Second Skin - Chapter 0008

Chapter 8 — Formation

It took quite a while before his cell phone finally pulled him back. It wasn’t the ringtone—a discreet little bell, chosen on the first day precisely so as not to disturb anyone, and in a nearly empty cafeteria a discreet beep gets lost. It was the vibration. The device trembled inside the brown paper bag, the bag vibrated on the worn Formica tabletop, and the long table, with loose screws, resonated with a low hum that rose up Sebastian’s elbows until it found someone awake inside.

He raised his head. At the top of the screen, above the square and the two figures crossing paths in opposite directions, the bell icon blinked. Next to it, the clock. Sebastian checked the numbers, glanced at the cafeteria door, returned to the screen, and in the interval between one glance and the other, his stomach did the math before his mind: the second class had already started a long time ago.

He folded the bag with the sandwich, stuffed it into his backpack, threw the backpack over his shoulder, and dashed across the cafeteria, running down the hallway and up the stairs two steps at a time, the zipper hitting his lower back. The classroom door was closed. He opened it the way you open something you don’t want to hear creaking, entered with his head down while the teacher, with her back to him, was still writing on the board.

No one complained. A student in the back looked up and then quickly looked down again. Sebastian sat in the first seat, as always, opened his notebook to a blank page and wrote only the date at the top. That was all he wrote in the next two classes.

He could read the board. And that was the problem.

Sitting in the front was never a choice: in six schools, he sat there because, behind any classmate, the blackboard turned into a wall of scribbles. Even in the first row, with his glasses, the little note in the corner would dissolve into a blur, and he copied it from his neighbor. Now, from there, he saw everything: every letter of the explanations, the pressure of the marker varying with each word, the piece of masking tape holding the map in the corner, the dust accumulated in the eraser tray, the damp stain on the ceiling without a defined shape. Too clear. Too insistent. An exaggerated focus.

And he didn’t write anything.

The teacher’s words passed by him like light through glass, leaving no trace. On his third attempt to pay attention, he realized he had no idea what the material was. It could be anything. The page remained with only the date, the pen motionless between his fingers, and he continued staring at a board that, for the first time, he could read from anywhere, and of which he didn’t read a single line. His mind was elsewhere.

It was, first and foremost, on his own face.

He ran his hand over his nose once more—the third or fourth time since the cafeteria—and found nothing: just smooth skin over the bone, where the nose pads of his glasses, over thirteen years, had carved two marks that not even a bath could wash away. Nothing on his temples. Nothing behind his ears. He had no idea where his glasses were. He hadn’t looked for them. And the strangest thing—stranger even than seeing well—was this: he didn’t miss them. An object that, throughout his conscious life, had been the first thing he touched upon waking, before thinking, before knowing what day it was, had simply disappeared from his routine, and he hadn’t even noticed.

Sebastian understood how things worked. It was the only thing he admitted to doing better than others. He’d take an inert device, open it up, and at some point, the logic would emerge: a loose wire, a bulging capacitor, a cold solder joint. There was always a cause. Things don’t break down for no reason, nor do they suddenly start working again out of nowhere. An eye is a lens: if the curvature is wrong, the image is projected where it shouldn’t be; the body doesn’t perform overnight maintenance to fix that on its own. He even knew the exact name of the problem and the prescription of each lens, memorized from hearing his mother repeat it at the optician’s counter every two years, in the voice of someone checking prices.

So he did what he always did: he opened up the problem and started looking for the part. Had he overslept? Yes, but sleep doesn’t fix your eyesight. Was he dreaming? He couldn’t have been: it was the third hour of a cold day, with a heavy sandwich in his stomach and a boy behind him tapping his foot; dreams don’t provide that level of detail. Does tiredness improve vision? Worse. He reviewed all the possibilities, like running his fingers through the wires of a panel looking for something loose, and they all ended in the same place—nothing. There was no part, no wire. Only the white screen in front of him, clear, waiting.

And when he finally gave up on the board, his mind would return to that night. It wasn’t a memory, but a whole block of sensation that he couldn’t divide into parts, and which would surface uninvited whenever he stopped working. First came the real fear, the fear of the wall, which had filled his chest with ice water and stolen his voice. Then, without transition, the euphoria: an open hand on his back and the floor disappearing. The figure he only knew from movie screens and silent documentaries, crouching a meter away from him, taking off its mask. For him.

