Maxine Rush

Exactly three feet and eleven inches high, Maxine Rush fills the corridor of the Gracehall Military Academy much in the same way a tortoise fills the Pacific Ocean by pissing into it:

Negligibly.

Tiny shoes adorn tiny feet. Children's trousers flop heavily down upon her legs. The envelope of a used shirt wraps around her chest, leaving an opening large enough for two genuine Maxine Rush skulls to pass through the neck. Her arms, the slender offshoots of a weeping willow, coil around a large stack of books that tip the scales of gravity precariously against her favor.

She walks down the black tile hall, passing lockers and classroom doors as if she were treading gingerly through a redwood forest that she doesn't want to disturb. Each step is placed purposefully, firmly, in the center of the next one-foot square tile, one after another, slowly and deliberately reaching for her constant twelve-inch goal, out of breath with the weight of the books and the driven pace of hopscotch squares set in place by gods who recognize a stride undreamt of in the wildest philosophies of Maxine Rush.

The air reeks of foreign stench and vile perfumes: scabbed knees, jock itch, foot powder, dirty socks, dog shit, chewing gum, filthy hands, shaving cuts, leather shoes, canvas flats, blue denim, tan khaki, bathing soap, shower jells, body cream. The smells of students that had only minutes ago filled the hall still linger in the pin-prick nostrils of Maxine Rush, swirling and dancing into her brain where they coalesce into ripe juices, sticky and sweet, that run out of her ears and pool at the base of her neck, an olfactory cacophony to last for hours.

She reaches the large double doors at the other end of the hall and realizes her dilemma which is that with an armful of books she dare not drop on a floor as filthy as this one (and Maxine Rush has a better vantage point than any other student at Gracehall Military Academy to inspect the dirt and grime that has metamorphosed itself into a kaleidoscope of patterns on the once gray tile), how, in fact, does one go about opening the doors? Solid doors, impressive doors, each one spanning nearly three times her height and four times her breadth, made of some impossibly thick wood stained dark from years of abuse, built to withstand the test of time, the trials of war, the torture of youth.

Spanning lengthwise across each door, clearly not a part of the original design, stretches a long stainless steel bar, bowing down at a sickly angle waiting to be pushed or shoved or beaten or trampled, with the sole purpose of allowing the door open. Maxine stares at the stainless steel rod of the left door, nearly at eye-level. She can see her reflection in it, a fun house of distortions pulling her forehead and chin down the opposite sides of her elongated and bulbous nose. She gently presses her forehead down on it. The pressure is not great enough to move the bar, to open the door. Harder. She can feel cords in the base of her neck gurgling under the tension, a knot forming in the back of her head, the bar moves slightly, not much, she can feel the skin of her forehead rip and tear, individual cells grinding beneath the pressure, scurrying to avoid the angry steel pushing its way into her skull.

The door opens and Maxine Rush topples through, out into the sunlight, crashing into a blue trousered leg smelling of sweat and dry cleaning, her knees land on a well polished wing-tipped shoe as only worn by Lt. Cmdr. Franklin Mann, senior administrator of Gracehall. He steadies her with two well placed, military sized paws, one on each shoulder. He is a huge man, build proportionally equal to a Sherman tank. His feet are as long as Maxine's legs, his head easily the size of her chest, his hands large enough to wrap themselves around her entire body. He steadies her by the shoulders, his palms resting squarely above her two perfectly round, perfectly equal, perfectly insignificant breasts and his fingers stretch across the line of her perfectly useless bra down to the small of her back. She does not move his hands. Though they are dangerously close to the slight peaks she has been growing for years now, she knows he does not even notice them, stretching out to him. His hands slide off of her shoulders as he steadies her into position. His fingers brush past nipples reaching out to invite him, and she knows he does not notice, not through the layers of callous, grown from years of combat, action, adventure, or he doesn't not assume there is any woman at all here before him, merely a duckling with books who stumbled through a door.

