gold can turn to sand. [ben rosenthal]

benedict rosenthal


*
6 DD

"Young man," the principal said, glaring at Benedict as he placed the booklet between them on the table, "would you like to explain what this is?"

Getting called into the principal's office meant Big Trouble, Benedict knew that. But he didn't see what the big deal was with the booklet, and anyways, the principal had a funny looking mustache that wiggled when he talked and made him look like the "W is for Walrus" in the first-grade classroom's alphabet book -

"Giggling and staring off into space is not an answer. What is this?"

"It's a machine," Benedict answered proudly, "that turns people into BUTTS! You take all your enemies and put them in the BUTT-O-MATIC, and then you turn the crank, and - "

"Okay, okay, that's enough. The homework was to write a "How To" book. What made you think that this was an appropriate response to the assignment?"

"I wrote directions for using it at the bottom. Here," Benedict said, in between bursts of giggling.

"The assignment was to write a "How To" book for something in your everyday life. I've called your mother to come over today, since Ms. Rishi has raised concerns several times about themes of violence in your homework. And I don't find any of this funny, so you can stop laughing now."

Benedict could not stop giggling. But this one wasn't violent, he thought, it just turned people into buttheads. He couldn't help it if his BUTT-O-MATIC was hilarious, and it wasn't like there was an explanation for why it was funny. It just was.

He never knew how to answer these sort of questions, when adults kept asking him why he was doing this or feeling that. All the responses he'd used before - "I don't know," or "Because I felt like it," - just made them even more angry at him about talking back, which made no sense because if he didn't say anything back they would be angry at him too.

His dad had been especially good at asking him questions he didn't know how to answer, but now he was dead. A lot of people were dead, because they were fighting a war, but eventually the good guys would beat the bad guys and win the war.

He missed his dad.

The thought immediately made him sober up. The principal's eyebrows raised slightly at how quickly his face fell, but said nothing, the next admonishment about to leave his lips now unnecessary. Benedict just wanted to melt away in his chair, the wave of sadness in his stomach suddenly as uncontrollable as his fit of giggles not minutes before had been.

"Is this about Dad?" his mom asked when all three of them had gathered in the office and the principal had explained the situation. Benedict moved to cover up the papers, even though he knew it was a useless gesture. He didn't want Mom to see the assignment, or the superhero picture Ms. Rishi had confiscated last week because he was drawing it instead of paying attention in math class, or the story he'd written about an evil monster attacking the school during recess.

"Uh, no," he replied, frowning. Man, now they were making the whole thing seem so serious. He didn't realize the adults were going to take it so seriously. At most he figured he was getting yet another "Benedict doesn't follow directions and repeatedly goes off task " write-ups, with one of those big teacher frowny faces that curled in a little on the ends, which Ms. Rishi wrote in his report cards all the time anyways, and that was only because Ms. Rishi was so slow and boring.

"Anything going on at home that might be helpful for us to know about?" the principal asked, turning to his mom.

"No, nothing has been going on."

"Nothing" sounded about right, by Benedict's estimation. Dad's schedule was still taped up on the fridge, and Harrison had taken their mom's whole "You're the man of the family now" thing to mean he was in charge of making them follow the whole thing line-by-line. They got home at three o'clock. Benedict had to do his homework first, and then he could play until dinner, but he had to play quietly or his brother would scream at him for making any noise. Making noise was fun, in Benedict's opinion, and sometimes it was even more fun to get his brother all worked up just by drumming on the windowpane or repeating a particularly funny-sounding word. Like moist. Mooooooooist. Moioioioi -

Sometimes Marie would be taking a nap though, and then he actually had to be quiet or he'd make her wake up and start crying, and watching her trying to reach up and cover her little ears made Benedict feel bad about himself.

Dinner was at six o'clock. Harrison could make pasta, and bread, and just about anything that involved dough, but on the days his mom felt well enough, she'd help him cook something less bland. He never let Benedict in the kitchen to help, because the one time he'd tried he'd shaped the rolls unevenly and spilled egg on the floor and his brother had told him he was just getting in the way.

Then they would start getting ready for bed at eight-thirty, because bedtime was at nine. That part hadn't changed much either. It was remarkable how much all three - four if you counted Marie, who'd never known anything different - of them had been working around the hole their dad had left. He was probably supposed to feel like there was a giant chunk ripped out of him, but it felt more like a little whisper in the back of his mind that he only thought about every once in a while when he settled down.

Marie's birth had been a bigger adjustment for all of them, anyways, because it made their mother get so sick and also now he had to help feed her and change her diapers sometimes and remember to not make noises that might upset her.

So yeah, nothing much had changed in the past year or so, and especially nothing had changed since the last time Benedict had landed in the principal's office about a month ago.

