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Chronicles of a Film Student
Orikaeshigitae
Registered User, ClubPA regular
Registered User, ClubPA regular
Coded for format. Check here to see what this is all about.
The morning sun poured through Janine’s bedroom window. She squinted against the merciless sun to get a look at her alarm clock – seven thirty. Shit. Late for class again. She rolled out of bed and pulled on clothes. The door locked behind her as she sprinted for her bike. Jamming it into high gear, she sped off down the street, passing out-of-work rock stars and porn smugglers. Living in the downtrodden part of town was cheap, but gross. She checked her watch, then muttered to herself disconsolately. “Shit. Prof’s gonna kill me… wonder if Jon’s gonna be there?â€
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And that was the second-to-last thought that flashed through Janine's mind that morning, because in the next instant her skull had a rude ecounter with an unfortunately-placed signpost, ironically proclaiming "Yield to Peds". The last thought Janine had, before she slipped into unconsciousness, was a mixture of relief that her camera apparently still worked and confusion as to how it was suddenly turned on.
* * *
A dozen hours and several boring medical tests later, Janine found herself wandering out of the student health center, half-wishing she did have a concussion so she'd have a good reason to miss some class (and a chance to catch up on some paper-writing). She walked past parked ambulances, shifting her satchel to the opposite shoulder, and a heavy clunking noise in the bag brought her to a sudden stop. My camcorder!
Janine furiously unzipped her shoulder bag and rifled through it, shoving eyeliner and cellphone out of the way to grasp the most expensive object she owned. Pulling it out and giving it a good once-over, Janine was surprised to find it miraculously unscratched, and a press of the power button even revealed a full battery charge.
That's odd... I seem to remember... didn't it turn on when I fell? The battery should be dead. The camera finished its power-up routine, and Janine began testing its various functions to make sure they still worked, now meandering down the sidewalk toward the campus coffee shop. Playback seems to work fine... I wonder what this thing recorded after I passed out.
From a falling camera's point of view, the earth itself does a gymnastics tumbling pass. As the off-campus minimart finished a series of back handsprings on the camera's playback window, Janine winced, looking at the scrapes the same fall had left on her forearms and shoulder. The camera's viewpoint had now settled with everything at a right angle from normality, a problem easily remedied by a ninety-degree rotation of the device. Janine was treated to a static view of the sidestreet between her apartment and campus, and as the timer counted off seconds, she had nearly given up on seeing anything interesting.
But, just as she reached to close the playback screen, a figure... slithered into frame.
Hey, that's the old guy I almost ran over on my bike! Janine was able to identify the old man by his hunched posture, but not by face. Of course, she hadn't gotten a look at his face before crashing her bicycle... but even now, there was something... wrong with him. The picture warped and twisted where he walked, and it seemed like frames were missing as he blinked from spot to spot at random.
Janine tried to swallow a heavy lump in her throat as she saw The Man Who Wasn't Quite Right approach the camera lens, and presumably, her fallen body. The figure slowed to a stop a few feet from the camera, blinked out of existence for an instant, then reappeared, standing there looking down. A couple of steps closer, and what should have been a discernable face, but wasn't, was out of frame. Janine blinked hard, trying to focus on something, anything, some specific feature of the man's appearance, but she just couldn't--her eyes seemed to slide off his pants leg, his shoe, his dangling hand, of their own accord.
Oh, God... Janine's hand started trembling as she semi-saw the man kneel down next to the camera, reaching an unidentifiable hand toward something behind the camera lens.
"Janine!"
Almost dropping the camera from shock, Janine snapped the playback screen shut, looking up at a rapidly approaching graduate student.
"Jon!"
"For pity's sakes, Janny."
"I know, I know." Janine could recognize the tone in his voice perfectly. "Well, only a minute or two late, right?"
It was a shallow excuse, but Janine would never put it past Jon to fall into a state of worry. Anything to help keep his mind off of the class ahead, and the Professor, would be a godsend.
