The Shoreline Redemption

Chapter 1
Chapter 1

“Mr. Jonathan Avery!”

The boy jolted erect in his seat, as if tasered on both sides.

“So sorry to interrupt your little nap. Now why don’t you come forward to the board and show the rest of the class how to solve this problem? Maybe that might help you stay focused?”

“Yes, Miss Drake.” he said, shirking away from her baleful glare. Rising to his feet, he shuffled down the classroom amid muffled giggles from the other kids.

It had been such a bold and ingenious plan, perfectly suited for an up-and-coming mobster like himself. With the help of an age regression drug, he would go undercover, infiltrate the home of a police detective, and send intelligence reports back to the gang.

Armed with that information, the gang would be able to conduct their smuggling operations with impunity, and once they cleaned house, he would revert to manhood and return, triumphant, with a bump up the ranks and a juicer chunk of the profits.

And initially, things had gone swimmingly. All that meticulous planning and research on the foster care system had got him adopted into his target household without a hitch. But as it turned out, he had woefully underestimated the day-to-day reality of what it meant to be a boy again.

Kidnapped by his parents’ diseased marriage, and wrecked by the crossfire of their never ending drama, he had long suppressed the dark memories of his own childhood. And it wasn’t like he had any direct experience with kids. So when he descended into the bedlam of Shoreline Elementary, swirled into the mad circus of rampaging rugrats, it was like Tarzan being flung onto the streets of a bustling metropolis.

Without the slightest clue on how to interact with his classmates, he tried at first to smile a lot and be polite to everyone. That did not come naturally to him, and so he ended up all stiff and formal. For a while, it appeared to be working, until he overhead a teacher remark to his foster mother at a parent-teacher meeting that he was behaving “just like a little adult”.

Terrified of losing his cover, he swerved hard and embarked upon a bout of energetic cuteness. Trying to mimic the other boys, he hopped thru the hallways to avoid imaginary hot lava, jerked his body around in an exaggerated fashion, and spontaneously leapt to his feet in class, bursting into loud gibberish about barfing, butts and boogers.

Unfortunately, his attempts proved so ghastly and contrived that they frightened some of the girls and earned him a visit to the principal’s office. Sitting opposite the graying Dickenson lady with her laconic drawl, he had the uneasy feeling that he was being evaluated for Special Needs. So much for keeping a low profile.

Then there was the little matter of school work. Shoreline Elementary was nothing like the last place he had sporadically attended, some inner city dump where the teachers pretended to teach, the students pretended to listen, and police officers patrolled the hallways. Now in a single week alone, he found himself confronted with a hefty list of vocabulary words to review, poem stanzas to memorize, and a multi-page book report on some sissy-sounding title like “Charlotte’s Web”. He couldn’t remember the last time he had been forced to spend so much time at home behind his desk.

At the very least, he had expected math to be a cakewalk. He was quick with numbers, and had a particular affinity for those that came attached with dollar signs. But much to his chagrin, he had tested “Below Basic Expectations” for his grade level, chiefly due to those mysterious double-storied numbers he barely recalled, rearing their head like an unwelcome ex-girlfriend from the distant past who shows up uninvited at a reunion.

So after the other kids left for the day, he had to stay back for a late afternoon remedial class “Fractions in Action”, which was about as enjoyable as running across a field strewn with old car tires. Staring blearily at the equation on the board, he tried again to recall what “factorization” meant.

When the torture was finally over, he trudged to the bike racks and wheeled out the pink monstrosity his foster father had got him from the thrift store. It had been a girl’s bike, still festooned with bright daisy decals, but it was in a better condition relative to the other rusting or dented options, and that was all that mattered to the man.

Jonathan didn’t think much of his foster father. Haggard, cadaverous and a lifelong workaholic, Jonathan was certain he was the culprit behind the couple’s childlessness. He looked like the kind of guy who would barely last a minute in bed, assuming he could even spring into action.

His foster mother wasn’t much better. A clerk at the Shoreline Public Library, she was frumpy with wide bifocal lenses. Desperate for a child, she had subjected Jonathan to so many squelching hugs on the day he arrived that he felt like a human teddy bear. Even today, he was still struggling to get used to the sight of her huge stretch mouth trimmed in bright red lipstick descending upon his cheeks.

Jumping onto his bike, Jonathan glided along the suburban street, the generator headlamp flickering bright in the cool spring evening, the wind fresh against his face.

There were many downsides to being regressed to boyhood. Shorn of his broad farmhand shoulders, the crop-rows of abdominals, his powerful muscles, Jonathan felt naked and vulnerable. Then there was the neutering of his voice, stripped of its depth and authority, leaving behind a residual Tweety Bird falsetto. A particular humiliation was trading in his virile viper for an innocuous nub – he had tried, but no amount of rubbing could generate even the slightest reaction.

But at least he had anticipated all of those, and had been mentally prepared. What he hadn’t expected, and had turned out to be even worse than any of the physical changes, was the loss of his mobile phone.

He had thought, quite reasonably, that he would get a hand-me-down phone from his foster parents. He was right, but they turned out to be a tad behind the technology curve, and what he received looked like a cinder block from antiquity that couldn’t even connect to the internet.

Until then, he hadn’t realized just how dependent he had been on his phone to fill his day. All those games he played, checking out news tidbits, watching short videos, messaging others – collectively they had fueled a stealth addiction he didn’t know he had. Even now, whenever he had a spare moment, he would reflexively pull out his useless chocolate-bar phone to a pang of disappointment. It was as if someone had severed his arm.

It had gotten so bad that he had even flirted with the idea of pulling out and playing with the hidden phone he was using to communicate with the gang. Every night, when he was sure everyone was asleep, he would sneak into his foster father’s home office, rummage thru the day’s police reports and send out a short dispatch. He kept that phone sequestered deep inside his closet, and it was only the overwhelming fear of getting caught that kept him from whipping it out during the day and firing up his favorite game. Few things were more terrifying to him than the prospect of being trapped as a kid and forced to grow up again.

The bicycle was going much too fast as he rounded a corner. An unexpected pothole jolted the front wheel, and Jonathan watched the world around him whirl in slow motion as he was flung forward. His head struck the asphalt, and an abrupt blackness snapped around him.