If I Could Tell It

Colorado Springs, America, 2008

Things that make sense.

-Mathematics

-Swordplay

-Latin

-Circles

Things that do not make sense.

-People

-Contractions

-Christians

-My Father

-Ranks

-Me

That was the list I was making during my fifth period, seventh grade, Language Arts class. Mrs. Delores told us to make a list of four to six things that made sense to us, and four to six things that did not.

She was gliding through the rows of wooden desks, scanning each person’s paper and maybe saying a thing or two about it to them.

Then she got to me.

“Arthur, why do you have ‘people’ down for things that don’t make sense to you?” she asked me. I looked up at her.

“Because they do not.”

“And contractions?” she questioned. “I would think that your generation would have the easiest time of all with them.”

If only she knew.

“Not me.”

“Why didn’t you write football down under things that make sense?” she asked, “I thought you loved playing.”

I shrugged and blew my longish golden blonde hair out of my face. She said to be honest, so that is what I did.

“And what about playing the trumpet in band?” she tried, obviously not satisfied with my lists.

I shrugged again. I did not want to talk to her. Talking made me feel out of place; the accent was too foreign.

“Well, okay,” she said, frowning. I noticed she did not say anything about the fact that I wrote “me” and “my father” down.

It was universal knowledge among my teachers that I was a foster child. I was the one who people looked at and said ’oh I feel so sorry for that poor boy’. That was me, the one whose parents left him on the doorstep of an orphanage when I was twelve years old, or so they thought. At least they did not question me too much. Questions were bad. Questions meant more lies I had to remember. More things I had to cover up.

“Now get started on your paper about what the things that make sense to you all have in common, and the same with the ones that don’t,” she said; she looked at me for a second. She probably thought I had fleas and slept in a cardboard box at night. “Arthur, just remember if you ever need any help that you can come to me.”

I nodded and looked down at my notebook, at my lists, the lists that apparently were not good enough for Mrs. Delores.

I sat there in the red metal chair at the brown wooden desk in the center of the green painted classroom on top of short grey carpet. There was a girl with long, brown hair on my right who had black marks smeared across her eyelids. She was concentrating on her lists. I saw school under her “does not make sense” list; she must have been struggling. On my left there was a boy with short, dark hair wearing a black sweatshirt advertising a beach city somewhere. I searched my mind for their names, but I could not remember. I suppose this was because I did not care enough about them when we met.

I looked up at the front of the classroom and saw Mrs. Delores gazing at me, as if in deep thought. I think she did not understand me, and that was why. Because when people did not understand something, they either decided not to think about it, or they had the desperate need to figure it out. Unfortunately, she had the desire to figure me out. If Mrs. Delores had a list of things that do not make sense to her, then I would have been at the top of it at that moment.

There were only five periods in the day at Carmel Middle School. First was Mathematics- Pre-Algebra, Second was band, third was Physical Science, fourth was History, and fifth was Language Arts. So, Mrs. Delores was my dominant teacher, and therefore, she believed that it was her personal mission to help me and figure me out.

The bell rang, and I closed my notebook and tucked my pencil in the side of my jeans. I shoved the red notebook with Language Arts written across it into the black backpack that my foster parents had given me. They really were nice people. They just could not figure me out either.

Mrs. Marion Ector met me at the front door of the school, as she had done after football practice for the past month of September. Practice was canceled today, however, so she met me at two thirty- four today. She was my foster mother, and she had told me it was alright for me to call her mom or mother, but I did not like that. I had a mother. Just not here. So I stuck with Miss Marion or Mrs. Ector.

You see Mrs., Miss, or Mr. were titles for people who did not have titles. It did not matter their profession: if they were older than eighteen, and you were not, then you called them Mrs., or Miss, or Mr. At least that was how I saw it. Maybe there were certain types of people that you did not use titles on, like the people who sit on the sides of the road with brown signs saying things like help or God Bless; Miss Marion curses them and says they will go straight to the drug dealers if you gave them any money.

