Before Kyle covered half the distance to the mysterious sanctuary, his courage snapped like a toothpick supporting an anvil. Kyle was no stranger to fanciful or particularly egregious circumstances, but the oppressive weight of constant surveillance enveloped and consumed his attention. Constantly eliciting horrible clamor merely strolling through abandoned ruins had already taken its toll, yet every second exposed to that unyielding presence grated his frayed nerves. Kyle did not doubt, even considering his father's hair-raising and oft repeated tale of a botched root-canal, he'd be much happier at the dentist.
It wasn't fear which halted his short journey. Sure the sheer oppressiveness spirited the very air from his lungs, and nobody would question, witnessing his haggard lurches toward dubious salvation, that he radiated exhaustion. Presented with an abundance of perfectly valid reasons to quit walking, Kyle harshly plopped to the ground, stirring up a thick plume of swirling dust and a cacophony of stressed wood to yelp in exaggerated agony. Something was very wrong here. Kyle could never remember—from the day he transformed his father's prized bowling trophy into shattered remnants, to when he'd nearly launched himself from a moving pickup truck after fiddling with the door handle—being more frantic or hysterical. Everyone lives through, and even triumphs over the occasional terror or trial, but when Kyle looked around and really saw his predicament, what he couldn't see finally took shape.
What lay ahead, behind, and indeed everywhere was not esoteric or imperceptible, or even minutely deserving of analysis. It was hate. Loathing of the purest and most unadulterated hostility dominated the landscape and smothered beyond the capacity of the thickest fog. The familiarity struck him like a bolt of lightning, even causing him to sit a little straighter on the weird soil. Yeah, he'd been despised once upon a time. How could he have forgotten, after countless battles both mental and physical, the seething and ultimately impotent rage of Jim Doolan?
Kyle was the new kid, as usual, at Moonrise Elementary. Oddly enough, Jim wasted no time befriending the unfortunate waif before the more prominent bullies marked him for abuse. In reality Jim was duly marking his territory, taking dibs. Neither Kyle or Jim understood this at first, but as time passed, animosity settled in. Kyle wasn't a social reject and he radically objected to nearly everything academic, but was something of an idiot savant when speaking to adults. For whatever reason, beyond any sense of logic, Kyle enjoyed easy rapport with several teachers. Years passed before he deciphered the numerous baleful glares directed at him while he chatted-up Mrs. Klein. Without experience to direct him otherwise, Kyle had unwittingly made himself the enemy of the entire school.
Nothing obvious came of this, however. Noone challenged him to a fight, and nobody directly accused him of being the Teacher's Pet. But there were little things. Always tiny nuances hide between the lines, where only the immensely perceptive unravel the truth. Kyle was almost famous for being oblivious, and equally likable. This presented a dual problem: poking fun at Kyle for speaking Adult was inevitable, and Kyle never understood the taunts. The entire situation was a wash for everyone, leaving only Jim angry at the attention his new friend constantly stole. The teachers all loved him, and all the other kids enjoyed the boring yet silly game of joking at his expense. To Jim, this was unconscionable.
The straw that finally broke the proverbial camel's unfortunate spine was Jim's 11th birthday party. Jim had few friends of his own, but he liked company and the gifts they were obligated to bring, so practically the entire 5th grade class received small envelopes proclaiming a stupendous forthcoming occasion. There would be cake! There would be punch! There would be movies galore! Don't walk, run to the nearest parent and demand permission and possibly transportation before it's too late! If it were possible to transubstantiate a gasp of impending doom, the invitations would have been composed of the stuff. Kyle was more than willing to bring a gift and enjoy the festivities.
On the actual day of the party, Jim's house was absolutely encumbered by countless balloons, streamers, confetti, several models of lawn chair, treats, dogs, cats, tables overflowing with wrapped boxes, pinatas, fruit, jello, amorphous and disturbing combinations of both fruit and jello, and other bric-a-brac too numerous to comprehend. The entire scene suggested the existence of tactical nuclear bombs which contained party supplies in lieu of precious fissionable uranium-235. Surveying this shockingly overabundant smorgasbord prompted Kyle to mumble the single phrase that, had his father not moved them yet again, would have possibly involved deployment of genuine weapons. "Holy Crap! This place has a billionty party supplies," he mumbled mostly to himself. A billionty. A billionty?!
