Every Day is Like Doomsday (10 page)

“Parting shots are like weapons. They can be used
to stun, to terrorize, to inflict further pain, or to promise
a return. They should be used sparingly in order for them
to have the utmost effect, something which you chatterboxes all need to work on. For example, if you threatened
to be back in a disturbing voice every single time you left,
you then set yourself up to
have
to reappear and be even
more menacing. It would be a nightmare. So to recap: be
brief and get out. Who’s first?”

Professor Titus stepped aside and, without irony,
sat in a director chair on the right side of the stage. It was
Monday morning and as soon as they had entered the
“Memorable Exits”classroom Elliot had gotten as excited
as a kid on Christmas.

“It looks just like the little theatre at my old school,”
he had whispered to Innya. “And the teacher looks like a
caricature, with his little purple beret and his sweater tied
around his shoulders.”

“And his indeterminate sexual preference,” added
Innya.
Elliot studied the teacher for another moment and
conceded, “I suppose you could say that.”
“Why are you so giddy? Please don’t tell me you were
a drama nerd on top of everything else.Your loser quotient
will skyrocket and even I won’t be able to stop it.”
“I wasn’t,” he had said dejectedly.
“Band geek?”
“Can’t play a tune in a bucket.”
“That’s a stupid metaphor. D&D?” she had asked as
she led them to the very center of the audience area.
“Once or twice. I died a lot.”
“Careful. If death finds you here you won’t be able
to start the story over tomorrow.”
Elliot said nothing and she hoped that she had gotten her point across because she didn’t feel like spending
the rest of the class trying to explain it to him. She liked
this class and wanted to pay attention even though she
had never participated before. She had so far been only a
spectator, silently judging her peers as they climbed the
steps to the stage, took their places in the spotlight and
practiced their exits.
“Seriously?” Elliot whispered after the teacher’s
opening monologue, “This is a class?”
Innya answered without looking at him. “Don’t
mock it. It’s harder than it seems. You have to try them
out to see if they work as well in your head and then you
have to practice to make sure that it’s perfect every time.”
“What’s your exit?”
Innya shrugged, “I haven’t performed for them yet.
They’re not ready for what I have to give.”
Elliot chuckled and sat back and Innya didn’t offer
up any more information. She wanted to watch, not talk.
This class was not a time to talk. The girl who graced the
stage first was of average size in every way save one. Her
hands were disturbingly, freakishly large.They looked like
those giant monster hands that Innya had seen kids playing with. Aside from her hands she looked as though she
had just stepped off a farm in Nebraska. She wore nondescript jeans, a plain black T-shirt and Chucks, and her
boring, medium length blonde hair was tied in a ponytail.
She was about as vanilla as they came.
The two girls with whom Crusher had been sitting
shouted, “Go, Crusher!” and the girl waved in response.
Innya whispered loudly to Elliot, “Do you feel a
breeze?” Elliot stifled a smile but didn’t answer so Innya
turned back to the stage.
“Ok, Crusher, give us your best shot,” said Professor
Titus.
Crusher, which to Innya sounded like a dog’s name,
nodded and closed her eyes as if she were an actress centering herself in preparation for a dramatic monologue.
Innya had seen this performance before. Crusher liked to
try out different tag lines and styles and she was the first
person on stage almost every time, to the general amusement of all. She was easily the most popular girl in the
class. Innya hated her.
Crusher opened her eyes, flashed a wicked grin,
spread her arms wide and said,“Boom goes the dynamite!”
in a menacing voice. Then she banged her fists together
so hard that it rattled the empty wooden seats and made
Innya’s ears ring. She put her hands over her ears and
thought, what a bitch, as Crusher skipped happily off the
stage. Did she seriously just skip, thought Innya? What
sort of a Villain skips?
The teacher waited until most of the students had
uncovered their ears before announcing, “Very good,
Crusher. I think that’s your best yet. Just a suggestion,
though… Perhaps you could add smokers to your fists
so that when they bang together you are enveloped in a
plume of smoke. Then you could make your exit unseen.”
“Thanks, teach!” she chirped and Innya wanted to
kick her in the face.
“Jesus, what was that?” asked Elliot, rubbing his ears.
“She’s a pain in the ass. She’s a fake.”
“Seemed real to me.”
“She lacks star quality and a particular wickedness
that is required for villainous activities. She skips, for crying out loud. She should go back home to her family’s
farm and help them pull the tractor.”