Miss Marion was a medium sized, forty something, very stressed out, woman who was always doing something to do with her very busy social schedule. She had told me that she and Mr. Ector had had their children when they were young, twenty-four, so now they were off at somewhere called college. Twenty-four did not seem very young to me; my sister was only fifteen and my father was constantly trying to marry her off. Plus, my mother had had me when she was sixteen.

“Ready, Arthur?” she asked, holding her hand over her cell phone for a second.

I nodded, and she resumed her conversation with whomever was on the other end of the cell phone and put her hand on my shoulder as if to push me out the door.

We walked out to the parking lot where all of the other students were either being picked up by their parents, or getting onto big yellow school buses. Miss Marion ushered me into the front seat of her small white car, and I set my backpack between my legs. She finally hung up with the person on the phone and flipped the device closed, setting it in the car cup holder between us.

“How was school?” she asked me, trying a little too hard to be friendly.

“Fine,” I said simply. Keep talking short, that was how to not make people ask me about things.

“I just got off the phone with my friend Carey,” She said as she put the car in gear and backed out of the parking lot. “She really wants to meet you.”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay” was kind of like “yes,” except it could be used for more things, like simple acknowledgements, also “alright.”

I noticed that the Ectors keeping me as their foster child was kind of like a social advance for them. People saw them taking care of me and they thought that they were such nice, generous people. They were helping that poor, orphan boy. It was alright though. They were helping me, so I did not mind helping them out in their political and social aspects of life.

“What’s your favorite class?” she asked. I had to come up with a decent answer; she was getting annoyed with my lack of talking.

“Math,” I said, shortening the word like everyone did, “it is the easiest.”

“Oh?” she asked. She was really just prompting me to continue.

“Yes,” I said. She was not going to get anymore out of me.

She continued asking me questions, and I continued answering them without any description the entire ride to the Ectors’ house.

Their house was rather large as houses go, I think. It was painted pale blue with white trim and was three stories high. A lawn of green grass and river stones stretched out in front of the house, and a blacktop driveway made a pathway from the road to the three car garage. The garage was the only place in the entire house that was messy. It had all sorts of things shoved in all sorts of places. For example: there was a canoe paddle stuck in the rafters of the roof.

“Thank you,” I said quietly, grabbed my backpack, and got out of the car.

“Sure…?” I do not think she quite understood why I always said thank you whenever she did anything for me. It was just respectful in my mind.

I laid in bed awake that night.

The ceiling was a dull gray color and I stared at it as if it could tell me all the answers I wished for. The answers to the reason that in a few moments I would close my eyes and drift off to sleep, only, instead of dreaming, I would wake up where I was from. I would wake up in reality. I would wake up there.

Cadbury Castle, Britain, 645

The stick was slammed down on my hands for the ninth time that hour. I was counting the amount of times before my fingers broke. I looked up at Father Patricius in defiance.

“Arthur, focus!” He yelled at me as if I was some sort of dog.

I blew my hair out of my eyes and glared at him. I was done with these ridiculous Latin lessons. I knew what I needed to know, and that was that. I wanted to learn Greek, anyway. Then, I could read the texts in the library about the studies that the Greeks had done on mathematics; especially circles.

“Now what is the ‘nos preterite’ tense of ‘venire’?” he asked me. His face was red, and I knew he was about two more times from hitting me in the face with the ruler.

“Nos venit” I said, still glaring at him. I just wanted to be done with the lesson so I could leave. “We came.”

He nodded. I glared at him some more.

So he hit me again with the stick. I cringed. No matter how many times he slammed that stick down it would still feel like he was breaking all my fingers. “Be respectful!”

I looked down and away from his icy gaze. And people said the Old people were cruel. In my opinion Christians were much, much worse.

“To Britain to save the people,” he said, asking me to translate the rest of the sentence. I did not like that sentence, because we were not saving the people of Britain. We were killing them. We, being Christians, and also people like my father.

“Nos venit a Britannium salvabit populi,” I said, still glaring at him.

He slapped my hands again. I thought about how easy it would be to twist the stick out of his hands and shove it through his chest. I softened my look.

“Vale,” he said, which meant farewell.

I stood and bowed to him. “Vale.”

