Written: while listening to the rain
Powered by: a half-scoop of pre-workout that’s still giving me the tingles
Inspired by: this flash fiction prompt from Masterclass: A straight-A high school student falls in love with the troll who lives in her locker
By the time her school received the grant it needed for each student to have their own personal troll, Holiday was about to graduate and was completely focused on her end-of-year exams. She didn’t waste time naming her troll or making it little outfits like some of the other students did.
No, Holiday kept her relationship with her troll strictly professional. She didn’t need the troll to help keep her organized, to hand her extra pens or remind her that her English paper was due on Thursday. She only visited her locker in the morning, preferring to keep all of her books close by in case she got a spare moment to study.
But that Tuesday Holiday had a science project due and couldn’t carry all of her books and her reconstructed electrical generator, so she left a few in her locker. When she came back, her troll had the book propped up near the front door of the locker, straining in the dim light to read the words in front of him.
“I like this book,” the troll said to her as she unzipped her backpack, “the moors sounds beautiful, and sort of scary too! Have you ever been?”
Holiday smiled without showing her teeth shook her head, taking Wuthering Heights and placing it in her bag. “Maybe one day,” she said. But then the troll’s eyes darkened, and his forehead wrinkles deepened in despair.
“Yes, for you,” he replied with a little wave as she shut her locker door, “Maybe one day.”
For the rest of her classes Holiday found her thoughts returning to the little troll. At the final bell she went back to her locker and decided to leave Wuthering Heights there for the night. After all, she had another copy at home.
The next morning when she opened her locker, her troll was in a much better mood. So she left him her science textbook, since she didn’t have a science class that day.
“I had no idea all of this stuff existed,” the troll told her when she came back during lunch to check on him, “I especially like clouds. I wonder what it’s like to feel them rain.” So Holiday punctured the bottom of her plastic water bottle with a pen and let the water sprinkle down on the troll, ruining one of her forgotten notebooks in the process. But the troll was enthralled, unable to do anything except blink up at the droplets as they ran down his eyebrows and puddled into his elbows.
While her troll was enjoying his rain shower, Archer walked up behind her. “What, your troll stink?” he asked her. Her troll looked at her with some concern but Holiday just winked at him, and ignored Archer the way she always did. She hardly ever noticed him looking at her while she stood at her locker, and mostly ignored his attempts to start a conversation.
Holiday started visiting her locker during all of her breaks between classes, and started leaving behind more and more books. She even checked out a few from the library on the subjects her troll really seemed to enjoy. When her science project was returned to her with a perfect grade, she left it in her locker with the lightbulb on so her troll could see in the darkness.
“How wonderful it must be,” the troll said one day, “to actually be able to do all of these things, instead of just read about them.”
Archer noticed Holiday crying behind her history textbook, pretending to read. He sat down next to her and asked what was wrong.
“I should be locked inside there, not him,” she whispered. “I could do anything and all I ever do is read. I never even thought to try anything else.”
“I think you’re great,” Archer whispered back, but Holiday wasn’t listening.
“It’s not fair. He’s trapped.”
It was against school rules to take a troll out of a locker, and students had been expelled for trying to sneak them out at the end of the day. There was no way Holiday could risk setting him free in her final days of high school. So she glumly continued giving him her books. She had stopped reading them herself.
Still, she dutifully wrote her valedictorian speech, and at graduation delivered a heartfelt congratulations to her fellow students.
“We have an entire world of possibilities open to us,” she said, staring out into the crowd of red gowns and smiling parents, “Too many options for any one of us to take advantage of, even in a thousand lifetimes. It could be sad,” she paused, because here was where she stopped believing in her own speech, “but it’s not. It’s the challenge of every person’s story, the promise that no matter what choices you make, you can always have the option of trying something new.”
One last time, Holiday went to visit her locker. But as she opened the door, all she saw was her reconstructed electrical generator. Her troll was nowhere in sight.
She searched the school for him, terrified that the principle would discover him missing and revoke her diploma. Outside in the parking lot, she saw Archer sitting in his car. He was not wearing a red gown, or his school uniform. He rolled the window down as she walked up. In the back seat, her troll was perched on a stack of textbooks, staring wild-eyed at the world around him. She smiled, and they both smiled back.
“You coming?” he asked.