“Wow,” said Elliot, “Jealous much?”
She shot him an evil look and raised her hand to
smack him on the back of the head. Professor Titus chose
that moment to look directly at her.
“Yes, my little Russian doll. So you are finally ready
to show us what you’ve got. Please, come forward and
wow us.”
Innya stopped in mid-smack and literally felt all
eyes in the class turn towards her. Granted, there were
only about ten people in the class but that was still a lot of
attention at a moment when it was not desired. She had
performed acrobatics in front of more people than that
back home but here she had never even spoken out loud
in class, had never wanted to draw undue attention, had
plotted and planned in silence for the ways in which she
would startle them with her Villainous brilliance. Perhaps
it was finally time.
“Go, Innya,” Elliot said quietly as she stood and
inched past him in the row and walked toward the front
of the class. Her footfalls sounded hollow on the steps
and she stopped right at the top, still on the side of the
stage. Then she turned to face the class.
“Have you picked a name yet, my dear?”The teacher
asked in a gentle and unsettling voice that gave Innya the
chills. She wondered why old men always liked to call her
‘dear’. And then she wondered why so many of the socalled ‘men’ at the VA seemed to be uber-creeps.
“My name is Innya,” she said loudly, “I do not need
a pseudonym. They will know me by my rightful name.”
Professor Titus smiled and blinked slowly at her
as if he was trying to blink back his tears of condescension. “Very well. What can you show us, Innya?”The voice
dripped with sarcasm. He was daring Innya to suck. She
was about to prove him wrong.
She quickly took note of the stage, the walls of
the proscenium arch, and the random blocks and boards
scattered about the stage so that she could mount an
impressive display of gymnastics before speaking her final
words. When she felt ready she started to run diagonally
across the stage and the feeling of the wind in her hair
and against her face was glorious. She felt as if she could
accomplish anything, which of course she could, because
she was Innya, and no one could tell her otherwise.
She ran up the back wall and executed a perfect
back flip and three effortless back handsprings, the last
one of which took her to the floor of the house. She
pushed herself back onto the stage using only her arms
and into a pressed handstand, walked to the middle of the
stage on her hands, then with her back to the audience,
folded herself in half backwards, resting her toes on the
crown of her head as she looked out at the shocked class
and said loudly, in heavily accented English because she
thought a Russian accent like her grandmother’s sounded
very Villainous, “Yippie Kay-ay Motherfucker.” She then
took her feet to the ground and rolled her body up and
promptly completed a series of back handsprings until
she was off the stage.
From the wings she heard only one person applauding and she knew that it had to be Elliot. This surprised
her. She had given it her all and had been working on that
routine ever since her first day in the class. It was, by far,
better than anything else her peers had done.
“Um… Innya, my dear, could you come out here
please?” called Professor Titus.
She walked back to the center of the stage and
stood looking out at the faces, most of which were hiding smiles, some of which were outright laughing. Only
Elliot was grinning in triumph and though she didn’t
understand what she had done wrong she knew a letdown was coming.
“Now, can anyone tell me what our little Ruskie has
done wrong?”The teacher asked,turning to address the class.
Elliot called out, “I thought she was great!” in this
enthusiastic, cheerleader-like voice and Innya immediately wished that her superpower was extendable arms
so she could just reach out and finish smacking him in
the head.
“You are an idiot with no fashion sense and so your
opinion does not matter here,” said the teacher and Elliot
looked as if he had been slapped.Serves you right,thought
Innya, but she wasn’t about to let this teacher belittle her
by calling her ‘Ruskie’. After all, even she knew the old
adage that those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach.
“I do not appreciate you calling me that. My name is
Innya. I am not to be belittled,”she said, trying to maintain
her dignity in the face of criticism. Though her first inclination was to add that if he did it again she would use his
head as a thigh master until it popped she didn’t because
she thought that the threat was implied in her voice.
“Fine then, can anyone tell me what Innya did
wrong?”
“It was too long,” shouted one of Crusher’s friends.
Innya had yet to see that girl go up because every time
the teacher called on her she threw up, as she did just
then. Perhaps her super power was just to be disgusting,
thought Innya, and she smiled to herself.
“True,” said Professor Titus, then turned to Innya.
“You’re looking for brevity in an exit, not a performance
of Cirque du Soleil.” At this several of the students guffawed before a sharp glance from the teacher stopped
them. “You could have cut out a few of those flippy things
and doodads. They were entirely unnecessary. What else?”
he asked the class once more.
