Jon and Karyn collected their books and shuffled their way to first period, which was English. Jon tried to keep his predicament out of mind, and he mostly succeeded, until he remembered who sat in front of him in English class: Jay Duncan.
Karyn had said that weird thing about Jay, hadn't she? That Jon should ask him out. But he hadn't meant to stare at Jay, he'd just lost focus, and Jay happened to be an object to focus on. Right? Well, as Jon took a deep breath, he was about to test this theory.
"As you all settle into your seats," Ms. Robinson announced over the slight rumbling of moving chairs and books, "I want you to notice that there is a new quote of the week on the board, and I want you to all spend the first ten minutes of class writing a journal entry with this quote as your prompt."
Jon glanced at the whiteboard, where the following was written: "That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. -Samuel Taylor Coleridge"
Good. A distraction. Jon took out his composition book and began transcribing the quote to the top of the next blank page. He glanced between his page and the board to make sure he got it written correctly, but his gaze was interrupted on the way back to his desk. It was interrupted by a bushy shock of unkempt hair that was attached to the head of the student in the seat in front of him. That uneasy feeling he'd had by he wall with Karyn returned, if more subdued than it was then.
No. Jon had to focus on this journal prompt. Suspension of disbelief. Poetic faith.
Poetic. Wasn't it poetic how Jay's hair seemed to move to the beat of its own drum? Each curl choosing its own direction, even as it was constricted by its relatively short length, and its anchor in Jay's scalp? An expression of freedom, of carelessness in a world of rules. Jay Duncan's hair was perfect.
"Alright, does anyone want to share what they wrote?"
Jon blinked. Had it already been ten minutes? He looked down at what he'd written, and suddenly became horrified. The entire page was an ode to Jay's hair! Even if he didn't share this in front of the class, Ms. Robinson would read it eventually. What had he done?
A few students raised their hands, and Jon quietly panicked as each read their piece out loud. He genuinely had these feelings for Jay. And the more he thought about it, the more he could feel this sense of fulfilment, this sense of need coming from his gut.
"Those are all great interpretations," Ms. Robinson concluded when the last student had finished their reading, "but that's not quite what the quote means. I suppose it was a little unfair of me to spring it on you before explaining. You see, suspension of disbelief is an essential concept in literature."
Inside of Jon, new processes were asserting themselves. Visual inputs were processed by the same brain, but they were analyzed with new sets of rules. And these rules were self-propagating: the more Jon thought about things that triggered feminine instincts, the more that feminine reactions became hard-coded into him, and the more often he would trigger feminine instincts.
"Basically, suspension of disbelief means that we'll forgive some fantastical elements in a story," Ms. Reynolds continued, "if they're in service of generating conflict, or theme. At the beginning of Moby Dick, for example, Ishmael has no real good reason to join a whaling ship. But if he doesn't join, there is no story. We need a character with his outside perspective in order to contextualize everything that happens on the Pequod, so we take our normal disbelief that something like this might happen, and we suspend it for the sake of story. All fictional works, great or feeble, rely on this concept to some extent or another."
Was that what was happening to Jon? Was he like some fictional character, being placed artificially into a situation that would generate conflict or theme? Was this why everything that had happened this morning was happening to him? Was it all in service of some cosmic need to generate, and then observe, whatever inner spiritual struggle might inspire a boy who just yesterday was pretty sure he was heterosexual, and was pretty sure that he had a penis, to sit in horrified silence, without a penis, while harboring some kind of schoolgirl crush for one of his male friends?
"Because fiction is meant to be a representation of reality, and not necessarily a straight reflection of reality, it's inevitable that you'll see some inconsistencies that wouldn't bear out in real life. But it's those inconsistencies that often make for a fun and interesting novel. Can any of you think of a book you've read, and some ideas that you just had to go with in order to make the story work?"
A few more hands raised, but Jon's remained at his sides. He wasn't a fictional character, was he? He didn't need to worry about being a reflection of reality. He was reality. So every decision he made, every step that brought him to this point, had to make sense or else they wouldn't have happened. If it's happened, then by definition it's possible. And everything that's happened has happened.
Jon gave a consterned grunt that he hoped nobody else noticed. This was giving him a headache. He needed something else to focus on.
And as turned his head upwards to look at his teacher, it stopped mid-way once again. Jay had such commanding shoulders, didn't he?