He had met his hero.

He had rehearsed that meeting his whole life, and it had come out like a rough draft: no prepared speech, no questions in order, and him not saying the right thing. In reality, he said nothing. And that hurt in a strange place, somewhere beneath his pride.

Three questions. He’d counted them in the early morning, his head on the pillow, and counted them again there, pen still: if he wanted a photo. If the photo had turned out well. If he was alright. Three simple questions, asked slowly, by a man who bent down to his level—and Sebastian answered all three with just a nod: up, down; up, down. Like a dog. Thirteen years keeping the questions, reviewing and rehearsing them under the covers, and at the crucial moment his throat tightened and the door wouldn’t open. He didn’t even say “thank you.” Not even “thank you.” And then there was that last second, next to the fallen Frankenstein, when the man opened his mouth to say something, looked at him without smiling, attentively, and someone shouted his name from the other side of the square, the mask went back on, and it was over. Sebastian would never know what it was. He just wished he’d had the courage to answer. One word. Any word.

At least the photo remained.

He had looked at it more times than he cared to admit, and he looked at it again there in the classroom, his cell phone hidden in the fold of his notebook. It was trapped behind the cracks in the glass: their two faces side by side—the man with a beard, a discreet smile of someone who has been taking photos for thirty years, and his, pale as wax, with the dry blotch from his forehead to the corner of his mouth, his eyes red and enormous behind thick lenses, his hair plastered to his head by the snow.

Thick lenses.

In the photo, he was wearing glasses. It was proof, dated and timed, that the glasses had existed the previous night and were in their place. Sebastian looked at it for a while and then turned his phone face down, leaving it in the corner of his desk.

He spent a good part of the third class staring at the back of the device with a senseless hatred he couldn’t help but feel. It was just an object—a cell phone from three generations ago, with black electrical tape holding the cover together and a camera of another brand glued on with epoxy, which he himself had already had to resurrect twice. It wasn’t his fault, but it had vibrated without him noticing, and because of that, it had made him late for a class that wasn’t even the first of the day, precisely on the day his mother had asked, in a note folded in four that was now in his coat’s inside pocket: “Please don’t be late today.” And it carried those four seconds. And it carried the photo. Everything he most wanted and least wanted to look at fit into a piece of cracked glass the size of his hand—and it was easier to hate the glass than to hate himself for not being able to stop looking at it.

Then he went back to the notebooks. And they returned his gaze: the same page, the same date, the same blank space.

The bell rang.

The electronic beeper, which had been trying to sound like a brass bell, sounded, at best, like an exhausted microwave. At the same time, all the desks were dragged across the floor at once. Only after closing his notebook and slinging his backpack over one shoulder did Sebastian realize he had no idea where to go.

He was too new to Douglass to memorize the schedule. The sheet printed by the secretary, folded in four and taped to the inside cover of his physics notebook—the real one, with circuits scribbled in the margins—had been there since day one. Sebastian ran his finger down the columns to Friday, down to the fourth period, and read: Physical Education.

A very low moan escaped, almost inaudible, but loud enough to make the boy next to him look.

It wasn’t laziness—he wanted to make that clear, even if only to himself. Sebastian loved the body in motion; he could spend hours watching it. In the list of two hundred names he’d been memorizing since he was eight, many were just that: body, training, and stubbornness, showing up in the middle of the group and taking the same beatings as everyone else. He admired these people more than he admitted—perhaps even more than those who had already achieved something, because at least they had gone after it.

The problem was what he himself brought to the gym. He was the height of a boy two years younger, his arms swallowed by his secondhand jacket, so small that in every class photo he was always behind someone else—and when he wasn’t, he was always the smallest one. Since he was ten years old, he had been the shortest in every class, by an undeniable margin; Physical Education was the only time when he couldn’t shrink inside his jacket. It was the moment when his body was exposed, aligned with the others, for comparison.

He dashed off — he was already late.

The locker room was at the end of the ground floor corridor, behind a metal door that didn’t close properly, and the smell foreshadowed what was inside: rubber, cheap deodorant filling the air, damp tiles, and, beneath it all, that neutral odor of anonymous people that every school locker room carries. Inside, a commotion: about twenty boys changing clothes at the same time, locker doors slamming, laughter, a sock flying over the benches. They all wore the same uniform: a thin white cotton t-shirt, with the school’s name almost erased, and nylon shorts that reached mid-thigh. The style was generic, it didn’t look good on anyone.

