Erik Olson

ENGL 112B

Prof: Warner

12/3/09

Notes on “Perseid”

This story came to me from a number of sources. Like the narrator (Piers), I too was once a boy who sat outside and watched meteor showers with a close friend every August. I also had many fanciful crushes (who didn’t?) and enjoyed video games a great deal. Beyond these details, the events of the story are basically fictitious, yet to me the story is very representative of the reality of adolescent life.

One of my favorite short stories of all time is James Joyce’s “Araby,” and I know I am not the first to feel this way. It’s a great canonical story for a budding writer in part because it has such an excellent, easily copied structure. However, it is not precisely a YA Lit story, even though its protagonist is a boy of the right age. For one thing, the story’s climax is a revelation of frustrated ambitions. The romantic hero does not fulfill his quest, and in this regard the story is as much about a loss of innocence as anything else. So a direct mimicry would not do, and although “Perseid” resembles “Araby” in many ways, its ending is decidedly different in tone, as “Perseid” remains essentially optimistic (which is important in YA Lit).

The story really came together in my head when I realized that the Perseid meteor showers my friend and I watched for several consecutive years were so called because of their proximity to the constellation bearing the name of Perseus, a hero of Greek myth who slew Medusa in order to save the beautiful Andromeda. This made me think of the video game Castlevania, which features medusas prominently. I combined many of the game’s details with a few from other old Nintendo games such as Wizards and Warriors and the Legend of Zelda, and the end result was the more appropriately titled fictitious game Gorgon Slayer. (In my next draft I may just stick to the Castlevania details, as other guys who are in the know always seem a little disappointed with my meddling.) I also realized that video games have become as integral a part of the adolescent experience as movies and perhaps more so than books. Yet I have never read a story that really addresses the importance of video games, so I knew I had to bring this element in.

Several elements of this story reflect what I have learned about YA Lit since the beginning of the semester. For one thing, the narrator is a scrappy underdog of sorts, creative but not popular—kind of like Melinda Sordino or Harry Potter. This status of feeling marginalized or insecure felt important to me. Some “problem novel” side issues pop up, but generally only tangentially. I am thinking in particular about Zvi’s social status as a Jew and suggestions of an unstable home life for Piers (he’s poorly dressed at school, there’s more to eat at Zvi’s house, etc). For the most part these aspects of Zvi and Piers are present to increase reader sympathy and emphasize the gap Piers (Perseus) faces with his crush on Andrea Meade (Andromeda). I also tried to maintain a fast pace and keep things very visual rather than excessively interior. Lastly, as I mentioned above, I chose to keep the ending more or less optimistic (failed quest? Hit “reset” and try again) as a dark, brooding conclusion would have felt a little “off” for YA Lit.

Perseid

by

Erik Olson

Keep hitting the candles, of course, since they will drop everything you need. You can even hit the one way up in the corner of the screen, when you cross the river, because there is a ledge not far from it that you can jump off of. When you�ve picked up seven hearts, you can upgrade your whip. At ten, you get another upgrade. From there it�s mostly a matter of timing. The small medusa heads come in a predictable wave, so they�re pretty easy to track. But when the fire-breathing dragon statues spit at you, make sure you duck. They will always flash and then spit three fireballs in quick succession. So they�re easy to kill, as long as you whip while ducking, or just wait until after the third fireball. There will be bats too, but they�re usually slow. At the end of the first level, there�s the giant Medusa head, who keeps spitting snakes at you. But if you have the long whip, you can duck while you attack, hitting the snakes that come off and the Medusa head at the same time. Each of your hits takes off one point of her life, so you need to hit sixteen times. If you have the boomerang and triple shot, you can do even more damage than with the whip, because each boomerang hits at least twice, and can also hit the snakes—very powerful. Once the Medusa head is dead, you can rescue the first princess. And she gives you the key to the next level.

I thought all of this was pretty easy, because I have played Gorgon Slayer I don�t know how many times. But when my friend Zvi Danilovic was having trouble with the first level, he asked me to take over.

�This is impossible,� he said. But he wasn�t angry about losing at video games the way so many other kids were. That was one of the reasons why he was my friend. He just kind of laughed it off, and watched as I maneuvered through all of the hazards, and whipped at the walls to find pot roasts or double- or triple-shots.

