Part one of the Interestingly Curious Series of Events that Dramatically Impacted the Life of Pierre Leroux

The First Curtain-keep in mind this is quite old and hasn't been edited in a long time.

Pierre Leroux did not wake up this morning to the sound of his alarm clock, but to the ring of his cell phone. The familiar chorus of Madonna’s <i>Material Girl</i> instantly gave it away. <i>Lisa</i>. Pierre grumbled, and rolled over his queen-sized bed to his phone. Not finding it on his nightstand, he dived into his silken, green sheets. After a couple of seconds, he finally found it. He flipped it open, and grunted, “What? I do not appreciate being…” The torrent of words from Lisa’s mouth quickly drowned him out.

            “OH MY GOD! Pierre! Why weren’t you online last night? Oh, never mind, it doesn’t matter; I have so much to tell you! I TALKED to him last night!”

            At this point, Pierre was absolutely sure that Lisa was describing her recent crush, Tommy. He had been hearing too much lately about this guy and he was rather annoyed and tired, but he was awake, so he might as well listen.

            “Really? How interesting. Go on.”

            “Well, it was after you and Alex left school early yesterday. I was walking down the stairway, and guess who was there? HIM! And he said, hi Lisa! And I was like, well, hi Tommy? What’s up? And he was like, not much. So we talked for a while about totally random things, and then he said, oh, I have something to tell you! And then I was so like, yes! This is it! And he kept saying things like ‘um’ and ‘oh’ and was turning all red in the face and blushing. That’s a little redundant, huh? Well, anyways…”

            “Get on with it.”

            “Oh, sorry! Anyways, he kept beating around the bush, and then he just said, oh, I’ll tell you next week. And I was like, I’ll hold you to it!”

            “How exciting.”

            “Well, you don’t sound as excited as you normally would,”

            Pierre grumbled even more. “You do know that you woke me up at six? I wake up every day at six thirty, NOT SIX!”

            “Well, excuse me! I thought you woke up now, not later!,” said Lisa, feigning hurt.

            “Don’t worry about it. I’ll have time to get ready lazily, I suppose. I will talk to you later, yes?

            “Yah. We’ll talk later at school! Bye!”

            Pierre snapped his phone shut and yawned. He hated Wednesdays. They were the middle of the week, the hump of the camel. He rose from his bed and made it neatly, having somewhat OCD tendencies. He walked over to a hook on one wall and took down his bathrobe and towel, and put them on. He took the stairs from his attic bedroom down to the upstairs bathroom, the smell of bacon omelets rising from the kitchen.

After closing the door, he took a good look at himself in the mirror. He was never really sure how he felt about his looks, sometimes he hated them and sometimes he thought they were divine. His hair was wavy almost to the point of curly, but not quite there; it was remarked to look like the old Renaissance statues in Rome. He kept it longer than the norm, to about his neck.

His eyes were a deep point of pride to him. They were the flavor of French Vanilla Roast, his favorite description for them. They gave off a slight twinkle when he laughed and smiled, but turned harder than stone when he was angered. As obviously indicated by his last name, he was mostly French. His nose wasn’t very sharp or pointy. His slightly angular jaw hinted at a bit of Russian and German somewhere up the line, and a distant Persian grandfather caused his more tan skin tone.

He was very tall, currently at 5’11”, and the doctors had projected him to finish growing at another inch by next summer. He was also a twig, weighing only about 134 pounds. He always wished he would magically acquire muscles, but he never worked out. Rather than play sports, Pierre had been a devotee of literature ever since he could read. He had written plays and poems himself, but they weren’t anything that fabulous.

After taking his routine eighteen-minute shower, he emerged in his bathrobe smelling quite delicious, the scent of raspberries and peaches floating about him. He went back up the stairs into his room and put on a pair of slightly tight jeans, a green shirt emblazoned with an 8-bit picture of Luigi. His socks never matched, and today was no exception; the color scheme was a black and a blue one. Pierre finally took one his favorite necklaces from the nightstand and put it on, a jade pendant in the shape of a heptagram. He looked in his mirror: green looked especially well on him.

Downstairs his grandfather Gerárd was reading a newspaper and eating one of the famous omelets his grandmother had made. Gerárd was a car collector, his fascination lying mainly in cars from before the fifties began. He looked a lot like Ian McKellen, and spoke quite like him too. His old green eyes always shined with the radiance of the sea. Granny Célestine used to be an opera singer, but after the town’s opera industry fell apart, she retired to being a chef in a small café she owned. The Blue Moon enjoyed quite an amount of good fortune; it was listed in all of the guidebooks as one of the best jazz cafés around in the town of Harrington. (Not surprisingly, it was the <i>only</i> jazz café.)

Pierre was greeted with a hearty mouthful of a good morning from his grandfather, and his grandmother made grabbed him an omelet and a glass of cranberry juice. He thanked her and sat down.

“You always make the most wonderful omelets, Granny! I appreciate this quite a bit much, you know.”

“Was that just a really long and fancy way to say ‘thank you,’ Pierre?” she retorted, with a good-natured smirk on her face.

Pierre shrugged and smiled, his mouth full of bacon, bell pepper, and cheesy egg. His grandfather looked up excitingly.

“I’ve been looking lately in the car market, and I think I found something you might be interested in.” He passed the newspaper over the table, indicating a circle deeply engraved into the paper. Encircled within was an old 1936 Model J Duesenberg, Pierre’s favorite car. He looked up in awe.

