Quintessence, part 2

Here we are again - another weekend night, another scene. This is a long story, and a story that's been sorting itself out in my head for quite some time. One of these nights, I promise to tell a smaller story, one that's more complete in itself, but as this one keeps trying to coalesce properly lately, it's still very much ripe for the telling.

Quintessence, chapter 2:

Consider, for a moment, a boy, medium build, brown hair, torn black t-shirt. This boy is fourteen years old. He carries a gray backpack, which contains, at the moment, an assortment of schoolbooks (math and social studies) and a battered red notebook, occasionally used to take notes, never used to pass notes, for who would he give them to? More often it is used to make drawings, dragons and battles and complicated geometric shapes, a bit rough, but meticulously rendered in dark, heavy ballpoint pen. The boy's name is Nicholas, although no one uses it but his teacher. His mother, who never leaves that room at the top of the stairs calls him Nick, or actually, “NIIIIICK!” at the top of her lungs, usually when she wants him to bring her something, like another can of pop (she drinks Cherry Coke, always Cherry Coke, by the truckful, about a case a day – that's $25 a week. He once added it up, when he was bored in social
 studies.). The kids at school don't call him anything, because to do that you'd have to talk to him, and then the other kids would tease you, say you're his best friend or his boyfriend or something, except for the jocks, who call him “Stewie” lately, because they say he reminds them of some stupid kid on a stupid cartoon show.
    He is in the woods right now, because if he is in the woods, he will not hear his mother, and he cannot be called to get a pop, or to make some supper (usually ramen noodles and tv dinners. He doesn't want to cook, but his mom won't, and they have to eat something. It used to make her really happy when he cooked something. Five, no even three years ago she would've hugged him and said, “Nicky, you're such a big boy!” but now it's “NIIIIIICK, what's for dinner tonight?” Nothing, he'd like to say. Starve. Stop watching tv and fix yourself something, you lazy bitch. But he won't say that. Of course he won't. Because she's his mother and he loves her. Or he's supposed to. He remembers doing that once. And also there's the fact that if he said something like that, she'd probably throw something at him.
    So now he's in the woods. Watching birds. He rather likes birds. This area is full of cardinals and blue jays, and closer to home, outside his window, he can almost always see crows and sparrows. Sparrows are probably his favorite, small and unassuming, but smart. He'd swear that one he sees every day at the feeder he made in the backyard would probably talk if it got a chance. Maybe they do talk. Maybe people treat birds the way they treat him, and they talk all the time, to themselves, only no one listens. He sits and watches the birds for a few minutes, hidden in the tall grass, when he notices something deeper in the woods. It sparkles, just a little. It's probably a piece of foil. People are always throwing trash in the woods. If they don't have to see it later, they don't care what happens to it. He lays back and notices a squirrel in a tree. It's one of those stupid gray squirrels. They outnumber the red squirrels, and they won't let them
 eat the nuts or the food he puts out for them. He starts to throw rocks at it, and doesn't stop until one hits it square on the nose and it goes off to cower on an upper branch. Dumb animal.
    He starts to lay back down, when the sparkle catches his eye again. It's not a piece of foil. It's too big to be a piece of foil. It could be a mirror maybe, old shards of mirror that someone's discarded in the woods as their own personal trash heap. But it doesn't exactly look like a mirror. It glows, almost. giving the leaves around a faintly blue tinge. Curious now, he gets up and walks into the far circle of trees to have a closer look. It's a stone, a large round one about the size of a bowling ball. Underneath it looks to be a shade of grey, but it's giving off a pale blue light. It glows in the way that the underbelly of a firefly glows, only about twenty times brighter, and as he approaches it throws blue light on his hands, lighting him up like a child in a dark room sitting in front of the tv. He reaches out to touch it. In retrospect, this may have been a mistake.