He tuned out the rest of the conversation. His mom would scold him for it on the walk home, but the principal had stopped asking him anything as soon as his mom showed up, so he didn't really see the point. He'd much rather spend the time coming up with more superhero ideas.

He'd also have to be better at not showing them to adults, like his mom or his teachers. It seemed to bother them a lot for some reason, and he didn't want to make them worried and wind up having more Serious Conversations.

*
3 ADD

The roof of the orphanage was less exciting than it had been in Benny's imagination. Of course, he'd imagined a secret villain lair at first, or an enchanted doorway to a fantasy land, or at least a mass of railings and walls that twisted around each other like a giant jungle gym, so the expanse of occasional exhaust fans popping through a flat gray rooftop was inevitably going to be a bit of a letdown.

It was his, though. He could still paint onto that gray expanse with his imagination, and as long as he managed to climb up without getting caught, there would be no one up here to stop him. The boys his age wouldn't push him around or make fun of his name, the older boys wouldn't go around telling him that his parents had deserved to die, and best of all, he could make up stories out loud and the exhaust fans would drown out his voice, so he didn't have to worry about other people overhearing him and laughing at him for talking to himself. It was enough to make him risk being locked up in the Closet by the matrons, if they ever caught him going up here.

He'd been sent to the Closet less times in total than he'd been sent to the principal's office back in first grade, and one of the times wasn't even his fault, so he was at least a little bit proud of himself for that. The worst part was that the matrons didn't tell you how long they'd leave you in there, and you had nothing to do but sit there in pitch darkness and listen to the whooshing of air getting sucked up into the ceiling. Rumor was that one time the matrons forgot they had a kid in there, and after a week when she came out she'd turned into some horrifying, twisted monster. Or maybe that was just a tall tale Benny had told himself. He doesn't remember anybody actually getting forgotten, even if it had felt so interminable at the time that he'd started literally climbing the walls by bracing himself against the sides and shimmying up it.

He'd always been pretty good at climbing, and he was proud of himself for that, too. The path up to the roof required climbing a tree to reach the bottom of a fire escape, climbing the ladder of the fire escape, shimmying along a narrow ledge, going up an old maintenance ladder that didn't lead anywhere anymore, and using several footholds along the brick siding of the building. It was almost as familiar to him as the orphanage's playground by now; he'd climbed it dozens of times since discovering the route, and at least four or five times in the past week. The third Hunger Games were coming up, and every year that meant the sneering remarks about his father - and by extension, about Benny - got worse. Well, he supposed it was partly his fault for cheering on the death of that boy who'd executed his father, and for reenacting with a couple of dolls the part where the girl from Eleven stabbed his eye out straight through his glasses. That didn't mean he wasn't going to avoid the older kids as much as possible during these few weeks.

This time was different, though. Benny patted the package he'd hidden under his shirt, checking to make sure it was still there. There was two dinner rolls, one slice of ham, and half of his brownie, all saved off from his lunch, and it had taken him some effort to bundle it all up so it'd stay there securely without squishing the dinner rolls. Squished dinner rolls were Bad. From the landing he made his way down the Windy Corridor, past Adventurer's Overlook, and pried open the grate of one particular air duct.

"Marie," he whispered through the slats, peering down into the darkness. He could hear her from ten feet down, banging her head against the walls of the Closet. "It's me. Benny. I'm here. I'm up here, through the vent - it's me," he babbled until he sensed her beginning to calm, her quiet sobs giving way to a confused whimper. She didn't deserve this, he thought. Benny might've earned the times he'd gotten punished for getting into fights or pulling pranks on people, but it wasn't like Marie had meant to bite the matron who'd grabbed her all of a sudden and startled her -

"Uh, don't tell anyone I'm here. I brought you some stuff you like to eat. Rolls, meat, and I also saved you half a brownie."

He hoped she felt a little better with him there, even if he couldn't see anything beyond the metal slats. You didn't get dinner after being locked in the Closet, that was part of the punishment, and Marie was frail enough without the matrons going and deciding that denying her food was a good idea. There were so many things she'd refuse to eat - boiled eggs and mushrooms both came up a lot of the time - and they'd tut and scold him for swapping with her ("She needs to learn to eat what she's given or not eat at all. I know she's your sister, but you can't just let her have whatever she wants") so often that both Benny and his brother had taken to hiding their meals so they could do it in secret. Benny liked to think he was getting good at doing things in secret, and sometimes he imagined himself as a super spy hero, with Harrison as his reluctant sidekick.

"I'm gonna drop these through the vent, if you're ready to catch them." It feels a bit unceremonious as the climax of his mission, but he'd rather shove the rusty metal slats down his throat than start doing that sing-song "ooooh, and here are some dinner rolls. Don't they look so delicious?" voice like an adult would. "They'll fall into the left corner, the one where there's a chunk of floorboard missing at the tip."

