chapter fifteen

Chapter Fifteen

            Once Maxwell found himself outside the cave, dusk had already fallen upon the land.  He raced home as fast as his legs could carry him.  He knew his mother would be at home worrying about him.  While it was agitating to constantly act in such a way as to keep his mother from overreacting, he was actually very grateful that his mother cared enough about him to worry in the first place.

            As soon as he got back home, he immediately threw off his clothes, washed the dirt from his body, and ran straight to his computer desk.  Inside his mind, it seemed very apparent that he couldn't possibly even begin to expect to understand the kind of weird stuff that had been happening to him so far, so he simply blocked it out as best he could in a way that would allow him to begin doing his research.

           

            Evolution.   Maxwell simply couldn't understand how so many students in his class could have possibly chosen creation over evolution.  The concept of a world and all of it's existence being constructed in only seven days goes so incredibly far against every observable facet of nature that it made him want to laugh.   'I guess if God really is infinite, it couldn't exactly be entirely impossible.' 

            As a matter of fact, if God had the same sense of humor Maxwell imagined He must have, He'd make it look as if every living system over the planet were evolving over time, and He would make the fossils carbon date to a particular time period in order to cast an ever so slight misdirection.  In this way, the preservations of eons past could become placed into the ground by the devil to throw off every person with a critical mind.  That sweeps away the little problem of the 'dinosaur thing' as well as that of geological timescales, allowing systematic inconsistencies in complexity to be swept under the 'proverbial rug'. 

            'Must be a pretty huge freaking rug', Maxwell thought.  'So what, exactly, is evolution?  He found that evolution is be a combination of things.  For starters, evolution is the change inside the genetic material of a species from one generation to the next.  This shift in genetic material creates different characteristics in an organism that is either useful; helping them to get or obtain food, fight off predators, find viable sexual partners, etc; or very harmful, and ultimately leading to an organism's demise.  Over millions and millions of years, genes began to change which then allowed good characteristics to become passed down through sexual reproduction, primarily due to the fact that the good characteristics would allow an organism to live long enough to be able to procreate in the first place, much less to help ensure the survival of their offspring, therefore increasing the probability that those positive genes are exhibited even further down the line.  Likewise, genes that are detrimental to a species and subspecies alike, will ultimately be destructive due to those organisms not living long enough to spread their 'bad genes' through the reproductive methods found in their more successful brethren.'

            Maxwell scoured the Internet for a couple of hours and read dozens of many different articles on the topic.  Some of the papers were so complicated that he couldn't possibly understand what had been said.  Some, however, proved to be very understandable indeed for a younger person such as himself to follow.  It seemed that he only needed to find the right sites, and as he read to himself he began learning more and more and the easier evolution became for him to understand.  Gradually, the pieces began falling into their place like a puzzle finally taking shape after diligently connecting the parts over several hours.

            'It's going to be cake', he figured, 'and who knows, I might even be able to impress Jenna along the way.'  He began to recall how she'd made eye contact with him earlier.

            The more he imagined the girl, the more anxious he became.  He wasn't even able to concentrate on what he was trying to study any longer, so he turned off his computer and went upstairs to bed in hopes that sleep and the dreams it would bring would somehow temporarily solve his problems. 

            As he lay under his covers, he began to wonder how he'd ever be able to overcome his fear of this girl.  'Why am I so afraid of her?  Why is it so hard to talk to someone else, I mean seriously?  Why can't I just treat her like anyone else who I've ever met?'  The problem was in the fact that Jenna wasn't just 'any other girl' in this new school.  No, it was more like she was everything Maxwell had ever found attractive in a girl.  What Maxwell really feared, was found in the face of rejection.  Ultimately, he was simply unsure of himself and had slowly become more and more aware of this fact. 

            How, though, did he plan to build himself back up from this?  Where does one go about obtaining this thing, confidence?  It's not like William was super attractive or anything, and Maxwell was by no means unattractive himself.  In fact, the older ladies at church were always babbling on and on about how handsome and adorable he was.  Maxwell usually found this to be somewhat condescending and a bit annoying, but maybe those ladies really were trying to tell him something nice. 

            The problem with his uncertainty seemed to lie in the fact that Maxwell was simply poor.  He didn't even have any nice clothes.  He didn't live in a nice house either.  He didn't do any exceptional activities, he didn't do anything cool like the stuff the it boys were always bragging about, like wrestling and watching scary movies.  He'd never gone hunting or fishing or four wheeling, nor did he have any real desire to do so.  He hadn't ever experienced anything adventurous either, like parasailing, scuba diving, or snow boarding.  So the question to Maxwell was ultimately, 'What exactly do I have to offer this girl?, or any girl at all for that matter?'  Maxwell simply wasn't like the other boys in his class in any way whatsoever. 

            Maxwell simply didn't believe he had anything very tangible to offer, and so he found disappointment creeping into his heart long before he'd even had a chance to get rejected. 

            Maxwell simply gave up.  All these negative thoughts, with all the lingering psychological issues he was sure he had by now, and that deep, deep hole that had been created in his heart by his deceased father slowly began to combine into one gut-wrenching, unrelenting moment that completely overwhelmed everything and every aspect around him. 

           

            Maxwell started crying  It was the first time he had cried in a very long time.  

           

            He slowly shed tears with the beating of his broken heart as he lay there with his head on his pillow and his eyes closed until he slowly fell asleep.

           

            Incidentally, his mother had been in the hallway and was able to hear her son crying through the crack of his door.  Against every one of her strong motherly instincts, she had decided not to go into her son's bedroom to console him.  She simply remained in the hallway, curled up on the floor next to the door to her son's bedroom, and she too, cried herself to sleep late into the night.