Join us in the Clouds

There were many reasons why Jordan should have not been allowed to be in society. One main concern was his past malicious behaviors. Jordan played pranks on people, like many teenagers do, but his were far more sinister than just a simple whoopee cushion on a chair. Jordan liked pricking his two younger brothers with sewing needles while they slept to see in what areas they would bleed. He liked dangling his three month old cousin upside down by one leg to see how long it took for her to turn purple, and even smothered his mothers boyfriend with a plastic garbage bag and watched him gasp for air- until of course his mothers boyfriend kicked him in the groin and tackled him to the ground. Jordan had bruises on his back for weeks for falling so hard on the wood floor- but even this was exciting to him.
Although Jordan exhibited strange behavior, his mother thought “teenager = rebellion = attention = too much work.” She just couldn’t wait for him to go away to college so he could find something he loved to do besides playing practical but dangerous jokes on people he cared about. Jordan’s mother, a school nurse, saw students’ everyday that showed the same types of erratic behaviors that he did but they always turned out fine once they explored the world and found something constructive to do outside of their tiny town.
And so the day came where Jordan would finally become something, be happy, and meet people just like him; Jordan was going to college.
Jordan had arrived; he had his skinny black jeans hugging his skinny brown legs and his black button-down shirt. He made no effort to talk to anyone which intrigued the ladies and infuriated the men; but Jordan didn’t care. Actually, he didn’t even know people saw him when he walked from his car to his locker or from his locker to his class. However, he did feel uneasy here. From the minute he stepped on the New York City campus, he felt a sense of doom, sadness, and danger.
Students’ chatter filled every empty space of the school, even the black spaces where the people we couldn’t see lingered.
Jordan’s first class of the day was music. He was clueless in this arena. His specialty was psychology. This is what he wanted to do as a career and the class he enjoyed the most; even if everyone whispered about him in the class and said that the class should be studying him instead of people they didn’t know. He was different, not crazy, despite what everyone else thought.
Jordan sat close to himself, arms crossed, head down, body pushed all the way to the back of the chair. His professor liked to say that Jordan sat like this because he was “absorbing the beauty of Bach and the brilliance of Mauchaut,” but he really slept through the “beauty” and “brilliance.”
Today, something broke his journey to dream land. Through the large white windows where the view of the Hudson River was not only available but beautiful, Jordan heard geese. Geese on campus were a norm but the distinct calling of geese was something he had never heard before. Then as Jordan prepared to resume his standard head bowed, arms crossed position, the calls got louder and more desperate. They were calling for Jordan to help them, to join them in the beautiful gray skies and he obliged them. He looked around to the other twelve students in the classroom who were immersed in Bach and absorbing Mauchaut and ignoring the geese.
“Why isn’t anyone saying about the geese?” he thought “Don’t they hear them?” just then he stands up and walks to the front of the room. He felt like he was walking on air and only saw the partial rays of sunshine reflecting off the glass of the window.
“Jordan,” the professor started pushing his square rimmed glasses up to his nose. “May I ask why you are standing idle in the middle of the classroom-“he paused “staring out the window?”
Jordan could hear the geese getting closer and closer and …BAM! BAM! BAM! Three geese slammed into the window. Jordan flinched and glanced at the rest of the class.
“Well professor, the geese are calling me,” Jordan explained slowly walking towards the window he and only he saw the geese hit.
“Excuse me Jordan, first of all there should be no one calling you but my friends Bach and Mauchaut and secondly…geese don’t talk,” the class erupted in laughter but all Jordan could hear was “come and join us in the gray skies.” And so he slowly lifted the white wooden window, sat on the ledge…and jumped.
The class heard a thump, Jordan heard nothing anymore and his mother heard he committed suicide. “I guess he wasn’t rebelling” his mother said “maybe he was sick.”