�Wait, why didn�t you whip that candle? You just walked right by it.�

�That one has the watch,� I said. Then I shifted to my Dana Carvey-as-George Bush voice: �And that�s bad, it�s bad. Would not be prudent at this juncture.� My eyes narrowed, but were still glued to the side-scrolling action. No one wanted the watch. It took five hearts to use it, and all it did was freeze everything for five seconds. Pretty lame compared to the boomerang, or even the holy water. And you couldn�t use double- or triple-shot with it.

I didn�t get hit once until the next-to-last level, high up in the clock tower, where every enemy takes off four of your sixteen life points and the Grim Reaper is the boss so it�s nearly impossible to get through untouched anyway. And then when you do get through, sometimes it just glitches on you, and all your progress is gone. So you just have to hit reset and start all over.

Zvi and I were neighbors, but we didn�t start hanging out until the end of freshman year. We both agreed that P.E. was hell. Being pigeon-toed and Jewish didn�t help him in the popularity department. As for me, I was the kid who was too tall for his clothes. I didn�t own a Starter jacket or a pair of Nike Airs. Instead, I came to school in floods with holes in the knees. Neither of us was all that great at flag football, so we got pantsed by the upperclassmen. It was easy to laugh when it happened to other people, but it wasn�t so funny when it happened to us. Zvi and I stuck together because that way we knew there was at least one other person who wasn�t a bully.

My yearbook was pretty empty, except for the page in the back where Zvi recorded all our inside jokes in his huge handwriting. But I did reserve a space for Andrea Meade. I wrote the proclamation at the top of a glossy white page, the way close friends do for each other. I guess I was hoping that she�d tell me how funny my impersonations were, or that I was cute, or something like that. But all she put was

Hey Pierce! Wow what happened to the school year!

Well I guess it was cool having you in Algebra. See you next year maybe!

TTFN KIT 745-5695 Love, Andrea

It didn�t matter to me that she had misspelled my name. Or that the word �love� in a yearbook signature wasn�t what I wanted it to be. Or that she was two years older than me, way more developed, and had lots of guys interested in her. All that mattered was that she had left those seven digits. They were what gave me hope for the summer, a way to get noticed. I figured, maybe if I wore nicer clothes the following year, and filled out a bit, I�d have a shot. And then she�d see me for who I really was.

That summer was mostly two things: Gorgon Slayer and calling girls, or trying to. Zvi had a couple numbers himself, left in his �yearbook,� which was even more pathetic than mine because it was just a bunch of blank pages stapled together. So everyone wrote things like �Hey, nice yearbook!� as if he didn�t know his parents were cheapskates. He didn�t really have an Andrea like I did, but when you�re fourteen and home alone all day, and you have the option of calling your guy friends or your girl friends—what�s it gonna be?

I opened to Andrea�s page. The book covered my lap, heavy and reeking of printer�s glue. The words I had read many times over. I had no clue what I was going to talk about.

�Ask her what she�s doing this summer,� said Zvi while he reclined on the dusty, paisley sofa in the loft of his parents� house, hands behind his head. �It�s better than talking about the weather.�

�True.�

He picked up the old army green telephone, his fingers tucked into the back of it, and set it down on the yearbook with a tiny ring of its bell. �It�s time.�

�You go first.�

�Yesterday I made all the calls. Now it�s your turn.�

I took a deep breath. Dialed the number as if it were an infinite-life code for Gorgon Slayer, one that had to be entered quickly and flawlessly before the demo screen began. The line crackled as the dial tone turned to a ring.

A male voice answered, probably an adult. Probably her Dad.

�Uh, hi. May I speak to Andrea please?�

�Yeah, hang on.� Distantly, he hollered for her. Did they have a two-story house?

�Hello?�

My stomach knotted up, like a clown�s balloon turning into a giraffe.

�Hey, it�s me.� How would she know who I was? �Piers.�

�Oh, hey. Wait—from geometry? What�s up?�

�Nothing.� A pause. �What�s up with you?�

�Uh, well, my family�s going up to Lake Shasta today, so I should probably finish packing.�

�Oh, that�s cool. When are you coming back?�

�Not until a week from now.�

�OK then. I�ll just catch up with you after that. But hey, call me if you get bored or something.� That probably made it clear I was attracted to her, but I didn�t care. I had no cool to keep anyway.