Father Patricius left my chambers then, and I leaned back in my chair. I picked up the piece of papyrus I had been writing on, crumpled it into a ball, and threw it at the cobblestone wall. I hated Father Patricius, hated him. In his mind, only Christian men were people. Everyone else were animals, not worthy of any attention or effort. Women, we needed, but they did not receive any rights, the rest of them either deserved to be slaves or killed.

Lancelot was sitting on a table in the armory, staring at the wall. I tackled him off the table to the ground and laughed with my hands planted on either side of him.

“What are you doing Arthur?!” He yelled in my face.

“Greetings,” I said sarcastically and got off of him. “You were not prepared my friend.”

“I was thinking,” he said, defending himself, standing up, and brushing himself off.

“Mm,” I said. I picked a staff from the rack they were on, “and what were you thinking about?”

“Avalon,” he said. I adjusted my grip on the staff and felt the weight of it. “Do you think that I have really come from it?”

“That may be,” I said. I swung the staff around and spun on my heel. Unfortunately, I did not gauge my surroundings as well as I should have, and I tumbled into the rack of staffs, they clattered to the ground.

“Arthur,” he rolled his eyes. I cringed and bent to pick them up before someone came in and saw.

I set the rack back up and shrugged my shoulders.

“Maybe you could ask your mother,” Lancelot said, sitting back on the table. I balanced the metal rack against the wall at an angle that I hoped would hold it up.

“About what?” I asked, slowly backing away from the wall.

“She grew up on the isle of Avalon,” Lancelot said. He picked a staff from the opposite wall and followed me out of the armory into the grassy training yard.

The training yard was a very large rectangular courtyard in the center of the palace. It had covered hallways along the outer edges in the Roman style with tall stone pillars, and a few floral trees were around the edges and flower beds alternated with the trees. On the side closest to the armory, there were training dummies in neat little lines which were really just burlap bags of straw on a metal stick with armor and a helmet on. On the side furthest away were archery targets; furthest away, so no one would accidentally be shot. In the center there was a fairly small circular arena with grass instead of dust for padding. Throughout the entire yard there were podiums, for masters to teach from, and other various training aids.

Currently, about fourteen archers were shooting crossbow at the timed command of someone I could not make out. A couple of the older boys, Kay and Bedivere, were fighting mace in the corner across from the armory entrance. There were not many more men practicing, or even just having fun with each other. They were all out at war. The war of my father.

You see, I hated my father. Hated him. Uther Pendragon was the bane of my existence. The utter and absolute reason that I loathed the day I become king.

All he did was sit in the palace in luxury, coming up with new ways to tax people so he could send more men to his ridiculous war he started with the Saxons. A common misconception of that war is that they invaded us, the Britons. While this is true, Ambrosius, my grandfather, was the real reason for this. He pissed them off. Then they invaded, and my father, being the pompous idiot he was, pissed them off more. Instead of trying to make peace with them, he just sent more and more men to kill more and more of their men, and then be killed themselves.

That is why I do not want to be the high king of Britain: because all being king seems to be is sending more people to die while you encourage a problem that could easily be solved with peace.

Lancelot and I walked over near Kay and Bedivere, careful not to get too close so they would not harass us. They glanced our way, but made no move to instigate any communication.

We stood across from each other and slammed our staffs on the ground once, and then went at it. Lancelot struck first. I blocked it on my left side and used the momentum from the blow to spin around on my feet and strike at him from the right. My staff collided with his, and he flung it over his head. I tapped it once on the ground to get it to bounce back up, then spun it around my back around my fingers and whipped my body around, nailing him hard in the side. It made a hard crack sound against his ribs, and I cringed.

“Sorry?” I gave a forced smile at him while he glared at me, holding his hand over his side.

“You do know you are not actually supposed to hit the other person hard right?” he said, irritated, leaning on his wooden staff.

“I know,” I said. I smiled inwardly. I may have hit a bit too hard, but I had definitely executed that strike perfectly. If I had had a sword in my hands, he would have been dead. I just needed to hope that nobody saw me do it that was a snitch, so I did not get punished.

