She breathed like she’d lived for centuries – a metronome of symphonic music. But to her it didn’t sound like music; it sounded like dense oxygen. It felt like a ball and chain made out of everything bad in the world.
And she wasn’t sure that she was meant to feel that way about her own heartbeat. Wasn’t it meant to sound beautiful? Or at least like nothing? Shouldn’t she be used to existing so loudly, so heavily? After sixteen years of dense existence, she thought she’d be used to hearing it.
But she wasn’t.
~
Madeline Porp was a mere five-years-old when she first sat at a desk with a lid. I was twelve-years-old when she first started year one. A child prodigy, they’d called her. They rumoured that she was reading Shakespeare at the age of three, but even with all the intellect and potential she possessed, I doubted that to be true.
I didn’t know of her dense existence when we first met.
She was my best mates’ ‘buddy’, as the school called it. He wasn’t very good at taking care of her, or helping her when she got lost, but they got along well. They were both like mini adults. They often discussed biographical novels and crude reality shows. He was her best friend, but I don’t think she was his.
Madeline Porp was five-years-old when she first lost her virginity.
I was twelve when I first beat up a boy who should’ve been arrested.
Madeline deserved better than a best friend like that, even if she’d thought, at the age of silken hair and scraped knees, that he was just being kind. She thought that secrets were a good thing and a loving touch was loving.
~
She soon left the sleepy, hollow school of loving touches and mundane existences, not to anyone’s surprise. A school wanted her; one of those prestigious, all-girls private types, you know the ones. Before she left she wasn’t very sought after in terms of friendship or boys, but I don’t think she minded all that much. She was very invested in a project she called, ‘the predictability of oxygenic lifespans’. I didn’t really know what that meant at the time, but the papers couldn’t get enough of it. I was only eighteen, practically a child, beginning my first year at university and already she’d accomplished more in twelve years than I would in a lifetime.
She won some science prize, you know? But she didn’t look very happy in any of the photos I saw online; in fact she posed like she was in one of those old British pictures where the people weren’t allowed to smile. Once she was even interviewed for Spyglass. She said, and I quote, “I don’t like science all that much, actually. I like the theorems and the differentiating interpretations on one factual answer, but what I find to be most fascinating is that of music...” When asked what her next move was going to be she said, “I am leaning towards the study of music therapy. How it plays a crucial role in the development of children, unborn foeti, plants, mental health issues, indeed a whole range of segregating systematics.”
She talked liked an adult in a twelve-year-old body. She also liked politics, from what I had seen, but she only spoke about it in ironic sarcasm. “Tony Abbot’s quite a genius actually. Stop the boats? Brilliant really. Down with the gays? Couldn’t agree more!”
My best mate really had been an idiot.
~
I graduated at twenty-one and went straight into teaching English. I substituted for art classes when I got the opportunity, but that wasn’t very often, much to my dismay.
Madeline Porp was sixteen when she breathed a metronome of music and felt heavy with life.
Madeline Porp was sixteen when she met me again.
I’d seen her face a few times in my first year of teaching at her school, but she was just another wave in the sea of girls. It was sunny that day, inopportune weather for hermits such as her and so Madeline sat underneath the cold warmth of a shaded tree. I was on duty that Tuesday lunch and I sat next to her. “Hello, Madeline. Nice day, isn’t it?”
She didn’t look up from her book. “I suppose, Mr Kennedy. That is if the effects of Global warming and skin cancer reign no control over your determining’s of ‘nice days’.”
I smirked. “Yeah, the weather’s not exactly what I’d call reading weather, you know what I mean?”
She smirked back. “Actually, I believe all weather to be that of reading weather.”
I laughed. “I bet you do. So why isn’t it weather for socialising?”
“With whom, I might ask, Mr Kennedy? Because you’re the first person in this school to speak to me outside of class time in the last twenty-two months.”
“You’ve been keeping count.”
“I have a lot of free time, Jameson.”
“It’s Mr Kennedy, Madeline.”
“My apologies, Mr Kennedy. I seem to retain vague memories of a twelve-year-old boy defending my honour eleven years ago… I suppose I may be displacing memories to faces.”
