Re: Starring - up to Chapter 3
Hi, Thisonecoolguy. Thanks for the criticism. I acknowledge your opinion on changing perspective, but it has been my style of writing for as long as I remember. All my favourite books are also written with this style, so it has entered my subconscious as a way of writing.
At the same time, you will read eventually about Amber’s and Taylor’s discussion, in a similar way to how this has been written. I’m sorry if this is putting any readers off, but I feel that it will give a better understanding of Taylor’s character and background.
CHAPTER THREE
Taylor’s dreams
It’s an icy morning, as Taylor opens his eyes. It is still night, in his wishworld, but his mind is travelling back. The world where his memories are from seems almost ethereal, and unreal. He’s in a sleeping bag, wearing the clothes that he wore the day before: khaki shorts, with a blue top that, in the one corner, has the symbol of the camp that he was now in. He is in a lodging house, a large room that has an almost infinite amount of beds. His feet feel cold, but he knew to expect this. Him, and six other boys were halfway up the mountain.
“Morning, sleepy head. Took you long enough,” says a brown haired boy, sitting in the bed next to him, his stuff already packed, and on the go. Kevin is wearing a Nirvana top, which Taylor doesn’t really understand, but he shrugs it off. His legs are still sore from the walking they did yesterday, and he wasn’t sure that he wanted to continue with the hike.
“M…M…Morning,” Taylor says, trying to sleep, but still very drowsy, “What time is it?” His back feels out of joint, but he realises that if he says anything, he will be called a sissy. He stretches, and then kicks the sleeping bag off, and it lands on the floor without any sound. He shivers, and reaches straight away into his rucksack, getting out some jeans.
“Oh, it’s ten to six. Remember, you said you wanted to go jogging.” Kevin says, looking away as Taylor changes into the jeans. Taylor decides to keep the same top, after all, it wasn’t like it was that dirty.
“Oh, yeah,” Taylor mumbles. He bends down to reach his shoes, eyes half-open, and almost trips, which Kevin laughs at.
“It’s not funny,” Taylor grumbles, and opens his eyes properly to put his black and green takkies (sorry, it’s a South-Africanism, I don’t know what they’re called in other parts of the world - I think you might call them sneakers, I don’t know) on. They were Nike’s, but so old that you could barely see the ticks on either side.
“Yeah, dude, when are you getting new ones, those are ancient.” Kevin smirks
“They get the job done, ok.”
Taylor enjoys jogging. It’s his way of doing exercise, and gives him a sense of purpose. He likes the feeling of power he gets when he runs that final mile, and the way that the wind blows behind him. It’s the closest feeling that there is, in his mind, to flying. But, that morning, Taylor was not feeling motivated. Unfortunately, he’d promised Kevin that they would run, and he wasn’t one to break a promise.
Taylor, now dressed, goes to the bathroom, to take a tinkle, and laughs as he sees the way his hair is sticking up. He’s not really fazed about how he looks, but he feels that he should at least be fairly presentable, and so he combs his hair down, and keeps on getting annoyed as a piece at the back just refuses to be seated. He doesn’t like it when his hair sticks up. He eventually decides to move on, though, after all, Kevin is waiting, but before he does, he looks in the mirror one last time. It’s a really bad mirror, dirty, and you had to actually squint your eyes in order to see properly, but, in the mirror, he sees Rudy too.
Rudy speaks, but his voice doesn’t sound the same, it’s slower and much older. “Taylor, every night, you will have a memory dream. However, something will change in the memory; something has to, in order for you to wake up in the wishworld. But, when you do wake, it will no longer be a memory of your past, but merely a dream. And, as is the nature of dreams, by the next day, you will have forgotten 95 percent of what happened. Sorry, but I needed to let you know, and it’s the way it has to be. Enjoy your hike, though.”