“Arthur!” Too late. I think if I were a dog at that moment my ears would have been all the way back against my head and I would have been leaning my chin on my paws looking pitifully up at my punisher.

“Yes, Mother?” I asked weakly. Maybe she did not see it.

“Why did you hit Lancelot like that?!” she asked me angrily. Unfortunately for me, she did see it.

“It was an accident.” Of course it was not an accident. Can we focus on the fact that it was a perfect blow?

Lancelot snorted. I wanted to kick him in the shins, but I do not think my mother would have approved of that.

“We-ell,” she said, very sweetly, “I suppose you could not have meant harm to your best friend.”

Sometimes, I think my mother is the only person who loves me. Sometimes, I know my mother is the only person who loves me. And she always believes in me, no matter what. She was the one who believed in me when I was just a baby and no one thought I would live to see summer. She is the one who does not doubt me when I said that I knew what the future was like. She is the one who stands up to my father for me. She is the only one brave enough.

“I came to ask if the both of you wanted to go riding with me,” she said.

“Yes please,” Lancelot said. Lancelot was a bit like my adopted brother. Not by my father, though. The only reason he was not killed, when my father ransacked the isle of Avalon ten years ago, was because my mother saw three-year old Lancelot and took pity on him. She convinced my father that she could raise him in the New Ways and that he and I could be brothers. My father hates him even more than me because of this, because he was born from someone who believed the Old Ways.

She looked at me with her fierce gray eyes. I nodded, and she smiled.

“Off we go then.”

“Austin?” I asked my manservant as I sat in a chair in my chambers and sipped a cup of hot milk. He was currently preparing my bed for me to sleep.

“Yes, my lord?” He asked and brushed his ear-length red hair out of his freckled face.

“Do you ever have strange dreams?” I questioned. He pulled back the covers and I climbed into bed in my soft sleeping trousers.

Austin shook his head. “Not really.”

“Oh.” I just pulled my covers up to my chest. I yawned in tiredness. “You are dismissed.”

He bowed to me and blew out the remaining candle on my bedtable.

I settled into my featherbed then and closed my eyes, drifting off to sleep, or whatever it was.

Colorado Springs, America, 2008

The reason I like mathematics is simple: it makes sense. Everything builds off something else in a neat and orderly fashion. There are only right answers or wrong answers. Black and white, no grey. No questions asked.

In pre-algebra, we were currently learning about simple rules of algebraic properties. Like, whatever you do to one side of the equations, you must do to the other in order to get the correct answer. This seemed like it applied to my life in a way. Whenever something happens to me on one side of my life, it seems to trickle over to the other side.

“Arthur, do you know how to do number five?” my friend Ty asked me from across our four desk group.

“Ah, yes,” I said, tracing my finger down the list of equations to the bolded 5. “Factor out the three first.”

“Thanks,” he said and went back to his work. I finished my paper and got up to turn it in the metal basket on Mr. Krupnik’s, the teacher’s, desk.

He smiled at me, and I gave a forced smile back.

“Do you like math?” he asked me.

“Yes sir,” I said. I just wanted to go sit down and finish my drawing of the apartment complex I was designing to give to this boy Helix who said that he was going to have to move because of a fire that had destroyed his home last week. I thought if he saw my drawing, then maybe he would feel more hopeful.

“That’s good,” he said, nodding., “I hope you continue to like it.”

I nodded and went back to my seat.

I pulled out my ruler and the sheet of paper I had been drawing on from my binder and smoothed it out on my desk.

It was a big rectangular building with an angled roof so the rain and snow would slide off. The windows were circular and kind of nautical like. Helix had said when he was older he had wanted to join the navy and captain a ship, so I added that for him. All the angles of my drawing were the exact same as they would be in real life, and I made sure that it was all to scale. Every line was perfectly straight, and I think, if you were to want to, you, could use my drawing as a blueprint for the real thing.

“You going to practice?” Ty asked me as we packed up our things for the next class. The bell was to ring in about a minute and a half.

“Yes,” I said. The class started to line up at the door.

“You know,” Ty said, standing next to me, “you’re kinda weird Arthur, but you’re pretty cool too.”