She didn't say anything in response. That was okay. With Marie, words were for good days, not locked-in-the-closet-with-a-brother-peering-through-the-air-vent days, which had to be pretty up there on the "bad days" scale. It was starting to rain. Benny shifted his body so the open vent wouldn't leak any water inside the building, slid the packages of food through the slats, and stayed there until the sun began to set and his absence at the dinner table would've been suspicious.

He told Harrison about the whole escapade the next day, taking a detour on their walk home from school so that no one could overhear him. It was the earliest he'd gotten the chance to, and Benny had been restless the entire day, thinking about how he could best recount it to his brother. As he'd expected, Harrison had been alarmed about his roof-climbing path, but given the circumstances it wasn't like he could tell Benny to put a stop to his climbing.

It really was a shame he couldn't tell the tale to anyone else. Other kids would just as soon report him to the matrons to get him in trouble, and he'd never be able to convince the matrons he was doing the right thing when they were the bad guys in the first place.

"Something Father once told us," Harrison said, picking up Benny's hand in his, "but you might've been too young to remember. We'll make it through if we stick together. We're still a family. We'll be okay."

*
4 ADD

Marie died the next winter.

*
7 ADD

"Describe the factors that led to the downfall of the United States of America."

One factor that The downfall was caused by It all started about a hundred (?) years ago when

Ben threw his pencil against the wall in frustration. He hated essays. Not as much as he hated math - algebra deserved its own special place in hell, by his reckoning - but trying to line up all his thoughts and squeeze them into five paragraphs must've been some sort of torture device invented just to make him suffer. Ironic. His name Benedict was supposed to mean well-spoken or something, according to that etymology stuff they were learning about in class, but whatever his parents had hoped for when they named him, all they'd done was saddle him with a pretentious upper-class name that marked him as an easy target for those still loyal to the rebel cause, and a meaning that he could never live up to anyways.

It would be a lot easier just to drop out and pick up a job in the welding factory. They were continually looking for boys his age, and he'd get to make stuff instead of having teachers chiding him to sit still for half the day, and maybe he'd even be able to earn enough money to get out of the orphanage before he got too big to be able to climb up on the roof. Some of the boys here had managed it, after all, the ones who packed their belongings and emptied out a coveted bed position (near the heater, hidden from the matrons, or far from the stink of the bathrooms) for one of the younger ones to call dibs on.

He'd brought it up once to Harrison, who'd gotten angry at him for it, so he tried not to spend too much time dwelling on the possibility. Factory work was dangerous, his brother had reminded him. The orphanage would give them a roof over their head until they was eighteen, and enough food to live on; no one would offer that guarantee out in the rest of District Six. And school was important for his future; Ben oughtn't let a frustrating assignment or two ... or ten, or twenty, he grumbled ... drive him to making rash decisions he might later regret.

You just hate the idea of anything changing, Ben had muttered, but had dropped the subject. Sometimes he felt like Harrison acted more like a father than a brother, and all the praise the matrons offered him about being 'mature' or 'an old soul' was going to his head. But they were probably right, and even if Ben could plan out all that he'd need to do to live on his own, he couldn't very well go off and leave his only family behind.

Ben just wished they had more things in common with each other. He tried, he really did, he was trying now -

"The Untied States used to be one of the world's major super powers. Ten years before the Great Flood, Presidetn (? ? ?) said that the nation was "too big to fail"."

He was really supposed to remember that president's name, wasn't he? They'd had an entire quiz last week about memorizing a bunch of them, one that he'd failed pretty badly, and his classmates were never going to let him live down guessing "Imprresivosa Ironsqueak" as one of his answers. But if he stopped to try and remember which president's quote it was, he was never going to finish the essay, so he just had to keep going and figure it out later.

"However ten years later the goverment didn't do a good job of helping people during the flood and that caused people to start fighting. But the floood was not the only reason why people started to fighting. Also, the population also grew too quickly for the nation to deal with, so there wasn't enough food and supplies for everyone, so riots happened. Finally, the goverment spent too much time argueing with each other and didn't make the police go do anything until it was too late. These three reasons were what caused the United States to colapsse."

Whenever he thought about the flood, Ben saw himself standing waist-deep in the rising waters with Marie in his arms, the world erupting into chaos around them as he strained to hear his brother calling their names.

Her death had been a mercy, people had said. Ripred just didn't want her to suffer anymore. Ben didn't see what was merciful about slowly suffocating to death, fluid filling her little lungs until she'd stopped being able to breathe and her skin had turned clammy and blue.