No one said anything. Innya stared them all down
and though some looked away most met her hostile glare
with their own. Well, she thought, at least most of them
have the balls to stand up to someone. Someday I will
show them how wrong they are but for now let them
think they have some form of free will.
“No one?” he asked again and again no one spoke.
“Fine then.” He whirled on Innya and said, “You quoted
a movie.”
Innya shrugged. “So what?” she said.
“That’s against the rules.”
“What rules? We’re Villains, we don’t follow rules.”
“Wrong. In fact, we do follow rules and you have
broken one of them by plagiarizing a line from a movie.”
Innya didn’t see what the big deal was. “It’s a great
line. Why limit it to celluloid?”
“The harm is that it isn’t original. It’s not going to
make people think about your personal brand of evil. It’s
only going to make people think about the movie and
anything that they relate to the movie in their minds.”
“I still don’t see the problem here.”
“And they’ll think about the good guy. John
McClane was a good guy. And he did amazing, death
defying things to stop the bad guys.”
Okay, Innya thought, so he finally has a point.
Behind the teacher Elliot was nodding his crestfallen
head. Well, she thought, he had tried to warn her. And
Professor Titus was right because when she left the scene
of a crime she wanted to people to think only of her, to
love her, to worship her and all of her greatness. She didn’t
exactly relish the thought of sharing the mental limelight
with one of the good guys, even if he did have the best
one-liners ever written. But she wasn’t about to concede
the point completely to Director Douchebag.
“What about a quote from a movie Villain?”she asked.
“I’m afraid not.”
“Something that would only run on IFC?”
“No.”
“But nobody’s even seen those movies. No one
would know where it came from.”
“But what if your evil act involved robbing a coffeehouse?”
“Isn’t that stereotyping?”
“Stereotypes are true. That’s something you should
learn right now.”
“So, no IFC?”
“No. Tell you what… let’s try an exercise. Come up
with something original. Come up with something now,
off the top of your head, anything at all…”
Innya thought for a moment, then said,“I got nothing,”and walked off the stage.The classroom was strangely
silent as she made her way back to her seat beside Elliot,
but she could feel their unworthy eyes on her, judging her
with their tiny minds.
“Move,” she said and Elliot moved his legs to one
side so that she could slide past him. She knew that he
was watching her as well but she did not bother to look
up even though she knew that the teacher was staring at
her with his mouth gaping open like a stupid carp. She
gathered that he was not used to people ignoring or disobeying him; people probably usually obeyed his orders
because his class was supposed to be the lone bastion of
whimsy amidst a curriculum of doom and gloom.
The teacher took the stage once more, using Innya’s
performance as a talking point while Innya’s eyes shot
imaginary bullets at him. “Villains are known performers.
No matter what category you fall under, Villains have one
thing in common; we just can’t resist a chance to show
off. In fact, most Villains experience their downfall simply because of hubris. They just can’t help bragging about
every little thing, which slows them down and gives the
do-gooders of the world a chance to catch them and
kill them or punish them, usually ‘to the fullest extent
of the law’. Our little Ruskie’s performance,” Innya’s eyes
switched ammunition from bullets to bombs,“was hubris,
pure and simple. Perhaps she’d like to try again?”
The teacher held out his hand to her but Innya kept
her arms firmly crossed.
“What are you doing? Come up with something,”
Elliot said.
“No.”
“Why not? Everyone’s staring at you. It can’t be
that hard.”
“It’s not a matter of hard or not hard. It’s a matter
of pride. I do not play anyone else’s game. They all play in
mine. Besides…” her voice trailed off.
“Besides what?” Elliot asked.
“Besides… I need you to shut up now.”
Elliot stared at her for a moment, but when she
didn’t even look at him he turned his attention forward
as the teacher gave up on Innya and another student took
the stage. The new student made a glorious exit by saying,
“Poof !” and exploding into a cloud of smoke.
Crusher shouted, “Hey! You stole that!” and her
friends held her hands apart to keep her from banging them
together and deafening everyone in the room and beneath
the din of people screaming and gearing up to fight Innya
grabbed Elliot’s hand and pulled him out of the class.
Once they were outside Innya dropped Elliot’s
hand and kept walking. Elliot still followed. No matter
how fast or in which direction she turned he was there,
walking beside her, keeping pace and looking at her with
that same quizzical, innocent look of his. She couldn’t
decide whether she was irritated or touched by it and that
indecision irritated her.