This is going to be a sad story. This is going to be a happy story. This is going to be a long story. This story is just a set of random atoms, but that’s the thing about stories, you never quite know where the atoms will go. My name is William Butler and this is a story of chasing a star.
I met Ben Wilson on the 23rd of January 2003; the day the Earth received its final distorted signal from Pioneer 10. More importantly to Ben, it was his birthday. Ben approached me that afternoon as I sat on my own in the school cafeteria. I didn’t usually sit in the cafeteria, it was too busy and full of people, but I did that day; if I hadn’t, my story would have a lot different.
I was trying to digest the news of Pioneer 10 sending its weakest message, and eventually its last, from a very dark and lonely region of space . I stared into my stodgy and depressingly cold pasta, thinking about whether a hunk of metal could feel lonely as it drifted further and further into the dark cold bits of space between solar systems.
“What are you doing?”
It was so loud in the cafeteria that day I didn’t hear the creaking of the chair as Ben sat down. I looked up, finally noticing he was sitting in front of me.
Ben was peculiar.
At the age of 13 he was already the size of a rugby player, as dense as two-week-old milk, but was gentler than a bear on knockout pills. He resembled Gort from ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’, except without the silver body and solid death ray coming out of his eyes.
“Reading about the Pioneer 10” I responded
“Is that like a new games console?”
“It’s a satellite”
“You’re weird. Aren’t you in my Maths class?”
“Maybe”
“Didn’t you get in trouble with the teacher today?”
I understood the basic principle of needing to learn things; otherwise I would have tried to plug the hairdryer into our cat . But sitting in class trying to learn how many pears Michael would have if he started off with four and dropped two didn’t really help a tremendous amount, especially when you argue with the teacher about the parameters of the question. For example how many parallel universes were we counting pears in? If we were counting in all of them then there would theoretically be an infinite number of pears that he would drop, and many universes where he would spontaneously combust and drop all the pears. Were we there to observe the dropping? Or was it a ‘Schrödinger’s Cat’ style experiment? In which case if we couldn’t observe it, had he actually dropped them or were the pears in both states of dropped and not dropped? She couldn’t answer me, and that’s how I got in trouble with the teacher, and apparently made an impression on Ben.
“Sort of”
“Want to come to my birthday party?”
I still hadn’t made any real friends by the time I was 13. I had friends, but they were either the stars I’d named out of my window or the imaginary friend Frank who I had when I was little who wouldn’t stop disputing my theories of the universe . So the whole idea of birthdays and birthday parties were to me what the Higgs Boson was to scientists. I knew about them in theory but I had never actually seen one till that point. Luckily for me one of the other kids that had planned on being at the party got sick, so I was invited in his place. The kid did get better . They came and got his stuff the next day so he must have made a quick recovery and suddenly moved schools.
“Sure” I answered finally, wondering what I’d let myself in for.
We were all piled into a rusted hunk of metal, which was one small dent away from completely collapsing into a pile of metal so dense and infinite that we would never be able to escape, and were carted off into the night. It was an old people carrier, the ones you see abandoned in scrap metal yards. The seats were ripped, and covered in oddly coloured smears and the occasional sticky sweet. My seatbelt had lost a lot of its elasticity, causing it to attempt to rush back up into the framework of the car every time I let go of my grasp around it. Other kids, all talking and buzzing with excitement, surrounded me; I finally realised what I had let myself in for.
Like many simple theories I understood that putting fuel into a small space and igniting it causes internal combustion, which then in turn causes the wheels to grip and rotate over a surface, that then causes enough friction to help the wheel along. And I understand that this is a wonderful invention of the 21st century, but do we really need to sing about the fact the wheels of the bus go round and round? Shouldn’t our singing be reserved for the end of the journey after we know for sure it hasn’t erupt in a spiral of flames? It was one of those unusual situations where social stigma, for a short while, is forgotten about, and people much too old to sing about buses allow themselves to sing about buses .
