The cold place I

Humming a tuneless little ditty, Kyle rolled his eyes at the scenery passing by.
His blond, straight, thin bangs occasionally took flight as he marched with a purpose down the sidewalk toward his home.

Another school-day, gone.

Another afternoon begun.

This one will be much like the one that preceeded it, and the one that will follow.
Homework books are squeezed onto the top of a pile in his backpack which works every day to change the curvature of his young spine.
They'll be ignored.
Unless, of course, someone asks "Did you do your homework?".
That should be around 10 o'clock tonight, so we're golden.

Kyle doesn't hang around after school.
He doesn't fit terribly well with any of the "in" crowds.
He's not a jock, not a head, not an artist, not a freak, not a.....
Kyle bites his lip to pull back from the cold place.
His lower lip bleeds a little, warm and salty.

The cold place.

Cold and dark and cavernously solitary. There, a single step could take a thousand years. Or a thousand steps, up a Mayan Temple could pass in an instant.

Kyle never could find words to describe what it was that happened when he would go there.
Go. That's a joke. More like being dragged backward by sharp, merciless steel hooks embedded in his sternum. There was no volition involved, when he would suddenly be "elsewhere".
And, the more he would try to make people understand that he was alright, that he had just "checked out" for a bit, the more they would look at him as if he had grown a tentacle right out of the middle of his oily pre-pubescent forehead. A thick, clammy, sticky, glistening, festering, wriggling, whip-cracking tentacle.