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Summary: The musings of a legendary man who has spent most of his life lurking unseen in a high school.
I sit sometimes on the weathered bleachers on the home side of the football field. The track is in an oval around the field, where the physical education class stretches and runs. They can run. Those little pawns. They can run, but they are going in circles and won’t ever get anywhere Fishy scents wash over the four-lane road separating me from the canal and a biker rides by, sleek in his jersey and tight shorts. A heavily pregnant woman walks the outside lane of the track, past the snack bar.
This is my school. Nobody ever sees me, nobody ever hears me, but I am here. I don’t go to classes. I do no homework. But I attend this school. They say I’ve been here for twenty-odd years. That makes—over seventeen classes I’ve seen through their four years. The freshmen this year are strange—too sure of themselves, and too many of them. The seniors are too far gone to care—they’ll graduate this year, and they’re preoccupied with college and prom anyway. The junior year is traditionally the major power in the static politics of high school, and they take it as some sort of a threat, a kind of mutiny. Some of them meet in empty classrooms and janitors’ rooms to discuss it. The janitors’ rooms are, I’ve noticed, rarely used for janitorial purposes. More often they meet in pairs, kissing, touching—fools. They think they’re in love. I’ve heard them professing it to each other behind buildings, in the baseball dugout, in the bathroom. Fools. You see now that I know all.
I make myself known to none, but I know all, and they know I am here. They don’t know who I am or why I lurk unseen, but they know I am here, ever watching. They pass the knowledge of me down the hierarchy of the student body year by year, down from the upperclassmen to the lowly freshman underlings. By the end of their sophomore year, they all know the legend. It is always said among the downtrodden of each year, the freaks, the nerds, the ones they all sniff at in the hallways—It is said that I was one of them once, many years ago, one who died a gruesome death in this school and haunts it still. Bull. I'm as alive as any of them. The higher-ups always say they’ve had dealings with me, that they alone know the secret. It wins them followers The teachers traditionally ignore the rumors. They say nothing. But they hear, and secretly, they believe. Oh, they believe.
I have always been here, and here I will remain. And nobody knows but me. Nobody but me! And I will never tell! I see it all; I have seen it all. Lives taken, wasted, made—I was there! I am always there. And nobody knows it but me, but me! I will never tell, I will never tell, because I—
I—I have nobody to tell. There is no one to tell.No one to tell but me.
I am Frederick the Extraordinary.