Sebastian went straight to the locker in the corner, near the drain, and opened it. Inside, his uniform was folded the way his mother had taught him—and on top of it, a pair of old sneakers, not the ones he wore, but those with soles worn down to the point of being smooth, yellowish-white, with laces of different lengths because one had broken and he had used the laces from another pair.

He changed in an instant: he took off his jacket, his torn t-shirt, his pants with holes in the knees without looking down—just as he hadn’t looked in the mirror that morning. He put on the white t-shirt, loose at the shoulders and long enough to fall down like a nightgown, put on his shorts, and tightened his sneakers. He pushed the rest into the locker, turned the key, and when he looked up, the locker room was empty.

Fast. But not fast enough yet.

Behind a second door, the court opened to another light: higher, entering through the long windows high up, where the January sun beat palely on the bars. The varnished wooden floor bore intersecting lines of three colors and a central circle that had once been red. It was cold—the Douglass heaters worked intermittently, the windows closed whenever they pleased—and the air inside tasted like a gymnasium in winter: old sweat, cold wood, each breath escaping as steam.

And everyone was already there.

The entire class lined up in a single file, their backs to the back wall and facing the door. In front of them was the teacher. No one else was late. Sebastian realized this the moment he stepped onto the court and could only keep walking—stopping would be worse.

He ran close to the wall, and the whole class turned to watch him. Now he saw every face: the boy with the shaved head and his mouth slightly open, the tall girl biting her lip to keep from laughing, the big blond boy at the end of the line nudging his classmate—eyes that drifted from his shoulders to his baggy t-shirt, to his pale knees, and back up again. Too much information at once.

And then there was the teacher.

A middle-aged man, with a severe, factory-like face, marked by two deep lines beside his mouth. His bald head gleamed in the light, and his short, almost entirely gray hair lay close to the sides, as if everything there were under control. A thick mustache, darker than the rest of his hair, covered his upper lip. His body was broad, as if he had once possessed strength and still retained it, only now it was stiff. A black whistle hung from a cord around his neck. He wore a worn navy blue sweatshirt jacket with a zipper and frayed cuffs; on the left side of his chest, the once white, now faded embroidery read: COACH SMITH.

His arms were crossed behind his back. And, as Sebastian approached, the coach’s face furrowed in degrees: with each step, a new wrinkle on his forehead, an extra crease between his eyebrows, his mustache drooping a millimeter. His small eyes followed the thin body to the end of the line, then returned to him. When Sebastian reached the point to stop, an arm emerged from behind his back and raised a clipboard.

He didn’t need the whistle.

“Young man! What’s your name and why are you late?”

The voice filled the entire block, rose to the windows, and echoed back down. It was a rehearsed shout, born not of anger, but of habit—and therefore all the more frightening: the man wasn’t losing his temper; he was simply doing his job.

Sebastian hadn’t expected the question. That’s what threw him off balance.

He had transferred to Douglass recently, so recently that most of the teachers were still just a name on a piece of paper to him. Some he had only seen once; others, never. There was, however, one type of teacher with whom, in all his previous schools, he had never had a problem—and perhaps that was why he was so unprepared: the science teachers. Physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics—it didn’t matter. When a teacher truly wanted to teach and found a student with a genuine thirst for learning, chemistry, in the literal sense, worked. Those had been the best months of his school life: people who recognized hunger when they saw it.

The problem wasn’t the type of teacher who was passionate about what he taught. It was the one who only clocked in and out, copied the book onto the board without ever looking at the class, almost always gave the wrong answer, and hated being corrected. Sebastian could never stay quiet. It wasn’t out of malice – it was something that slipped out unintentionally, one extra question, a “but that’s not right” at the wrong time. The teacher took it as provocation, and from then on, the school year became a torment for both of them.

But that’s a story for another time.

At that moment, a man was yelling at him in front of twenty-odd students, and Sebastian’s body reacted on its own. It stiffened. Arms pressed against his torso, feet together, spine stretched as far as it would go, and suddenly a thin, overly loud voice emerged from his throat, echoing through the back of the gymnasium in the voice he hadn’t been able to find the night before to say thank you.

“Sebastian, sir!”