He didn't believe Ripred (if He even existed) spent His time going around deciding whose lives were good enough to be worth living, either. It was unfair that she'd been so delicate, that the other toddlers who'd gotten sick that winter had all lived, that Ben could do nothing but watch helplessly as her body shut down. While mercy may have been Ripred's will, He still depended on humans to interpret and enact that will, and bullies and teachers and matrons had drilled in Ben's head a thousand times over that life wasn't fair, and life wasn't supposed to be fair.

But he must have felt freed, people had insisted. Little boys should be running around on the playground with their friends, not worrying about taking care of a toddler.

Ben didn't really have any friends. Harrison would rather stay inside and write than run around. And maybe he "shouldn't" have had to be worried, but he'd needed to be, because the matrons obviously didn't know what to do with Marie half the time no matter how much they tried to reassure him that they knew better. But they asked him so many times that he began to doubt his thoughts; after all, people always told him that he was an inconsiderate, selfish, naughty boy, so how could he be so certain he'd never once wished for his sister's death when he couldn't even remember what he'd said to upset Karen Eastwick last week?

When he sat down and closed his eyes, his imagination flooded with the feeling of brick slipping from his fingers as he climbed down for dinner, his body plummeting into oblivion.

And after all, how could he be so certain that death wasn't mercy?

*
12 ADD

Harrison had always had too much faith in him.

It was easy for him to tell Ben to keep his head up, to find what he was good at, to not get caught up in his feelings. Harrison had always been good with numbers. That was something District Six valued. Ben was turning eighteen this year, and he was pretty sure that the prospects for his future hadn't gotten any better since he'd abandoned the idea of dropping out of middle school so many years ago.

He tried not to resent his brother for any of that, just like he tried not to resent the orphans who got adopted by new parents. Maybe it made Ben a terrible brother, that he couldn't just be happy for him when Harrison got a new job, or a pretty decent house that he even invited Ben to visit every weekend. But all he felt was tired, tired of the constant fear pressing at his back about being left out or pushed aside in favor of someone who belonged better, no matter where he tried to belong.

He felt it when he'd first met his brother's girlfriend. When he ran across the girl everyone had called "Acne Head" in middle school and was stunned by how beautiful she'd become.

And most of all, Ben felt it in the tension and still continually shifting balance of power between rebel sympathizers and the District mainstream. The Capitol promoted inequality, to ensure that the wealthy and powerful would remain in power. This part was undoubtedly true, and Ben knew that he would never be smart enough to be valued by the district's industry. The rebels wanted a world without that, and therefore in their view, everyone would be equal. Ben found it a lot harder to believe in that part. He still wasn't ... something ... enough to fit in with any of the rebel-aligned groups he'd managed to drift in and out of over the years, and he worried if when it came down to it, everyone would end up equal except for him.

Ben was never going to know whether his father had been a good or a bad person - if indeed he could judge the man by such a simple measure. He'd taught the brothers so many times about the importance of fairness - like all good fathers did, Ben assumed - but they had been too young to wonder whether he extended those values to how he treated his workers, or whether he'd exploited them instead. What Ben did know is: that Nathan Royce, the owner of one of his father's rival businesses, with an easy charm in his twinkling blue eyes and more than a dozen allegations that had come out against him since the war ended, had not only been untouched by the rebel mobs but had emerged from those six years even wealthier than at the start of the Dark Days. So had Mr. Whitman, and Mr. Miller, and dozens of powerful and corrupt men that Ben couldn't care to remember the names of.

He thought about seeing the face of Johannes in those reruns, all twisted in hatred, and wondered if the boy had thought of his father as less than a person when he'd killed him, the way the matrons always seemed to look at Marie as though she was less than a person. If they'd twisted his face into something to despise and blame, because it was easier to get people worked up enough to rally together when they were uniting against something to hate.

If he made the correct connections. If he did the correct things. If he was the correct kind of person. It didn't matter what kind of person Ben wanted to be if Royce could shrug off those allegations like water, could still control so many people's lives, could hold loyalty with fans from both sides minimizing his crimes while continuing to shower him with respect and power. If only Ben wasn't Ben -

Well. He would rather die than be trapped as a pale shell of a person, a pile of 'correctnesses' in order to be seen as at best a pale imitation of those men. If history even plays out in your favor, he reminded himself. And honestly, the 'death' option was starting to seem pretty tempting.

Ben's alarm went off.

It was Saturday, and already three-thirty. Harrison and his girlfriend would be expecting him for dinner at their place at 4pm. It wouldn't do for Ben to get lost in his thoughts and upset his brother again by showing up late. Ben would never describe his relationship with Harrison as close, but he knew that they loved each other nonetheless; his brother never lied and very rarely changed his mind, and for all of Ben's fickle emotions and constant doubt it was the closest he could come to holding onto a thought as truth.

We'll make it through if we stick together.

The echoes of his brother's promise - his father's promise, before that - rang hollow, but it was all they had left. And Ben had to do his best not to break that promise any further.