"Well, at least you brought the damn camcorder back. I don't even want to think about the deposit."
"You always think about the damn deposit. It's all right, take a look."
Janine handed the camcorder to Jon, and the feeling of relief came over her again. The film, the shots, everything done over the weekend was out of her hands. For now, it was someone else's problem. It's his turn to worry. Again.
Jon and Janine walked side by side past the student health center towards class, in complete silence, as Janine slowly scanned over whether or not the Professor would accept a note from the student health center.
Any note from the health center, she hoped.
She forced herself to put the old man and the footage on her camcorder out of her head for now. No sense worrying about it, she could find out what happened later. She was sure there was a reasonable explanation for everything. There had to be.
Instead of dwelling on the footage and the crash, she concentrated on the humid air around her, on the sounds of Jon's worn out sneakers slapping against the path beneath them, on things that were normal and comforting.
Jon spoke, and she nearly jumped at the sound of her voice.
"You just can't keep yourself out of trouble, can you Janny?" he said, but his voice was not stern. His dark eyes twinkled. He held the door to the school open for her, a gentleman as always.
"Guess not," her voice wasn't as nonchalant and casual as possible, but Jon didn't seem to notice. "Hopefully I can get through class without blowing anything up."
And hopefully the professor will have a perfectly good explanation as to what happened to my camera she added silently as they headed to her next class.
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Janine awoke to the sound of banging on the door. She shot upright and looked around for a moment, disoriented, until finally her eyes fixed on the clock, which read 7:30.
Shit. Not again. She fought to get clothes on and get to the door as quickly as she could and wrenched the door open to find Jon looking back at her.
"Hi." Jon smiled. "I was almost worried you weren't going to get up for a moment there."
"What?" said Janine, who was still struggling her way into the world of the waking.
"I thought," said Jon, "that with your bike out of commission, you might want someone to help you walk to class."
"Oh," she said, "yeah, hold on," and grabbed her bag and camera. Right, the bike. How did he know my bike wasn't in usable shape? I guess I must told him about this last night, when I was talking to him about the crash during class. Right, yes, I'm sure I did.
As they walked, Janine brooded that she was late, again. It was too bad that not only was she going to walk in with a dubious note from the medical center and begging special forgiveness for an absence, she was going to walk in fifteen minutes late with a dubious note from the medical center and begging special forgiveness for an absence. Still, there was nothing to be done for it. Of course it was going to take her longer to get to class today; as Jon had pointed out, she didn't have a bike after the crash. Of course that must count for something. Still, it was a bit of a surprise. She wouldn't have quite expected a gesture like that from Jon. Maybe
Janine, lost in her own thoughts, did not actually see what happened next. She only heard, heard a brief little scream that sounded like it could be Jon's.
The events of the next minute or so were a tatter in her memory. Besides a lot of shouting and screeching and tire noise, the first clear memory she found herself left with afterward was sitting on a curb, police lights reflecting off everything, a policewoman beside her putting a jacket around her, with the camera-- the REC light for some reason glowing-- cradled in her arms. "Class", she gasped, "I'm late for class. I have to get to class."
"Don't you worry about that, honey." The policewoman said. "Class can wait. You just hang on here for a moment until we can ask you some questions about what just happened, okay?"
"Are you with us, honey?" The policewoman persisted, and Janine looked from her to the camera, feeling suddenly completely disoriented.
Things seemed to be happening around her, out of her control, and she let world fade into the background. She heard the woman say something about shock, but it was distant.
The details kept slipping through her fingers. Absent-mindedly, she turned the camera off to save the battery and tried to remember.
Walking to class, lost in thought. A stifled scream, a flash, she turned and... blood? Was there blood? Who screamed? Had it been Jon? Where is Jon? She remembered the woman next to her.
"Jon... where is Jon?"
The policewoman looked at her sympathetically, then at the team working on the scene. "Jon? There was no one else with you when we arrived. Could he have been involved in this?"
Had he run, and left her? No, he wouldn't do that. They were best friends.