It wasn’t a great start to what was my first birthday party but, nonetheless, I endured in agony, and sat quietly as everyone sung sarcastically around me. Ben sat in the front seat eating a lump of cake that distorted space around it, glaring at his dad who was singing along to some unknown 80’s power ballad. Ben’s dad was wearing his old biker jacket, worn and ripped from years of hard wear. His greying muttonchops crawling down his sun tanned face, stopping just short of a faded tattoo jutting out of the neck of his t-shirt. He looked like a character out of a spoof motorcycle movie about middle age men going through mid life crises.
The mini van was full of kids from our school, but because I was the smallest in the group, I was naturally the one who had to sit in the middle. The middle car seat is a strange phenomenon. It’s a point in space and time where one can exist, yet be completely invisible to those observing from the right and left car seat. Either side of me, two girls were talking at rates approaching the speed of light. I could barely hear them over the sound of Ben’s dad singing ‘Knee deep in the hoopla sinking in your fight. Too many runaways eating up the night’.
While I thought deeply about how someone would eat up the night, which was just darkness produced by our earths rotation facing away from the sun, I heard a sharp whining coming from the left-seat universe.
“What did you say?” I asked
“What does your t-shirt mean?”
Jenny Douglas occupied the left car seat universe.
I didn’t like Jenny.
She was harmless, but she had extremely poor memory. One moment she would be nice to me, asking how I was and what I was doing at the weekend, then out of nowhere she would be sadistic and mean . In one famous occasion during a wood-tech lesson, I was both stabbed by a screwdriver and was told that I’d made a lovely bird-house; which was a strange compliment because the bird cage was hanging to my school jumper by a thin layer of super glue.
“So? What does it mean?”
“Well…”
I knew exactly what the picture on my shirt meant, but I didn’t want to tell her that. The t-shirt had a picture of two atoms on the front holding hands. It was a carbon atom and a hydrogen atom walking off into the sunset. The quote below them said ‘They bonded from the start’. It was a joke I didn’t think anyone would appreciate, so I lied.
“It’s a band”
“Oh… cool”
She shot me a sharp smile, then forgot I existed and continued talking to Emma Finley; the girl in the right-seat universe. Emma was that girl in school that every guy has liked and attempted to ask out on dates.
My own attempt at asking her out didn’t go well. It was back when we were in primary school. One of those days had come along that I knew the existence of, but couldn’t have explained what it was; Valentines Day had come around. It was around the time when I became obsessed with science and space, so the card was based on some scientific experiment of two materials bonding. Emma used to sit behind me in class, which meant I could only see her when she got up to go to the front of the classroom. I was making a card for her that day, hunched over my desk so she couldn’t see. I was so intent on finishing the card that I didn’t hear her get up and walk by me. She must have noticed her name, quickly snatching the card away from me, looking at it like you would a dead pigeon on the road, filled with disgust and curiosity. Suffice to say, she wasn’t a fan of my work.
There were another two seats behind me in the car. One was inhabited by Geoffrey Knight, that guy at school that no one seems to like but gets invited to every birthday party, and a girl I’d never seen before. She was staring out the window as Geoffrey talked incessantly in her ear. Her forehead was pressed against the glass while the last of the suns rays escaped over the horizon, bathing her in blinding sunlight. I couldn’t see much of her face, just her black hair cutting through the broken light. By the time the sun spots in my eyes had gone we were pulling into a car park in the middle of nowhere. The car behind us, driven by Ben’s mum, pulled up alongside. Apparently we’d won some sort of race which meant we could heckle the other car and shout triumphantly over the screeching guitar solos still coming from the CD player.
We all climbed over ourselves to get out and ran towards the entrance of a stadium. Obviously once again the middle seat phenomenon proved true as people kicked and flopped over me to get to the door. Everyone made their way through the car park, watching boxes of popcorn skirt across the cracked tarmac. Arriving at the entrance to the stadium, I read the sign above us and saw two words that should never be put together.
Car. Derby.