...was that a compliment? I think so. It was hard to tell sometimes, especially with Ty’s thick African American accent. He was a tall, dark skinned, and curly haired boy, with full lips and dark brown eyes.

“Thank you.”

“Yeah,” he said, and patted me on the shoulder. I only came up to his ear. I was still waiting for my predicted growth spurt to happen so I could be taller and stronger. At least, I hoped it would happen. “Whatcha got next?”

What do you have next? I mentally translated. “Band.”

“Oh, you’re one of those,” he said. One of what?

I did not answer, because I did not know what he meant. I just looked at him, confused.

“Never mind,” he said, shaking his head and half smiling. “Go unleash your inner geek.”

Well alright then.

That night after football practice, I retreated to my room at the Ectors’ household to finish my on the similarities between the things that did make sense to me and the things that did not.

So far, I basically had an introduction on what the things were, and a couple similarities. The biggest similarity I had, between the things that make sense to me, was that none of them had to do with other people and that they were all independent. I had left a blank spot in my writing for the similarities between the things that do not make sense to me.

I think that my handwriting is rather bad compared to the other students. This is probably because I learned to write with a quill and ink instead of a pencil. And, I had only been using a pencil for about a month.

“Arthur,” Miss Marion knocked on the doorframe because I had left the door open. “It’s time for dinner.”

“Okay,” I said, and set my pencil down on the paper. I looked around the room for a second.

The walls were a plain, eggshell white and the carpet was a light gray. The bedspread on the twin bed in the corner was a scarlet red, and the desk in the corner opposite the door, which I was sitting at, was a plain oakwood with a black cushioned chair that spun around. Miss Marion said I could put things up on the walls, if I wanted, but I did not have anything. Maybe, someday, I could put up one of my drawings.

I followed her into the upstairs hallway, down the stairs, and through the living room to the wood floor dining room. Mr. Ector was already seated at the end of the table. I sat at his right. Miss Marion brought a pan of some sort of pasta, cheese dish that she called “lasagna” and set it on the table between the three of our seats. Also, a green salad and a loaf of fresh bread that she had bought at the grocery store.

The Ectors did not pray before their meals, which was slightly strange to me because I had never known not to. Miss Marion served both of us some of her concoction and sat down to eat, herself. I thought it tasted fairly good, but, then again, I have been told that I will eat anything.

“How’s school going Arthur?” Mr. Ector asked. That seemed to be the staple question of adults nowadays. How is school going? Was what they asked when they did not know you very well, and they had no idea what else to say.

“Fine, sir,” I said. I knew to be respectful to adult males. They were the ones who made decisions, they were the ones with the power, so, therefore, in order to get what you wanted, it was smart to be respectful.

“Please call me Anthony,” he said, exasperated. He had said that to me many times. Anthony was his first name. I knew I would not call him by his first name, though. It was extremely disrespectful. I nodded anyway.

“I think we should do something about your hair,” Miss Marion said, breaking the silence.

What was wrong with my hair? It was about shoulder length, and I tended to just cut it with a knife, so it was a bit choppy in some places. I did not think anything needed to be done to it.

“Do what to my hair?” I asked nervously, forgetting to add a ma’am to the end so it did not sound so cavileer.

“Cut it,” she said. “I can take you to my salon when I get mine styled on Monday.” Today was Thursday, so that meant three days.

“Cut it how, ma’am?” I did not forget this time.

“Short,” Anthony piped in, “I bet you can barely see with that mop in your face.”

Miss Marion punched her husband in the arm to say that his comment was rather rude.

“I will just take you in with me and you can cut your hair however you like,” she said, giving Mr. Ector a curt look.

I finished my paper when the digital clock read 8:30 in bright red letters. I slid it to the side and looked out the window over the desk.

The neighborhood streetlights were all on over the concrete road, illuminating the houses. It was beautiful, really. Each house was a little bit different, but all of them matched in a certain way. They complimented each other. A neighborhood would be an interesting project to design, it would help people, but it was also like a work of art in the own right of it. I gazed out the window for a bit, picturing all the scales and measures and angles that went into designing this complex housing development.