Taylor looks around the bathroom, in shock. He was going to forgotten the hike, the most awesome experience he’d ever had, other than wearing diapers. Well, that was a blow. Unless, he changed something in this memory, then he would wake up, and he would forget the start, but remember the rest. He finds his head looking down at a puddle on the floor. He doesn’t know whether it’s pee, or water, but he doesn’t want to find out, but as he looks, Rudy appears in the puddle, and whispers something. He has to go closer to the puddle, and he finds out, due to the smell, that it’s pee.
“A change you make won’t do a thing; the change will come on its own. And it will have something to do with your own life. Don’t worry, though, it’s not like it’s going to change much for you – it’ll just remove your memories, and if you were a diaper boy, you wouldn’t have these memories any way. Bye.”
Kevin enters the bathroom, wanting to ask Taylor to hurry up, and is surprised to see Taylor sniffing a puddle of pee.
“Taylor, are – are you, ah, sniffing a puddle of pee?”
“It’s not what it looks like, I promise.”
“If you say so,” Kevin says with a high voice.
“It’s not!”
“Ok, let’s just run, now, ok?”
They walk outside, and shiver as the cold winter air hits them. They’re quite high up on the mountain, and the wind is howling desperately. Taylor decides to check if Rudy is right, and, just for the hell of it, decides to change something, so instead of running the way they ran the first time he was here, he decided to run in the opposite direction. It was harder to do, as the wind was pushing them back, and Kevin asked for than a few times if they could run in the opposite direction, but they eventually finished their half hour run. Taylor’s feet were pounding, the sandy floor and the rocks in various places had done a good number to his feet, and so he hat to sit for five minutes, to catch his breath, and so that his feet weren’t burning.
As he was sitting on a bench outside, his feet lifted so that they weren’t touching anything, so that they would heal faster, a boy came out. He was wearing a red top with the words “I’m forgiving what I’ve done…” – the lyrics of Taylor’s favourite Linkin Park song.
“Morning,” he says to the boy. Taylor realises with a jolt that he needs to get ready to go on the hike, and pack his stuff up, but when he goes inside, he can’t find his bag.
He asks the boy who just outside if he’d seen his bag anywhere, and is told, “I think I saw that other guy, the guy with black hair wearing the blue top, a, slept on the bed next to you yesterday. I saw him take it. It looked like he was walking down the mountain. He went out the back way. Sorry I didn’t stop him.”
“Nah, it’s cool,” Taylor says, and then realises with a jolt that this guy he was talking to here was the guy he was at the Justin Bieber concert with. He was the gothy nerd. He needed to know a bit more about him, after all, it looked like they were friends in the wishworld. The easiest place to start was with a name, and so Taylor says, “Hey, dude,” as he walks down the path in the front of the cabin," what’s your name?"
“Zack,” the goth says, “Yours?”
“Taylor. Pleased to meet you,” he says as he runs down the mountain. He’s forgotten that Kevin likes pranks, and he would probably want to get Taylor back for the route they ran. He sees Kevin standing next to a dustbin reasonably nearby, and goes and talks to him.
“Can I have my backpack back?”
"Sure. It’s in the bin. Fish it out, or hike without it, your choice. Sorry, it was too good an opportunity to pass down.
“Seriously, Kevin?”
“Yep,” Kevin replies, and then goes up to the cabin again, giggling. He shouts back to Taylor, “Oh, and we’re leaving in 5 minutes, so be quick about it.”
Taylor opens the bin, and is surprised to find the smell of pee in the bin. Thankfully, the bin is reasonably small, and Taylor soon has his bag out. And then he realises where the smell is coming form. It looked like Kevin had put the bag in a puddle of pee before putting it in the bin. This is most certainly not something that happened last time I was here, Taylor thinks, Surely this is a big enough change, but the dream was still continuing.
Taylor puts the bag on his back, but makes sure that the pee doesn’t touch him. He runs to catch up with the others who had already began the hike, and decides to walk with Kevin, wanting him to explain this.
“Oh, what’s that strange smell? Taylor’s eventually arrived, I see,” Kevin says as Taylor walks with him. Kevin ignores Taylor after the first comment, and talks to another of their friends: Anthony.
Taylor starts getting angry, but tries to keep himself calm, and asks Kevin, “Why?”