And that meant three hours of grinding gears and terrible classic rock ballads screeching through corroded speakers.
It began by being forced to eat a questionable burger made mostly of bun with a packet of expired ketchup for extra spike. As I sat there staring into the heart of a burger so black even light couldn’t escape it, I pondered whether there was another me in another universe actually enjoying this. There wasn’t. Don’t ask me how I know. It’s just a hunch. The other kids apparently didn’t like their meals either; using the chips they’d bought as projectiles in an attempt to launch some kind of war.
The speakers belted out a muffled warning that the ‘show’ was about to begin, marking the start of a night I would both never want to remember and never forget. All the other kids ran excitedly towards the high chain link fence surrounding the mud arena, and screamed in excitement as the beaten up, rusty cars rolled sluggishly into position. I ambled behind them at a leisurely pace, hoping something would happen to save me from my current situation; like the ground swallowing me up, or a meteor crashing into earth.
Car derbies; they were only an act of destructive physics, one mass giving way to another. One car would collide with the other, the only winner being the one with the largest mass and fastest speed. The bleachers that were dotted around the stadium flickered on, like a light does when its about to commit suicide and shower an unsuspecting person with its remnants. The cars gurgled into life, their exhausts spluttering and sending a dense black fog into the air. I was behind the now critically excited kids pondering how much force it would take to bring down the rusted fence that by my count had 36 rips in a space of only about 5 square feet. While the math and probability of surviving after a small amount force would be absorbed by 9.5 children in front of me helped my chances of survival , one of the 9.5 came and sat down next to me, decreasing my chances considerably.
I didn’t know what to do.
Did you talk to females?
Or did you just hyperventilate next to them till they left.
I couldn’t understand why she was sitting next to me. Usually people take a pretty wide berth when it came down to deciding who to sit next to, or just stab me with screwdrivers, whichever was more convenient for them, and depending on whether I had glued a bird cage to my jumper. She sat next to me the whole evening; the girl with no name. I tried to strike up a conversation with her using the only good thing I had in my favour, my knowledge of useless facts and figures.
From underneath the barriers, smoke machines coughed up thick white smoke that circled the mud caked wheels of the dented cars. I shot a flew glances in her direction to see whether she even knew she had sat down next to me, but she remained fixated on the flickering lights of the stadium. I cleared my throat, shifted in my seat and opened my mouth.
“So take that car... Destructo... The car weighs a couple thousand pounds right? He’ll hit... Mr. Grind’n’Gears at maybe 30 miles an hour. The force created by that collision would equal around 25 tonnes, pretty much obliterating the car and the driver inside”
Silence.
“I mean, usually, the crumple zone in each car would absorb the impact at the point of the crash, but judging from the front of their cars it doesn’t look like they have much more crumple to save them”
She looked over at me for a second while I laughed awkwardly, then looked back towards the cars revving their engines as the traffic light in the far corner of the stadium lit up red. The other kids started chanting their demonic countdown, and Ben’s dad proceeded to unravel his noise cancelling headphones from his pocket . The traffic light turned to a colour that resembled a dying star when it starts burning all that it has left in it, and lit up the girl with no names silvery black hair with a bright yellow tinge. Her expression remained unchanged as the final light sent out a stream of sickly green light and let loose Destructo, who proceeded to drive too fast towards another car, missing entirely and ending in him crashing head long in to the barrier on the right side of the stadium made completely of deflated tires.
For the next 3 hours I watched as shards of car hurtled through the thick air of the crowded stadium. Drivers came and went, most of them still in tact, which is more than I could say for their cars. Every now and then I would try to get the ‘girl with no name’ to speak to me, but either because she was a mute or that I was trapped in some bubble universe where she couldn’t perceive me, I couldn’t get a word out of her. Ben would glance over every now and then from the destruction to make those mocking kissing faces at the girl with no name and me. I would have said something but I was so surprised I had a friend that I decided it would be best if I took the insults and kept the friend.
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