For the Love of Truth

From the writing prompt, “Louder isn’t always better.”  I loved being able to focus on Oliver. And though he doesn’t appear much in this (in human form, anyway), it was also fun to introduce Lex.

The sound of something large and heavy being tipped over made Oliver Meeps pause for a moment outside the classroom door. He waited there for a moment, listening intently to the clamor of voices inside. A male voice was raised in anger and then abruptly cut off; something resembling a girlish scream rang out, and then Oliver heard the familiar sound of someone being tossed into a large wastebasket. This was followed directly by a loud flatulent noise that sounded very much like an angry octopus trying to extricate itself from a mound of paper and pencil shavings.

If Mr. Meeps had learned anything from fifteen years of hero work and another five of substitute teaching, it was that timing was everything. Straightening from leaning on his cane, he took a deep breath, squared his shoulders as best he could, and entered Springfield High’s after-school detention room.

Unsurprisingly, he was immediately greeted by the guilty-looking expressions of six football players. They were all gathered around the industrial-sized trashcan over in the corner, doing a good job of blocking his view of it. The desk directly next to the trashcan was knocked over, and if there hadnt’ been two notebooks scattered like debris around the desk, a worse observer than Oliver would never have known there was a seventh student in the room.

But Oliver was a good observer, and he also had the advantage of being able to physically see the moral character of every individual in the room. He took a moment to indulge in what he privately called the “soul searching” of the room’s occupants. The small balls of color he saw coming from each of the boys all had distinct shades of very guilty purple around the edges. He knew their types well. They weren’t necessarily bad at heart; they were just unruly, disrespectful, and rarely disciplined. A few of them even had the potential to do something quite impactful with their lives, if they picked better friends to associate with.

Still, they’d been caught red-handed, as it were, and for a split second Oliver knew he had their attention. He cleared his throat softly and looked at them over the tops of his glasses with gentle, if not innocent, brown eyes. “Good afternoon, gentlemen.”

They were clearly thrown by his mild manner. Another good thing he’d learned from his many experiences was to keep your voice down. Even after all these years, he could practically hear his mother’s voice murmuring, “Louder isn’t always better, dear. Sometimes the best response is the one they can barely hear.”

Oliver took a few careful steps forward, trying not to rely on his cane even though his hip was twinging painfully from an oncoming storm front. He smiled at them, quite calmly, and reached up to dust an imaginary speck of lint from his hat. “I believe,” he continued in that same even tone, “that you’ve put Mr. Laurence in the trashcan again. And unless I’m very much mistaken, that’s quite against the established detention-time rules. If you’d just remove him, then I won’t have to write you all up another detention.”

One of the boys (Oliver thought he was probably the quarterback) regained his composure and stepped forward. “Oh yeah? How you gonna make us? You’re just a substitute!”

For a moment Oliver very much felt their differences in stature; Meeps himself had always been something of a small man, even before he relied so much on his cane, and the boy before him was a good foot taller, not to mention at least a hundred pounds heavier.

If this had been a question of physical violence, Oliver would have beat a hasty retreat at this point. Fortunately, it wasn’t, and he knew full well that the poor boy had no idea who—or what—he was dealing with. He could tell just by looking at the way the boy’s colors shifted to a kind of gaudy yellow that he was bluffing, and not particularly well. He’d gotten away with this one too many times.

He’d clearly never had to deal with old Mr. M. Oliver smiled up at him without an ounce of trepidation. “Ah, I see. Just a substitute, of course. I can’t really do anything, can I?”

“That’s right,” the boy agreed with a smug look back at his friends. There was a soft popping noise from inside the wastebasket, followed by what sounded like a rat trying to claw its way up a smooth plastic wall.

Oliver nodded agreeably. “So you say. I’m sorry, what was your name?”

“Mayes,” he said proudly, in the same tone that other people used when they’d just won awards. “Billy Mayes.”

“Ah.” Meeps took some satisfaction in knowing he’d been right. “Our school’s famed quarterback, I think I’m correct in saying?”

“That’s right,” he said with a grin. Oliver could literally see his yellow-green arrogance swelling to ridiculous proportions in his chest. Several of the boys still at the trashcan made affirmative noises, and one even stepped forward to slap Billy on the back.

Oliver continued to smile, but now his eyes narrowed a bit. Someone that knew him well would have been wary of the glint that was forming at the back of his gaze. Billy Mayes had picked the wrong day to try and bulldoze the substitute teacher. Especially this substitute teacher. “Alright then, Mr. Mayes. If you can tell me why you have the right to stuff poor Lex into the trashcan, then I suppose I won’t have to give you a detention.”

Billy stared at him blankly for a moment. He was used to substitutes and teachers alike bowing before his superior athletic record. This wasn’t the out he’d been expecting. Still, he made an effort, his face screwing up in concentration until he finally answered, “…Because the guy’s a twerp?”