She wonders, suddenly, if he has to duck to enter the academy's front doors, if he has to order special shoes, if his uniforms are really two ordinary sized outfits sewn into one? She wonders if, proportional to the Sherman tank that he is, lingering on that metaphor for the moment, if, her mind races, having spent more than one afternoon on this particular thought, if...

He crouches down to her level, way down on his thick haunches, still towering over her, and asks her if she is all right? His large white eyes staring intently at her, his dark brown skin, smooth and drawn tight across his face as if his skull had decided, just moments ago, to swell. He asks her why she has the red mark on her forehead, did anybody do this to you, are you okay, Maxine? His voice is as rich as the dark chocolate color of his skin, and it has the taste of hot brandy flowing directly into her mouth and down her throat instead of trying mightily to penetrate her button-shaped ears. She shakes her head, no, I'm fine, I'm okay.
He must realize how he still towers over her, for he sits down on one of the steps, one step lower than she is standing right now, which brings his face close to hers, a basketball to a golf ball, the Earth to the moon.

He speaks.

Maxine, you have to be careful, you'll graduate this year if you're lucky, and you are lucky, not many people make it in this kind of environment, anyway, and if your daddy wasn't who he is you would never have been allowed to skip all of that PT, you know, we let you go because of who you are and who your daddy is, which is fine and all because in every other way you're the best goddamn student Gracehall ever had, but I know the other kids got it in for you because of who you are and who you're related to, I know what they say about you, I know what they do to you when no one's around, what the girls did to you in the locker room, what the boys do to you in the mess hall, hell I even know how the teachers treat you in the goddamn classroom, which makes me see red, girl, I want you to know that, and I'm telling you I can't believe you've made it this far, which says more about your inner strength than any doctor's report or physician's tests, let me tell you, but you've got to be careful girl, you know that?

Maxine nods. The locker room, a memory she'd rather leave behind, a place connected with the gym, which in itself was a taboo subject concerning Maxine Rush, the daughter of the commander of the… well, of the whatever he was the commander of. The locker room she'd visited for the first time six months ago, deciding that contrary to her father's wishes she needed to exercise, to build up her small muscles in ways that she'd never done, she wanted to run around the track and stretch her legs, if only once, and to dribble a basketball and stretch her arms, if only once, though the other girls in the locker room had other plans for Maxine's small muscles, her small arms and her small legs. The locker room, to which she never returned.

The mess hall, the cafeteria, on the other hand was a daily exercise in Zen meditation. The mess hall, to which she was required to go, to eat whatever food was offered, her one meal at Gracehall at her table in the corner where she was at peace, though the trip to get there was grueling, the boys of Gracehall having discovered through the mathematics of Maxine's own personal height that her head, her eyes, her nose, her lips and mouth brought her just to ass vs. crotch level of nearly every disgusting member of the Gracehall community, give or take a quick stretch up or a short squat down here and there, and daily Maxine was bombarded, pressed between bodies, blasting stench filling her nostrils or hardened flesh bruising her lips until she made it safely to her table. She returned each day, as were the rules, but Maxine Rush picked up the art of Zen meditation along the way.

The classroom was a battlefield over which she had no control, from which she had no escape, and from whose masters, highly aware of the stature of Maxine Rush's commanding father and the nature of Maxine Rush's particular strengths and weaknesses, she could not hide. They lashed out at her for every child denied entry into Gracehall, for every ridicule thrown at them from above, for every other student who failed to meet the celebrated top fifteen percent of the class because Maxine Rush constantly wasted one of those precious seats. Had she been accused of cheating? Had she been whipped for stealing? Had she been forced to clean the toilets with a toothbrush for blatantly cheating off another student's test paper? Had she been cursed at, yelled at, slapped, spanked, pushed, shoved, chortled, choked? Had she been forced to eat a piece of chalk in front of the class? Had she been bent over the teacher's desk and paddled with a force to fell trees? Had that paddle touched bare skin? Had she retained her four-point-oh average anyway? Had that been Maxine Rush? Or had that been somebody else? Did the art of Zen meditation extend to the classroom? Had she learned to meditate while her back molars ground down on dry, brittle chalk-dust, while the skin from her legs to her back reddened and screamed?