Much to Kyle's chagrin, several nearby partygoers overheard him utter this absurd and patently improbable use of the word: billion. Some even stared at him in complete disbelief as his or her brain percolated and digested the word that assaulted the very concept of language and proper grammar. Something astonishing happened then: they liked the nonsense word. For a few moments, the world withdrew and witnessed each child's confusion transform to unabashed jubilation. Unaware of the enigmatic interpretive mutation, Kyle froze in place as adrenaline blasted through his body. He didn't know whether to run or tackle the nearest child to prevent the dissemination of his literary faux pas. Soon it was obviously too late for damage-control, leaving him bemoaning ill luck and cursing several innocent deities.
A girl on his right giggled, "did you hear what he said?!" She skipped over to her nearest friend and whispered into a proffered ear as if protecting some great conspiracy. Both then looked at his direction and hunched their mouths into their hands to giggle more quietly.
Soon the muttering of this new, fantastic abuse of billion was lofted to a sort of cadence. It spread carried by the legion, each clamoring to present his version in the rising din. Billionty became one of those rare creations which exceeds its author in both fame and glory. In less than five minutes, every single human being within two city blocks tested it upon his tongue and found it agreeable. Billionty! Worse, the context was not lost in the translation, for there was indeed a billionty decorations littering Mr. Doolan's yard, possibly more. Even as Kyle morosely resigned himself to eternal existence as a laughingstock, he had been elevated to the status of hero. Before he could fathom the smiling faces around him, he was a Tiny God. Suddenly his nonchalance with the older generation was forgivable. Who, after all, would blame even the crustiest old coot for appreciating his natural wit?
Jim would. There comes a certain emotion beyond hate, rage, or even white-hot eye-popping fury. Jim was apoplectic as only a newly minted 11-year-old can claim. Kyle had blatantly belittled his birthday party and everyone rewarded him with accolades! Sure his father was laughing along with the rest of them because he had to, but Jim would be damned to take such abuse without a fight. In his haste, he almost rushed to his father and demanded Kyle be driven home. Before he'd taken a single step, he abruptly halted and nearly tripped on his own feet. Only a completely dense object such as a rock or maybe a girl could possibly ignore the gleaming smiles directed at Kyle by everyone in North America. The very second he demanded Kyle's ejection, the gala would flop like a freshly caught trout. He'd be the overreacting villain to Kyle's angelic cherub. Jim knew he was trapped, so he gritted his teeth and swore revenge, trying at least to look awed by his bounty though nothing had so ever soured in his stomach.
To Kyle, the next few months appeared stolen from a nearby crime thriller. Ever since his appearance at Jim's house, he'd been something of a legend. Yet Jim himself directed at Kyle a ceaseless raging hot scowl that could sear straight through prodigious quantities of solid lead. Then the assignments he finished began to vanish. Fortunately he had a habit of showing work to Mrs. Klein before the due date because he almost always needed help finishing anything of even moderate difficulty. That didn't eliminate the presence of a thief taking liberties with his work, however. When Jim became openly hostile, the puzzle finally made sense, and a quiet war between them smoldered until Kyle broke the stalemate by moving thousands of miles East.
It was that memory that immediately clarified what felt so disturbing. Still on the ground, Kyle looked up and grimaced at his new awareness. Somehow being openly despised proved worse than supernatural explanations. Something else troubled his addled wits in the bargain: the vengeance prompted by a supposedly ruined birthday and brazen mockery of Jim's family was several orders of magnitude less intense than the nearly tangible enmity flowing through every gust of wind, all directed at him. He couldn't escape feeling like an anathema, or worse. In a better mood, Kyle could joke that the pervasive ire, and not time, vanquished the buildings so thoroughly.
Instead, he barely had the energy to sigh. But that last standing structure, whether school or church, was so tantalizingly close! He had to go there, had to see for himself why it held such import to avoid fate. So he relaxed and gathered his strength; there was yet time to exploit this exile.