed her hands from his face. Jeremy knew he should have been afraid, but he wasn’t. Just intrigued and a bit perplexed. He suddenly wanted to talk with this strange girl, to at least ask her name. But she just stared at him, sad and dejected, until he spoke again.

“Uhh…who are you?”

The strange girl seemed to recoil a bit, dragging a fine trail of mist behind her as she did so. She spoke again softly in a neutral tone, with what seemed to be great difficulty.

“Leave me alone.”

The girl was already turning away to descend back into the river. Jeremy suddenly panicked. She couldn’t leave him now! He took a large step forward to stop her but he passed straight through- the hand that had reached out to grasp her white robe had caught nothing but air. Still, she turned her ghastly face toward him and he saw it in a dreamlike blur. Once again, as from a distance, he could hear her whisper:

“Do not search for that which you are not meant to know.”

She turned back around and this time he did not go after her. In the same surreal haze as before, the girl walked out over the shallows. Her feet made no ripples in the water. After what seemed like an eternity, her body went limp and she fell. Just as she was about to touch the water, the girl suddenly faded away in a newly-formed cloud of vapor.

Jeremy knelt there still, staring out at an invisible beacon over the water, reaching motionlessly toward the thickening mist.


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Jeremy blinked. He was strolling along the shoulder of Ronan, not knowing quite how he got there, just letting his legs guide him and hearing without really hearing the gravel crunch under his shoes. Left, right, left, right, without thinking. Half his mind was still on the riverbank, falling back to the nebulous experience as is recalling a dream. Already the details were escaping him.

But it didn’t matter anymore. Whoever that girl was, she had obviously been sent by Trent as part of an elaborate scheme as always. A normal girl, hiding underwater, ready to intrigue him, coerce him to confide in her so she could report back to Trent. Give him more material to work with. Yes, he saw it all clearly now, and he would not return to the river.

With that in mind he turned again, onto Solomon with the old broken houses and the yellowing grass. One, two, three, four, five houses down he made a right and started up the front walk. But for a moment he stood leaning against the old green gate looking over his house, maybe doing a mental inventory, he wasn’t really sure. An ancient wooden gate with a broken hinge, a yard of dying, shredded wheat-like grass and scattered action figures- David’s, of course- a rusted old Buick in the driveway. The house needed to be repainted, but that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. Home sweet home. He climbed up the porch and pushed open the front door.

As he expected, Mom was vacuuming the living room, which never seemed entirely clean, undoubtedly grateful to drown out the constant chatter of her two daughters. She barely noticed Jeremy walking through the door. He set his backpack by the door and strolled into the kitchen, receiving only an acknowledging glance from his mother, a half-smile, a sorry-I’m-busy-I’ll-get-to-you-eventually. She had already turned back to her work, forcing the tube between the cushions, constantly hurried.

Sighing in incomplete pity, Jeremy turned to the counter to find a lone slice of frozen pizza. To him this was luck. He grabbed it and took a bite, chewed it slowly, thinking about nothing in particular. But his peace was short-lived.

“I was gonna eat that!”

He looked up and his twin sister Laura was standing there, clearly not as annoyed as she wanted him to think, but still a pain. He would play along, he supposed. Half smiling, half angry, she shoved him, but he was braced against the counter. Jeremy grinned and took another bite of the pizza.

The vacuum stopped and Mom walked into the kitchen, hurried and distracted as always.

“Jeremy?”

There was still pizza in his mouth, but he managed a, “Hmm?”

She didn’t hear him.

“Jeremy!”

“Mom, Jenny’s giving me a ride to orchestra.”

“Jeremy, don’t fill up. I’m- okay Laura- I’m making pork chops for dinner.”

He stood there for a moment with his mother and favorite sibling when a car horn broke the silence. Laura started toward the door. Jeremy caught up with her and handed her the half-slice of pizza, grabbed his backpack, and retreated to his room.


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“Jeremy, what are you doing?”

His mind rose slowly to awareness. “Huh?”

Laura was looking at him from across the table, slightly uneasy. In snapping out of his daze, he noticed his left hand falling back onto the table.

“Why do you keep touching your glass and then touching your face?”

“I…don’t quite remember-” he began truthfully, but Kristy cut him off.

“Because he’s a little freak, that’s why! Aren’t you, Jeremy?”

His oldest sister was twenty, with no college and no job, nothing more to Jeremy than a pain in the ass.

“Kristy, don’t pick on your brother,” his mother said tiredly. Kristy looked at him in disgust.

“Freak,” she growled under her breath. For once Aaron looked up from his plate.

“Don’t worry, Jeremy,” he said from behind lips covered in grease and cheap pork breading. “You’re on a different plane from Kristy entirely.” Kristy cursed at him and left the table. Jeremy grinned. He liked Aaron a lot better, even though Aaron liked to try out new wrestling moves on him, and even though Jeremy had little interest in sports, which Aaron lived and breathed.

The best of the night was over, and Jeremy returned to his room.


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He leaned his head against the cool glass of the dusty window, looking out through the gathering haze of dusk. Maybe even contributing, with the warm vapor from his breath on the pane. Jeremy watched the dancing of the last of the fireflies in the cool night air, the ones that would die in a day or two, their carefree summer closing fast upon them. He could relate to them.

God damn Trent and his cowardly cronies. And damn the kids who told him, ‘Oh, no one ever gets shoved into lockers.’

He replayed the incident in his mind for the millionth time. Walking to biology, getting shoved into the locker door, cowering before a false punch, then falling helplessly to the floor after a real punch in the ribs. Shame and humiliation. It was alright, though. It would all be okay. Because soon he would kill Trent. He would be the one to do the job and that’s all there was to it.

He shook his head sadly and looked down at his shoes, then at the peeling paint on the opposite wall. Through the tangled jungle of his thoughts swam a pure white calm, and before he knew it he was up at the window again.

On the other side of the glass was only a canned-sardine array of houses, but his senses seemed to reach out beyond them to the cool river. He could almost hear it now….he could hear it now, and he could feel the weird haze around him, and he thought he could even see her in front of him in a luminescent blur.

Jeremy lay back on his bed, his thoughts standing pleasantly still. What had happened at the river, anyway? He closed his eyes and Trent began to fade, blotted out by the cool white mist and the warm halo of the late summer sun.


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End Day One.