I sat silenced by her remark and realised that she did, in fact, remember me as I remembered her. It was funny; to think that a five-year-old that went into year one that particular year earlier than the rest would remember such a person as me. I can’t even remember who I was friends with in year one, or if I even had any friends, yet here was this girl, the smartest girl to never go by ‘Anonymous’, remembering such a person as me. To think, if only she had started school that particular year later…
“You remember that?” I asked, sitting up straighter, my back scraping against the harsh bark of a tree through my button-up.
“I was raped, Jameson. That is not something easily forgotten, other than by someone with that of repressive tendencies.”
“Right…” I remarked solemnly. “I’m sorry that happened to you.”
“Bygones, Mr Kennedy.” She closed her book and got to her feet, so I followed. “We have English in two minutes.”
“Right.” But I didn’t follow her. I stood in the cold warmth of the shade and watched her walk away from me.
And I found myself glad that she didn’t go by ‘Anonymous’.
~
When Madeline Porp was seventeen she campaigned for ‘Free the nipple’ and other activist groups alike. She didn’t start walking around the school topless, because she was smart enough to realise the difference between rebellious activity and inappropriate stupidity. She canvassed to have the school make uniform pants for the girls who didn’t feel comfortable in skirts. That was an odd week of girls’ hiking their skirts up higher and the teachers calling Madeline a ‘dyke’ in the staffroom.
I stayed out of it.
When Madeline Porp wore her own slacks to school she got suspended for two days to show her the severity of… I don’t know, free expression in confined depression? Something. She kept wearing them however and because the school couldn’t physically stop her from doing so, she was expelled. The child prodigy dyed her hair purple and cut it to the length of mine. She started wearing clothes with feminist logos on it, apart from at school, where she now wore the boys uniform at a public co-ed.
The next year I was called in as a substitute for an art class at that school. Madeline Porp was now in her last year of officially being called a ‘child’ prodigy and would soon venture out into the world to either change it or discount it, depending on what she decided her potential to be worth.
I was teaching a year ten art class when she saw me through the window. Even then, with a strip of emerald in a fringe she didn’t have when I last saw her, she still waved shyly and talked like she saw the world through older eyes.
“Hello, Madeline.” She was standing outside the classroom door before lunch, leaning against the frame and looking at me.
“Mr Kennedy. I now have just reason as to assume that you are stalking me in pursuit of my educational prowess.”
“Actually, it’s Mr Denn now.”
“You got married?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve been gone a long time it appears. How’s the minimal wage hellhole?”
“Worse since you left, Madeline. Not to my surprise. Won any more science awards since our last encounter?”
“A few. Mostly I’ve been commended in my personal literatures and psychology research. I have a few brand new discoveries on the influence of music on the human body in fast pace motion, Mr Kennedy. You should come prepared with a shiny medal and a vat of motivational speaking.”
“Mr Denn,” I corrected her, though I wasn’t sure it was necessary.
“Why don’t I split the difference?” she asked, trailing a newly glossed finger over her lips. “What do you say, Jameson?”
~
Madeline Porp didn’t graduate early like everyone had thought she would. She didn’t get an overall OP of -10 or gain the powers of flight either, but I didn’t hear anyone talking about that in the grand hall.
I went to her graduation and clapped the loudest when she got up to speak. I don’t remember the exact speech, but I remember one bit in particular. She stood up the front, before all these people she’d never talked to before and most she’d never see again in her lifetime and said the words that would forever resonate within me.
“I am more than a child who was assumed into a life of greatness,” she said loudly to the sea of faces that stared at her with blank passivity, “and you all are more than a sheet of paper with your names on it, telling you that were good enough, smart enough, could remember enough, to graduate from this fuck pit known as high school!”
She was escorted off the stage.
~
Madeline Porp discovered a passion for politics. Her scientific theorems and music psychology still interested and fascinated her, but I think her desire to be more than a child prodigy, born into a life that expected more than she could give, outweighed that of her desire to be what she was born to be.
I suppose her dedication towards activist groups and her united provocation towards certain government officials, made her realise that she was more than biological mass. She was more than that girl who was raped when she was five or that girl who could read before she could walk. She was a girl who wasn’t afraid to be a girl, or to be smarter than those who had lived for longer. Because she saw this world in the most unique, enlightened way with eyes that were older than time and musically metronomic breath in an existence denser than she could carry.