�Ummm� sure. What�s your number?�

I gave it to her. �Because going on trips with family can get boring. Unless your family, is, like, super-fascinating, in which case, that would not happen.�

�You are so random sometimes,� Andrea said through a half-giggle.

Random. That was a new one, but not all that different from the other words used to describe me. Some people were good at sports. Some were attractive. Others were straight-A students. But me—I was happy if I could just get someone to laugh. It was all I had going for me.

Summer was like that for a few weeks. Mostly we would hang out at Zvi�s house, because his parents worked all day and there was a lot of food. His phone manner was cooler than mine, so mostly I would get him through the tougher levels of Gorgon Slayer while he watched and listened to whatever the girl was saying. I would angle my body as if that had some bearing on the controller, leaning to the arm of the couch if I had to make a long jump, wincing on the rare occasion when I got hit. �Look,� I�d whisper. �You just duck at the midpoint here, and a treasure chest comes up�� and he would nod and mouth the words �that�s cool.� He could put up with it for so long when it came to the things girls talked about. It was always something about a boyfriend, how he wasn�t really a jerk, people had him all wrong, and blah, blah, blah. Zvi bore it all with great patience. But then, there was nothing on the line for him. �I like to keep my expectations low,� he told me.

You have saved the princess! read the screen after I killed the boss. In a pink dress with blonde hair and a gold tiara, the pixellated princess hugged the pixellated hero, causing red hearts to stream up to replenish his life total. The screen went black to load the next set of enemies.

One evening that August, I sat on the dusty armchair in Zvi�s living room with him and his graying parents. They were loud—his mother because of her shrill commands and warnings, and his father because he cleared his throat with a sound you might use to scare small children. They were older than most parents I knew, and accidental Zvi was the youngest of four.

They refused to pay for cable. The local news was on their huge television, with a bad rabbit-ear picture. The anchorman talked about the Perseid meteor showers, and how it was going to be easy to see them over the next few days because of clear weather.

�Zvi! You should see the me-teor show-ers!� She had a way of stretching out her words when she wanted you to do something, which was pretty often.

�Yes, mummy.�

�You and Piers should look for them out-side when it gets da-ark!�

�Mummy, we�ll look for them tonight.�

She smiled, acknowledging the speed of her victory. �It will be good for you to see something edu-ca-tional over the summer so you don�t for-get everything.�

His broad, barely contained grin told me he was thinking the same thing I was: what the heck did meteor showers have to do with anything in school? But we dared not ask.

His father cleared his throat of more mucus, and followed it with a cough.

That night we brought blankets out to the cheap lawn chairs on the old second-story deck, which adjoined the loft of the Danilovic home. We had to be quiet about it so as not to disturb his mother, who always slept downstairs on the couch in front of the television. Sound traveled far in that house.

Even with the competing orange glow of the freeway down at the bottom of the hills, we could see many stars. We turned our chairs away from the city�s lights and wrapped ourselves like burritos in the ratty old blankets. Within a few minutes, only my nose was cold. I listened to the whoosh of a passing truck on the far-away Interstate as its sound carried up through the greenbelt, to my ears, warped by wind and the Doppler effect, long after its source had disappeared. The white specks shimmered above, unsure of themselves in the broad darkness. I thought about distance and what it does to the things we perceive.

�What do you think will happen with Andrea?� I asked Zvi.

He bundled tighter.

�I don�t know.�

Zvi wasn�t a liar, which was a good thing, except it also meant that he sometimes gave answers that lacked imagination. I wanted an answer. Something I could rely on. A goal to be reached, a path to be cleared, through untold numbers of hostile beings. If only I knew which weapon to use.

�I just wish I knew, you know?�

�Yeah. Ooh, there�s one.� He pointed. I caught the end of its streaking white line.

The night�s breeze blew at my ears, chilling them. I folded the lobes against my temples with my thumbs.