“How… did you find it?” he said, much to the amusement of Gerárd.

“Well, it was rather easy. I looked in the newspaper. Looks like some guy up in Salem is holding an auction for, I think I might drive up there and grab it for myself. Someone’s birthday <i>is</i> approaching, eh Célestine?” laughed the old man.

Pierre was even more awestruck, but he didn’t have any more time to ask questions, as the doorbell rang. Célestine looked up from her breakfast right as Pierre was going to launch a torrent of questions at his grandpa

“That must be Alex at the door, dear. You had better hurry, or you’ll be late to school now!” she shouted after he gobbled down the rest of his meal and ran upstairs. He grabbed his white leather messenger bag that served as a backpack, donned a pair of white leather gloves, and pulled his favorite cashmere scarf around his neck. Then after running back downstairs, Pierre took his favorite article of winter wear, a black, velvet duster, off from a peg on the wall next to the door. After putting this on and securing his things, he opened the door with a flourish. On the other side waited a rather impatient Alex.

Alex was not exactly tall, but compared to Pierre, no one was exactly tall unless they were monument-sized. He was around 5’9”, blessed with a soft, youthful face. (This earned him the name of “Baby-face,” three years ago in freshman year.) He had soft, curly brown hair a shade lighter than Pierre’s dark, as well as his eyes. He didn’t have such an outfit of <i>flair</i> on as his French companion; he normally wore a school pullover jacket and jeans. Usually he had a smile on his face, but he was frowning at this moment.

“Why the hell didn’t you open the door sooner? I’ve been waiting five minutes for you!” he said half-angrily, half-jokingly. Alex was not one quick to anger.

“Actually,” Pierre retorted, “It’s been more like three and a half minutes. I had to get a couple of things together, you caught me while I was eating!”

The two began to walk to school, which was not such a far distance away. Harrington was a smaller town with a population of around 40,000 people. It wasn’t huge, it wasn’t small, it was just right. The town was quite wide, and the snowy Oregon air kept it very cool in the summer and frigid in the winter. An old theater hub for the rural community, the old Garnett Hall Theatre had fallen into ruin and disrepair fifty years ago. (It was sometimes frequented by kids or teenagers looking for a scare.) An avenue of other theaters had grown up on the more flashy main streets, but Célestine always remarked that they were never the same as old Garnett Hall.

Out of the three high schools, Alex and Pierre attended Harrington Honors High; a somewhat recently built school supposed to be for “brilliant young minds” (a misnomer.)  The school was reported to have the finest technology around, which was <i>nearly</i> true. However, cutting edge technology was not something the school could always afford, but the school still did maintain a variety of neat classes and a fresh environment.

Pierre yawned as the two made their routine walk, much to the notice of Alex.

            “She called you too, huh?” he said, in a sarcastic manner which hinted he had been treated the same.

            “Too? Are you serious? She called me half an hour till six-thirty! <i> Everyone knows I wake at precisely six-thirty!</i> Whatever it was about, I don’t remember.”

            “She talked to Tommy again. More like flirted, I guess, but she wasn’t bold enough to come out with it.” At once Pierre was inflamed, wishing he had paid closer attention this morning.

            “Oh, <i>really</i>? Extrapolate!” Alex winced at the word “extrapolate,” remembering a certain music video of a man in drag singing about shoes.

            “I guess he just said hi to her and that he wanted to tell her something, but put it off until next week. That was pretty much it,” said Alex wearily, having listened for Lisa days on end about Tommy. He wished that one would just ask the other out rather than sit around and babble about it. He was always the first one to hear about certain events pertaining to the two (Pierre normally was, and resented this strange development), which was considerably odd, as both Lisa and Alex dated at the end of last year.

            “Interesting, I suppose… I’ll talk to her later.” Pierre was silent from here on out, thinking about the recent turn if events. After various mental arguments, yes, he admitted, he was indeed jealous. All of his friends were beginning to acquire dates for the approaching homecoming, yet he was here alone. It wasn’t like he couldn’t get a date-he did have girls falling every which way for him- he just wasn’t interested in such things. He wanted to have a real <i>someone</i> that he could begin a relationship with. The majority of the female population at the school was well aware that Pierre was not interested; he was about as straight as his hair was the most common euphemism. Nevertheless, some girls simply ignored this fact or told him he was making a terrible choice, and the he could change to be straight.

            Unfortunately, his soft beauty and light charisma were not enough. There were simply no guys to date at his school, or rather; there were none that wanted to date him. He knew a few, and they were good friends; however, they had too many problems. Mainly, they were extremely afraid of coming out to anyone for fear of bad judgment, or afraid of asking each other out. Pierre was hopelessly single, to the evil delight of his female leeches.

However, this was about to change. The first interestingly curious event was about to take place in about eight minutes and forty-three seconds. Pierre and Alex resumed speaking about small things: how far they had gotten in Final Fantasy IV, the coming Presidential election, the new Duesenberg that Pierre was about to possibly obtain.             They arrived in the other crowds of friends walking to school, crossed the street to the school, and walked into the great courtyard. Alex left to go organize chorus for that morning, and Pierre walked to the library to meet the “Lit Mag” crew. The Lit Mag, an abbreviation for Literature Magazine, was a collection of writings and art that was made into a single volume every year for distribution. It was sort of a subculture that existed, a secret group of safety away from the common tribulations of high school.