Maxine, are you okay?

Lt. Cmdr. Mann takes her books from her hands, places them on the steps between his two feet, lifts her up, and rests her on his knee where she perches, her two legs reaching down to the level of the books, uncomfortable as his bony kneecap pressed into her thighs. If she kicked violently she could not even reach his other knee, she realizes and gives it a try anyway. A black car pulls into the driveway from the distant gate, she knows it is her father's chauffeur, though it is still too far away to discern. She recognizes his ignorance of punctuality and his wanton recklessness concerning casual traffic laws. How that man ever got to the be the chauffeur for the commander of whatever she will never know.

Lt. Cmdr. Mann is speaking to her again.

Maxine, you come talk to me if you have any trouble, we only got a few weeks left in this term and then you graduate and go on to college, hopefully to a real school, a good school somewhere away from these people who resent you for who you are, for what you can do, and especially for what you can't do, I just pray to God your daddy don't decide to send you to some military college, pull some strings like he did to get you in here, goddamnit, though Lord knows he's got the strings to pull, he could pull those strings in his sleep, he got me here, didn't he, but I just want you to be safe and sound, Maxine, I don't want nothing to happen to you, what in the hell do I know about being the administrator of a goddamn school, crazy fool, yes, you graduate and everybody's happy, no more locker rooms, no more class rooms, and sure as hell no more lunch rooms, and not for you either, do you hear what I'm saying, let's just get through these next few weeks, you and I, and we'll be in top shape, by God, I'll be back where I belong and you'll be on your way to a real school, I just hope to goddamn hell he don't send you off to some military college, he wouldn't do that, would he, but even if he did, he couldn't send me there, too, not to some college, I'm no college boy.

Maxine looks at him for a long time, her eyes staring deep into his. No, she says, finally, reaching out to touch his face, not quite getting there.

The long black car pulls around the curve to park in front of the steps where Lt. Cmdr. Mann sits with Maxine Rush on his knee and her books by his feet, the chauffeur steps out, circles around the back of the car, and he opens the door. Maxine lowers herself off of the large man's knee and stands on her books, her weight barely grinding them into the concrete pavement of the school's steps, and for the first time, she is taller, though barely, than he is. She looks down at him.

Then she turns and hops off of her pile of books, past the step that she was aiming for, and onto the platform below, falling to her hands and knees, tearing holes in the fabric of her pants and legs, ripping gashes into the skin on her hands, but she is up on her feet before either Lt. Cmdr. Mann or the chauffeur can rush to her side, the swiftness of her movements surprising even her. She turns towards her books and reaches out two bloody hands to them, holding them above the pile and squeezing them into fists until droplets of blood no larger than punctuation marks on a page begin to fall. Lt. Cmdr. Mann stares at her. She lowers her hands to the books and wipes the blood down across all eight spines and across all eight tightly bound sets of pages. She picks them up and with one heaving motion throws them at the limousine.

Limping, she walks away, ignoring the chauffeur, ignoring Lt. Cmdr. Mann, ignoring the pain in her hands and knees, ignoring the sun and the sky and the air and the earth, focusing on the sound of the ocean off in the distance, waves lapping up on a white shore she has never seen except on television, water she has never felt except for in her own miniature bathtub, the pull of the waves she has never experienced except in the vivid description of writers who have been there, things like undertow and currents as foreign to her as dribbling a basketball or running a lap, she focuses on the sound of the ocean, ignoring the various other sounds between it and her, cars, trucks, pedestrians, crosswalks with busy horns, police whistles and dogs barking. She has mastered the art of Zen meditation, though she has never opened a book on the subject, and that art, she knows, is to find a goal and realize it so loudly that everything else is drowned out, washed over by her own urgency, no matter how long it takes her to get there.

Swept away by the undercurrents of her desires, pulled under by her fear, vanquished by her strength, everything else disappears.