“well, based on earlier, it looks like you like the smell of pee. And, well, it’s tradition to prank someone on camp, and, well, Zacky’s been pranked a little too many times, so I thought we’d switch it up a little.”
“Wow. To think you would stoop that low. I thought I was your best friend, dude.”
“You are, but I thought it would just be something fun to try.”
“Fun! You think soaking someone’s bag with pee is fun! No, dude, that’s just going over the top.”
Taylor then walks away from them, wanting to have the last word, and decides to walk with Zack, who was right at the back, walking alone.
“They’re real dicks, aren’t they,” Zack says as he sees the pee on Taylor’s bag.
“Yeah, I suppose.”
Taylor spends the rest of the hike with Zack, who is actually quite cool, except for being over passionate about music and acting. Taylor also finds it quite odd that Zack didn’t seem at all disgusted by the smell coming from his bag.
They eventually arrived at the top of that mountain at around 6:30 that evening. After dinner, which is a poorly cooked macaroni cheese heated in a bad microwave, the boys hang out at the back of the dorm. Taylor is sitting on a ledge, his shoulders humped as he thinks of the way Kevin treated him earlier. He’s like to be friends with Kevin, but he knew that he would have to apologize for what happened earlier, and he wasn’t sure that he wanted to do that. He’d taken a shower, and washed the bag, but due to a lack of soap, he still smells like pee.
“You OK, there?” Zack asks. Zack had been singing away with his phone right to his ear, and had only just finished the song. The lyrics were, “Because these things will change, can you feel it now, these walls that they put up to hold us back fell down, it’s a revolution, the time will come for us to finally win…,” but Zack is no longer concerned about the song, but is worried about Taylor’s welfare. Taylor seems depressed, and Zack realises that he is the only one that could help.
Taylor seems different somehow, though.
“Yeah. I’m just sad that I’m no longer part of that group.”
“I’m sue you are. You just had an off day. It’ll all be okay tomorrow.”
“I hope so.”
It starts to get dark, and soon everyone goes inside the cabin. As soon as everyone is in, and the door is closed, Kevin comes up to Taylor.
“If you want to be part of our group again, you have to tell us some stuff. Anthony, David and I have some questions for you, and you have to answer them as truthfully as you can. In fact, you have to promise us you will. You’ve never broken a promise, have you, Tay Tay?”
Taylor is willing to do anything so that he could be a part of that group again, and so he quickly promises. The dream is so vivid that he is actually unable to realise it is just that: a dream.
“Awesome” Kevin says, sitting down on Taylor’s bed where Taylor was already seated, “so, why don’t you tell everyone why you were smelling a puddle of pee this morning?”
“I thought I saw something in it, but my eyes were playing tricks on me. That’s why I was on the bathroom floor.” It wasn’t a lie, technically. Rudy was in the puddle, but he couldn’t really have been, and so it must have been an illusion.
“Somehow I don’t believe you. Anyway, it’s your turn now, Ant.”
“Taylor, you’ve always been so perfect, so sure of yourself, and so I want some dirt on you - something not so amazing, and so I want you to tell this whole room your most embarrassing secret.”
The first thing that pops into Taylor’s mind is his poopy accident in grade 1,but before he could start talking about that, the words, “I’m a diaper lover,” come out of his mouth. I mean, like, I like wearing diapers and acting like a baby."
With that, everyone starts laughing, except Zack, who is surprised, but isn’t openly mocking him.
Taylor continues speaking, but without control.
“In fact, I’m wearing one now.” He pulls down his jeans and reveals a very wet diaper, ad the diaper starts getting even wetter until a yellow streak is falling to the floor, and is being stopped by his half pulled down jeans. The diaper continues leaking until the pee goes past his jeans and makes a tiny puddle of pee around him.
Taylor looks down at the puddle in shame, horror and surprise, and, as he does, he hears his mother’s voice saying, “Justin, please go and check TJ’s diaper,” and wakes up groggily.
END OF CHAPTER THREE