Someone let out a muffled laugh. He didn’t want to look where it came from.

Coach Smith, however, didn’t find it funny. His eyes fixed on the clipboard, he ran his finger down the list of names without saying a word. He went through everything until he reached a name written in pen, squeezed into the margin below the last entry.

The finger stopped. Eyes widened.

“Ah.” He raised his chin. “New student.”

He spoke as if recognizing a license plate. He glanced at Sebastian, then back at the sheet of paper, then back at Sebastian again, his mustache trembling slightly.

“And already late on the first day?” He took a short but authoritative step, taking his place at the front of the line. “I don’t know which school you came from, kid. But here we value punctuality.” He paused. “And physical training.”

At “physical training,” his gaze dropped quickly down Sebastian’s body—the same thing the whole class had done. Shoulders too limp for the t-shirt, arms as thin as twigs, pale legs sticking out of the shorts, the silhouette of a thirteen-year-old boy lost in the middle of the wooden court without a jacket to hide behind. The coach didn’t react – he just looked. When he raised his head, he spoke loudly, for the whole court to hear:

“I hope you will respect the schedules and commitments of our institution.”

Stifled giggles ran down the line: less giggles than the laughter of someone watching a cheap spectacle. Sebastian listened to each one, knew where they came from, but stood there, rigid, his face burning inside. All he could do was nod, first up, then down. He didn’t even know if he should answer: the phrase sounded like both a question and an order at the same time, and the only recourse was an involuntary nod – yet another nod to an adult in less than twelve hours. The comparison that occurred to him was ready in his mind, but he pushed it away before it could take shape.

Coach Smith waited another second, turned to the team, and, puffing out his chest, shouted:

“Fall in!”

Sebastian ran low and fast, leaving the center behind until he squeezed into the back of the line, behind a tall blond boy who towered over him in height and shoulder width. There, glued to the last one, he disappeared from the sight of his classmates – invisibility was a skill he had learned in six schools, even if this time he arrived too late. Even so, he kept his arms together, feet together, breathing through his nose, trying not to exist. But everyone kept looking at him, even with their backs to him.

The coach returned to his clipboard, lifted the first sheet, ran his finger over the second, lifted the second, and checked the third, his mustache twitching as he chewed on a number. Silence reigned, broken only by the occasional squeak of sneakers on the wood and the vapor of the breath of twenty-odd boys. Finally, he let the papers fall with a snap and raised his head.

“Good.”

The voice, once again, filled the gymnasium.

“Looks like today is your lucky day.”

Nobody quite understood. Sebastian could tell by the backs of his colleagues’ necks: heads turning for confirmation, whispers that died before reaching the second ear, the blond boy in front of him shifting his weight from one foot to the other. Luck, in that man’s tone, sounded like irony. Smith remained silent until everyone had recovered and only then did he smile – a smile that, far from comforting, was frightening.

“Today is test day.” He raised the clipboard to chest height, as if reading a solemn decree. “Preparticipation Physical Evaluation.” He spoke each word slowly, like an official document title, and, for those who hadn’t yet caught on, added: “PPE.”

A collective groan ripped through the line, low, drawn-out, twenty exhausted voices. Sebastian couldn’t contain his own: not all schools demanded that. In six institutions, few asked for anything like that – and when they did, it only took one morning. Douglass, it seemed, not only demanded it but piled on the demands.

He lowered his gaze. He saw the dark mark of a shoe sole on the yellow stripe of the wooden floor. A test meant numbers in columns, and numbers revealed comparisons. He knew he would be at the bottom of each list. It was a fact he had already calculated before stepping into that gym.

While he stared at the floor, the coach began pacing back and forth across the court, short steps, sneakers creaking, without any hurry. He glanced at the clipboard, then looked up at a section of the line, smiled, and returned to the paper. He seemed to stroll aimlessly, at a pace that made everyone aware of his authority. On the third lap, he spoke without interrupting his walk:

“You’d better give it your all.” Step. Step. “Because if you don’t, I’ll know.”

He continued walking, five steps, six, until the end of the line, and stopped so suddenly that his sneakers squeaked on the floor. He turned his whole body to face the students, examined each face slowly, his mustache concealing the movements of his mouth. And he smiled again, wider:

“And remember.” He lightly tapped the clipboard against his thigh. “Physical education also fails students.”