I did a quick sketch of the neighborhood with a pencil and a ruler on printer paper. As soon as I finished it, I held it out in front of my face, then immediately crumpled it up and threw it in the wastebasket underneath my desk. It was simply imperfect, and imperfection bothered me.

I tucked myself into bed after that, listening to the outward sounds of the American city. The modern sounds: the cars in the street, the electronic hum of a radiator, the wind against the window shutters. It was funny how familiar those sounds had grown to me in the last month that I had been waking up in America. They no longer seemed so strange and foreign. They had simply become a part of my reality. My utterly confused and unidentified reality, the reality that flip flopped back and forth between my two lives.

Wake up in Britain, wake up in America. Fall asleep in America, fall asleep in Britain. Dream in Britain, Daydream in America.

Cadbury Castle, Britain, 645

I looked at the doors to the trial room. Should I have left them closed and walked away? Maybe. But that was not what I did. I walked right up to that door and I told the guards to open it for me. Am I stupid? Most likely.

“Arthur,” my father said as I walked down the cobblestone aisle in the empty trial room to his throne.

“My Lord.” I bowed in front of him and stayed on my knee.

He waved his hand to release me and I stood up. “What is it that you want?”

Uther Pendragon was a tall, muscular blonde man with a bit of a large stomach and a wicked scar across his face stretching from his left eyebrow to his right cheek. He had pale blue eyes and a square jaw. His skin was even whiter than mine, almost transparent. He hated everyone, except for my mother at times. People knew not to disrespect him though. I have seen him cut the throat of someone for forgetting to use the correct title.

I had come to ask him not to kill the young girl from Avalon that had wandered into our city by mistake. Lancelot had asked me to.

“Um,” I said. His hard stare was drilling holes into my soul. How could this man be my father?

“Spit it out boy.” I could not remember one time that he had called me son. And still, for some reason I desperately wanted his favor, his attention.

“I came to say that I want to represent the Pendragon crest in the Winter Solstice tournament,” I said. I am sorry Lancelot, but I was afraid that my father might have killed me if I had asked, I rehearsed in my head.

“You have represented me for the last five years,” he stated. His stare narrowed even more, if that was possible. “Are you some kind of idiot?”

“No, my lord,” I said. I bowed my head.

“Get out,” he said harshly, “I have work to do.”

I did not lift my head up and I turned around and quickly began to walk toward the door.

“And Arthur,” He said. I could not help but be a little excited, maybe this time he would tell me that he loved me, or at least did not hate me as much as I thought, “you will be punished if you do not win this year.”

A chill went through me and I continued speed-walking out the door. The guards looked sympathetically at me. They had heard the whole thing.

I was supposed to be going to my chambers for my Latin lesson. However, I felt I needed to get out to the training yard to practice. I was afraid of what you will be punished meant. It was anything between being lashed with a whip with glass stuck in it to having my sword hand cut off because my father thought it was useless.

“Why are you afraid of him?” A smooth voice drifted into my ears. A small hand grabbed my arm and drew me into a niche in the hall. My sister’s face looked slightly up at me, her gray eyes shining in anger at my father.

“I am not, Morgain,” I said, brushing her hand off of me. “Leave me alone.”

Morgain was one of those people that just did not really understand the line between being normal and being a creepy stalker. She was three years older than me and had midnight black hair that flowed down her back in soft waves. She never put it up, even though it was considered rather promiscuous to always have the hair of women down. She had the same eyes as mine: the gray eyes of our mother, but she had the shorter, darker features of her father, Gorlois, the first husband of our mother. You can also add her to the list of people who hate me, right under my father.

“Arthur, stop lying,” she commanded me. I realized that was what I was doing, and I hated lying.

I just looked at her; we stumbled back into the cobblestone hallway that was lit by windows without any glass panes.

She shook her head at me. “You are a coward Arthur Pendragon. A coward!”

“I said leave me alone,” I demanded and pushed her away by her shoulder.

“You are just like your father Arthur,” She growled at me. “You could never stand up to evil, and you are going to end up just like your father: sitting fat on that throne while sending people to die.”