The woman spoke again. "My name is Linn. Please tell me everything you remember." Linn put a gentle hand on her shoulder.
Janine hugged her camera close to her and gave up the few details she could nail down from the morning. It didn't take long. Linn gave her a little card with her name on it and found someone to take her home. She trudged up to her room in a daze, placed the camera and her bag carefully on her desk, and climbed into bed, still unsure of exactly what had happened. Maybe if she went back to sleep now, she could wake up tomorrow and pretend the day never was.
As Janine drifted off to sleep, she thought about the REC light.
Sleep claimed her.
A quick shower and toasted breakfast saw Janine out the door swiftly. Her eyes stayed focused on the sidewalk, each step carrying her only so far. It was a brisk day out, yet the streets seemed more alive with activity. The passing of others, listening to their trivial banter - her mind couldn't escape the flashes in memory. She instinctively gripped her shoulderbag strap, knowing the camcorder had an answer.
Blood.
It stained the sidewalk in a trail-like pattern, spots extending from here to there. Across the street stood two policemen. Around them arced a barrier of yellow tape.
This isn't real. Janine gazed at the road, with nothing much to add aside from blood. A noticeable set of tiremarks extended from where she seemingly awoke the day before, and at that instant the odor of car exhaust came to memory.
Just ahead of her a local cafe was opening its doors. Janine sprinted forward, having once again made herself late to class.
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The door to the classroom creaked open – having been late her fair share of times, Janine had suffered much embarrassment at its ungreased hands – and Janine stepped inside. The classroom, on cue, turned their heads over toward her, gazing down at her from their perches in the amphitheatre-styled seating arrangement. All eyes were on her now, looking her from top to bottom, scrutinizing and critical. She slowly made her way to the desk at the lowest level of the room, and stopped at the professor’s podium, looking downwards, note in hand.
“Yes Ms. Janine. I suppose yet another terrible circumstance kept you from attending class yesterday? Were we not looking both ways before crossing the street?†The class sniggered. He was making a show of this.
“Err… professor, I have a note from the, uh… Student Health Center…†she replied in a low voice. Maybe he’d take the hint that she wasn’t in the mood to be an example today.
The professor took the note and looked it over. “Ah yes, the Student Health Center. Not the most air-tight ship on the sea, if you don’t mind my saying. Students getting friends to write excuse notes for them all the time -- though of course, I don’t mean to suggest you may have obtained this excuse note illegitimately. Right, Ms. Janine?†He gave her a questioning stare.
Janine shook her head slightly. Fuck this asshole.
“Yes, well, I’ll let you get by this time. In future, though, do be certain to bring me more… substantial evidence of your legitimate reason for not being in class, please? Now go and take a seat, and try and learn something in this class, okay?â€
Janine turned and walked up the stairs on the far side of the room, to secure her usual loft at the very back of the class. She wasn’t exactly a saint for having missed a few classes for no reason at all, but she didn’t deserve to be treated like this. And her classmates, those lapdogs, never questioned anything the Prof did. So naturally, they weren’t covert about their dislike of her. It didn’t matter – she was only in here for little over two hours a day, and it was just as long as she could bear.
One would think that, given this was a mathematics class, that there would be little dogma or diatribe, but the professor managed to sneak in his own warped views on things wherever he could. And the monkeys, as she’d taken to calling her peers, ate it up as unequivocal truth.
Shut up. How about you actually pay attention this class?, her conscience interjected. If you don’t pass the finals, you’re really in for it. I’m going to go ahead and shut off, so you’ll be at optimum head-nodding capacity whenever the Prof glances over here, okay? And so, the class period went on.
Stepping into the bustling hallway, Janine felt as though she had now completely regressed into her typical routine. She’d get shoved in the halls (maybe even drop a book or two, though it wouldn’t end in the stereotypical “guy picks up the same book you were going to, your eyes meet, and it’s the beginning of a beautiful relationshipâ€), space out through a class or two more, go home and listen to some CDs for a few hours, and then go to class again at 8 PM, where she might actually have fun with Jonathan, though even that was getting a little tired.