The noises inside the trashcan promptly ceased. Oliver only saw the tiny ant that appeared on the rim because he was looking for it. He watched the insect for a moment as it made its way to the classroom floor, and then returned his attention to Billy. He took a moment to really consider the boy’s colors; Mayes wasn’t innately evil, but the generally scarlet tones overlaying his character spoke of natural tendencies towards cruelty and domination.

“A twerp. I see.” Oliver paused a moment to consider which tact was best, but in the end, there was really only one option. The boy’s own soul gave Oliver all the information he needed to make his point. With a long sigh, he leaned forward slightly and spoke in a low voice. “You know, Billy, when I look at you, I see a lot of things. An accomplished athlete, a natural leader. You have quite a lot of promise.”

Mayes grinned widely, but Oliver wasn’t finished yet. He looked at the sickly yellow-green color radiating from the boy’s edges and identified it easily for what it was. “I also see someone that feels like he has to impress his friends, because he’s not all sure himself that he’s the kind of man he wants to be.” A petulant flair of bruised-purple color somewhere near the middle of Billy’s chest allowed Oliver to continue, “And I think that at the end of the day, Mr. Mayes, you know full well that you’re not fulfilling your potential. And you’re angry; at yourself, or maybe your parents, or just the world for not giving you the breaks it should have. But shoving fellow students into trashcans is not the way to solve these problems, Billy.”

The boy stared at him in shock, his arrogance silenced totally by the perceptive little man before him. It was likely nothing he hadn’t heard before, but something in the quiet delivery this time seemed to have hit home. He shook his head a few times, as if trying to dislodge Oliver’s words from his brain.

Meeps looked him squarely in the eye, and though he actively chose not to fully utilize his ability to show the boy his own colors, his words had more or less the same effect as he finished, “One day, Billy, you’re going to have to face yourself in the mirror and decide what your real colors are. Why not start now and make them ones worth looking at?”

Billy stood there a moment longer, clearly thinking hard in the silent room. No one noticed when Oliver glanced down and smiled at the ant now sitting on his left shoe. When he looked back up, he was just in time to catch the moment of decision on Billy’s face as the boy reluctantly turned to the others and said, “Alright, guys. Enough is enough. Let him out.”

The right tackle went to do so, but as he glanced into the trashcan he made a startled noise and jumped back. “Hey, he’s not in here! Where’d the punk go?”

Oliver felt a dangerous shifting by his foot and groaned. “Perhaps, under the circumstances, insults wouldn’t be–”

There was a tremendous popping noise down by the floor, but instead of turning into a raging hippopotamus or an angry bird like Oliver expected, the ant merely transformed into the despondent form of Lex Laurence.

The boy looked up through his fringe of badly-gelled hair and scrambled to his feet, nearly tripping over his far-too-baggy pants. Oliver took a moment to assess the boy’s colors, but they were no different than the other times he’d seen them: angrily embarrassed pink practically lit him up like a neon sign. Without a word, the sullen young man trudged over to his abandoned desk, scooped up his scattered things, and resettled at a spot across the room, glaring daggers at his temporarily-distracted persecutors.

“Right then,” Oliver said softly. “Maybe we should all return to our seats and get on with this detention?”

Amazingly, all seven of his students did exactly as they were told, spreading out to sit in desks again. Most of them stared absently into space, the atmosphere turning thoughtful.

Eventually, though, Billy Mayes broke from his reverie. With just a quick glance at Oliver, he cleared his throat and turned instead to Lex. “Hey, uh…Lex.”

The other boy looked up out of reflex, wincing like he expected a punch. He watched Billy with wary eyes.

But no punches or insults were thrown. With careful motions, Mayes leaned over and held out his hand. “I’m…uh. I’m sorry about the whole…you know, trashcan thing. And the…the locker thing. And the pool thing. It’s not that I don’t like you or anything.” He blinked at hearing those words come out of his mouth and quickly backtracked, “Well, I don’t, but only cuz I’m popular and you’re…well, you, you know?”

To Oliver’s bemusement, Lex nodded as if that made perfect sense.

Billy continued. “It’s just…it’s kind of fun to watch. That animal thing that you do. That’s kind of cool, you know?”

Oliver held his breath for a moment, fully aware that this was as close to an attempt at reconciliation that the quarterback would ever come.

After a long beat of careful study, Lex eventually extended his own hand and gave Billy’s a quick and furtive shake. “…You think it’s cool?”

Billy shrugged. “Kinda, yeah. At least it’s not some stupid power like…like…”

“Like turning people green!” one of the other football players chipped in helpfully.

“Yeah!” Billy agreed, obviously grateful for the help. “Animals are way cooler than turning people colors!”

Oliver smiled and sat back in the teacher’s chair. He knew that, in all likelihood, this moment of inter-clique student harmony wouldn’t last. Boys would be boys, after all. But for now, he took a deep breath, and settled in to watch over the frames of his glasses as the colors in the room shifted to a shade that was almost, but not quite, the blue-gray calm of understanding.