�Do you think she might go for me?�

�Maybe. Or maybe it�s just not meant to be.�

We were silent for a while, as the backyard�s lone olive tree rustled softly.

�You know what I like about you, Zvi?�

�What?�

�You�re a good listener.�

Another white line streaked above while the older lights, farther away, kept their secrets to themselves.

School resumed two weeks later, and I had still made no real progress with Andrea. My version of Dana Carvey as Johnny Carson amused her when she got back: �There�s a lake named after a soft drink? That�s weird, wacky stuff, Ed.� But I wasn�t any further than I had been when she wrote three lines instead of a page.

I carpooled in the mornings with Zvi, the two of us packed like luggage in the back seats of his parents� gray Buick Regal. Our new schedules did not overlap at all, so we found our footing in new groups and met after school for the walk home.

The good news, initially, was that I had Ms. Furey�s art class with Andrea. The seating chart of six large drafting tables did not favor me however, and so I had to steal glances at her table and make excuses to visit that side of the room. Her crooked little smiles came freely, but not because of anything I said. She shared her table with three seniors, and they all angled for her with their crude innuendoes and half-true stories of weekend conquest.

They were just loud enough for me to hear them. One of them said something about a drunk girl and a bottle of lotion. They leaned toward Andrea with this talk, with thievery in their eyes. I kept drawing and erasing the same line. It�s not right, I thought. It should be different. I would be different. I would be different from them. I began to draw a boomerang in the corner of the page, wicked and sharp, and forced myself not to look at them again until the bell rang.

On the succeeding days I was more aggressive, and sat in a vacant seat nearer to her table. So I went full-on with the impersonations, because I knew she had watched the most recent episode of Saturday Night Live. I didn�t have anything to talk about, but if I could get her to laugh, it meant I was winning.

I asked her what she was working on, and she showed me.

�Well isn�t that spe-shull!!� I said, and contorted my face to the best of my ability.

�Piers, a little quieter please,� said Ms. Furey from her desk.

�You are way too good at that,� Andrea said. �How many times have you seen that?�

�Only once,� I bragged, on a roll. Today, I thought, would be the day I�d keep it going outside of class. �Party on, Wayne!�

�Piers!� Ms. Devlin shouted. �You have been the loudest person in the class all period. You�ll be spending fifteen minutes in this room after school today for detention. Understood?�

The guys at Andrea�s table snickered. �Oops,� one of them said, his eyes hidden under the bill of his fitted Phillies cap. The other two, with hands over mouths, laughed through their nostrils, a hiss-hiss-hiss of stifled air.

That quarter of an hour was the longest I can remember, even though I played Gorgon Slayer the whole time on my Game Boy just under the surface of the table. Either Ms. Furey didn�t see or she didn�t care.

By three twenty-five, the school was almost empty. I went to the tree near the parking lot, but Zvi had already started the walk without me. The last few cars were streaming out and mingling with the street traffic when I saw a familiar form climbing into the passenger seat of a dirty Jeep. She looked happy, carefree. My body moved toward the Jeep. I didn�t know how I was going to get her attention, or why. But I kept moving as fast as my legs would take me.

When the Jeep turned, its driver became visible. Almost manly, with one hand casually on the wheel, the other behind her head. His dark red cap.

And still I was at least a football field away.

But the creeping traffic moved at about the same speed as my legs would take me. I took a parallel path, jogging through the alleyway where kids parked their cars illegally in front of homes, where the potheads went to smoke out at lunch. I dodged broken beer bottles and cigarette butts, imagined candles with hidden treasures and special weapons for only me to find.

At the other end of the alleyway, I looked down toward the street. The Jeep emerged right when I did, and picked up speed. Across the empty church lot, I broke into a run. The Jeep turned the corner and approached the freeway on-ramp. My lungs burned and my backpack jostled, but still I pursued them over bushes and a chain link fence until I was only a few feet from the pavement.

The mud-caked Jeep accelerated up the ramp loudly, and not far behind, my legs gave out. The soreness in my thighs was too much to handle. For a time, I was an immovable stone. The two of them disappeared into the ceaseless blur of cars, far beyond the small white sign that read �peds prohibited.�

I turned to look up the road that led home. Zvi was pretty far ahead.

Time to hit reset, and start over.