Great God Pan

He just got back from the ghost tree. His mom thinks he had to come home and something happened out there, and he didn't go to school today. He has some kind of a cough now, and he says a deep sound is always in his ears. We all tried to talk him into surfing Cheyenne's after school, but he said he just wanted to go to the Java Hut and think about it and they say he just sat and stared.
I just don't want him to freak out with Halloween coming up in like ten months. I am trying to get him used to his new bluffside home and I hung a dummy up like a dreamcatcher that is supposed to soak in the bad vibes and send them out to the Valley. Some shaman gave it to me. Guess it's pretty powerful further inside, when it got shallow, there was a deep wall and it feathered and swayed diagonally, trying to describe itself in the emerald drapery. New colors slipp'd by in the wintery light and the year's face was reshown. Maybe this is the moment he is trying to relive there inside his mind.
I thought maybe he was cured, and so Shayla carefully wrapped him up in her blanket on the beach so that he looked like a woven corpse watching said surf with a hollow and dark look. His blood had turned as white as seafoam and cold too. He had gotten Ugg boots for Christmas but left them in that minivan on New Year's Eve near the ranch, even if he did find them, covered in his own vomit, there was little that could reverse the effects of the you know what now.
Now the students write his name on their notebooks and imitate him in the parking lot as if he were our high school's version of Dora, and I have seen his last name spraypainted all low-budge in the drainage ditch down by the football field. Whatevs. In the early mornings, with that canyon breeze breathing it's hills through the parking lot, I finger the cassette he gave me until we are both satisfied, rewinding it by hand again, just to hear his first favorite song.

Posted by Blazer