She couldn’t escape the feeling, as she tried to move through the crowd of screaming students either playing football in the hall or shuffling hurriedly to their next class, that she was going nowhere really fast. Everything seemed pointless. She’d finish a Liberal Arts degree, get a decent-paying job somewhere to get by, and spend her lifetime trying to find some means of making her life worthwhile while feeling an inner emptiness. It wasn’t exactly the future people looked forward to.
Lost in her sea of pessimism, she failed to notice that everything around her had suddenly slowed down. The entire hallway seemed to be moving in slow-motion. She could see the boisterous guy with the green-and-yellow letterman jacket slowly, smoothly lobbing his miniature football through the air. She saw the pale, lanky kid, books held close to him, making his way through the hall with all the expedience of molasses. It was as if someone had turned one of those slow-motion camera videos into a 3-D ride at some amusement park.
What the hell just happened? What’s going on?! Janine couldn’t believe what she was seeing.
Somehow, seeing everything move in slow motion through the camera's eye made it a little easier to handle. She ran on, out of the building. She grabbed her bike from the rack waitasecond and pedaled off towards home, letting the camera hang on its strap by her side.
She entered the hypnotic trance of the habitual bicyclist, reacting to things ahead of her, obstacles in the road. In her head, she seemed in another space, at once part of and separate from the world her eyes saw. As she pumped her legs, she wondered idly what was happening. She seemed to be going much faster than usual, but that was probably a trick of the evening light. Her brain couldn't come up with any satisfactory answers that let her retain her sanity, so she shut the question away in a dark corner. She thought of the bath that awaited her at the apartment. A bath would fix everything. It always did.
Once, she looked at the camera casually. The red light was on. She returned her gaze to the road resolutely.
In the hallway, the rest of the class-- those who had lingered in the aisles between desks, or basically anyone who hadn't darted out the door the instant class ended as janine had-- were still leaving the classroom one by one. The general population of the hall was thinning slightly as students left the building for their next classes, the door to the class Janine had just left rocked back and forth majestic and oceanlike as each successive student reached a hand out to keep it open, all with incredible, inexplicable slowness. And as each student walked past the door and into the center of the hall, they flickered, froze briefly like a frame on a scratched DVD, and disappeared.
The last to walk out the door was the teacher, and as he let go of the door the scene seemed to begin to slow down even more, slower with each passing moment, while the teacher came to a stop in the center of the hall, his image gradually growing darker and darker as the door swung shut behind him until he was nothing but a standing shadow.
And then the shadow began to move, as if its head were raising to look at the camera.
The entire picture went illegible for a moment and then snapped suddenly into clarity, now displaying what was actually in front of the camera at that moment, the sidewalk flowing past as Janine biked, sharp and pixelated in the camera's tiny viewfinder.
Janine did not see this. She was not looking into the viewfinder. She was looking ahead of her, at the trees, at the cracks between the sidewalk panes, at fire hydrants, at everything around her except the dried stain of blood approaching on the sidewalk.
"Nidoking, I choose you!"
With a pop and a flash, Janine found herself facing a terrible beast, its skin comprised of rock shards. "Nido!" it roared as it attempted to stomp on her. Janine backflipped back up to her feet, staring down this mysterious stranger.
"Who are you?"
"I am the greastest trainer of all!" The stranger strikes a pose. "Ken Chase! Are you a bad enough dude?"
"Bad enough for what?" Janine answers.
"To do a barrell roll!" Ken points forward, instructing his beast to attack.
In a dramatic show of strength, Janine rose her arms in the air and let loose a frightful call.
"WRRRRYYYYYYYYYY!"
Ken looked up fearfully, shouting, "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"
And she smote her enemies with a steamroller.
There was punch and pie after.
And Pika is a loli.
The end.
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*slams down staff*
YOU SHALL NOT PASS!