“Shut up,” I growled back. I was nothing like my father and never would be. “I am not like him”

She snickered. “Whatever you say brother.”

I glared at her and walked off. I stopped mid stride when I realized I was going the wrong way, turned around and walked back past Morgain, who had her arms crossed over her chest and was smirking at me. I ignored her and kept walking.

“Did you talk to him?” Lancelot asked me enthusiastically as I pulled my sweaty white training tunic over my head in the armory.

“No, sorry,” I lied, “He was busy.”

“Oh,” Lancelot said, looking down. Way to make me feel guilty friend.

“Yes.” I said quietly, because I did not know what else to say. This was when the word okay would have come in handy.

Awkward silence.

“Kay says that he is going to slay the dragon that is supposedly terrorizing the people of the village Meredith,” he said, breaking the veil of silence.

I smiled. Kay loved to talk a big game, but he never actually did the things he said he was going to do, “of course he is.”

Lancelot laughed. “You would more likely do it.”

Then inspiration struck me. I would slay the dragon. Then my father would see me doing something great and Morgain would stop calling me a coward! I would go with Kay to Meredith, saying that I was to help him and then I would do it instead of him! I would be a hero if I did that. “Well, why not?”

“What?” Lancelot asked. I forgot he could not read my mind.

“I could slay the dragon!” I said excitedly. “Then my father will finally see some worth in me!”

“Arthur, no offense, but you will die if you go against the dragon,” Lancelot told me with a doubting look.

“Well, then I will work as hard as I can at training until I am good enough,” I said proudly.

“Alright Arthur,” Lancelot rolled his eyes. He did not think I could do it. That only made me want to work harder.

We had supper in the dining hall that night. We being me, Lancelot, Morgain, and my mother and father. My father sat at the end, my mother at his left, me at his right, Lancelot next to me, and Morgain next to my mother. It looked like we were having goose or swan, some sort of large bird.

“How was the day?” my mother asked, trying to be cheerful. One of the servants served me some of the meat, a ripped off piece of barley bread, and what looked like glazed carrots. I looked up at her and stayed silent.

“Fine, Ygraine,” my father answered, “other than the fact that we are fighting a losing war, and my only son is going to lose our land to the Saxons because he lacks a spine and a brain!”

I did not look up. I felt Lancelot glance at me. Morgain was definitely smirking.

“I am sure Arthur will mature with time” My mother said, trying to sound hopeful.

“Oh yes, time,” He said meanly. “I almost forgot, he can see the future!”

I bit my tongue. I never should have told anyone about the strange free land of America.

“What do you have to say for yourself, son?” The gaze of everyone at the table was on me.

I stood up. “I am not hungry.”

And then I left.

Left to go where? I am not sure. There I suppose, America, an escape from this place into another. An escape that started with the close of eyes in one place and the opening of the same eyes in another.

Colorado Springs, America, 2008

“Hello Arthur,” The school counselor, Mr. Labinski smiled at me as I came in through the glass door to his office. He shut the blinds.

“Hello,” I repeated.

“Please, sit down,” he said, motioning for me to have a seat in the brown office chair. I complied.

Mr. Labinski was a tall, skinny man with short, dark hair and black, thick-framed glasses. He had an almost fake expression on his face that looked as if he was trying to be friendly, but could not quite do it naturally. It looked like he was hiding some sort of pain beneath those thick glasses. I just could not quite figure out what it was.

“So how are you Arthur?” He asked me. Believe it or not, this seemed like one of the first times that someone had asked me that and actually meant it. Maybe it was because it was his job to ask “troubled” students that question.

“Fine,” I said. I needed to be undescriptive in order for him not to find out too much about me. I had a feeling this man had an aptitude for finding out things.

“Really?” he asked. He did not believe me. “Arthur you can tell me anything. I promise. I am here to help you.”

Somehow I did not think that telling him I was born in the year 633 would help anyone. “Okay.”

“Do you like it here at Carmel?” he asked me.

“Yes, it is fine,” I said. I looked at a poster on the wall that had a cartoon boy with skin made of a rainbow that said Be You on it.

“Do you know why you are here?” he asked me.

“No sir,” I said. I folded my hands in my lap.

“Your Language Arts teacher, Mrs. Delores, told me that you said that you wrote yourself on a list of things that didn’t make sense to you,” he said. So it was Mrs. Delores’ fault. “Why did you write that Arthur?”

“I do not know,” I lied. Maybe it was because I was in a strange land thirteen hundred and sixty-three years away from where I should have been.

“You seem to be a fairly intelligent individual Arthur,” he said, carefully gauging my expression, “and I don’t think you would write something for no reason.”

I shrugged and kept my face in monotone.

“You seem very respectful,” he told me. Of course I was respectful. I did not want to be punished. “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

I had never been asked this question before. Never. It was always Arthur you are going to be the high king of Britain and you will marry a beautiful young woman and have lots of children so that when you die there will be someone else to be the high king of Britain. I did not receive a choice. That was just the way things were.

“I do not know,” I said.

“If you could do anything for the rest of your life, what would it be?” he prompted me.

I thought about this. If I could do anything for the rest of my life. Well I did not want to do just one thing for the rest of my life. I wanted to do lots of things. I wanted to play football, and do mathematics, and talk to people, and do my drawings, design structures.

“...maybe an architect,” I said. He regarded me. I regarded him.

“That is a great career choice,” he said. He seemed thankful that I had finally given him a bit of information. “Why do you want to be an architect?”

“Because I want to help people,” I said simply, “and I like mathematics.”

He nodded, then looked down at his papers. He furrowed his eyebrows. “What’s your last name Arthur?”

I shrugged my shoulders. My last name was Pendragon, but I suppose I could not go around telling people that was my name.

“Well you must have a last name.” Mr. Labinski leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest.

“I suppose,” I said. I looked down at my hands, “I just do not know what it is.”

He studied me for a moment. “I suppose you could take your foster parents’ name if you wanted, and they agreed of course.”

“Okay,” I said. Arthur Ector. “That would be fine.”

“Why did you go to the counselor?” Nathan whispered to me as Coach Hunter explained to us the importance of working hard at practice.

“Mrs. Delores said I had issues or something,” I lied. I knew exactly why.

“I swear that woman’s crazy,” Nathan laughed quietly. He pushed his brown hair off his forehead.

“Maybe,” I smiled halfheartedly. She was not crazy. She just knew there was something wrong with me.

Both Mr. And Mrs. Ector picked me up that afternoon after practice. This was a rare occurrence. Miss Marion generally always picks me up except for the few times that she had charity fundraisers to attend with the women from her church.

Mr. Ector made small talk all the way to the electronics store, in which he parked in the parking lot of and ushered me and miss Marion into. I walked just a little behind them and dragged my sneakers on the asphalt. The dull hum of electronics made me nervous. They did not seem natural: images captured by foreign objects, human tasks done by machines.

“Why have we come here sir?” I asked, as Mr. Ector lead me through the store. Miss Marion had wandered off to look at washing machines.

“To get you a present,” he said enthusiastically. I blew my hair out of my face.

“You need not buy me anything,” I said quietly. Also, I was not sure I wanted anything that came from this store.

“Yes I need-” He paused for a second. I think my way of talking sometimes confused him. “I want to buy you this.”

I stayed quiet as he stopped in front of a table of opened laptops with the illuminated Apple sign on the screen. Ty had said that he had received one for his birthday a couple weeks ago. Also, that they were extremely expensive.

“Pick one,” he said. I looked up at him. He could not possibly be serious. What would I do with a computer anyways? “I mean it, Arthur. I want to get one for you.”

I thought for a moment. It was generally considered polite to refuse such an expensive gift at first, but then it began to irritate the other person if you refused too much.

“I do not know which one to choose,” I said quietly. I really did not, they all looked about the same to me.

“Well, what is your favorite color?” he asked me. He bent down a little so he was more at my level.

“Red,” I answered. I had always liked the color. It reminded me of power, and somehow it also felt hopeful, like something good was coming.

“Then get this one,” he said and pointed to one that was painted a shiny scarlet.