You Can't Escape the Baseball (RB vs. Empress Theresa, Chapter 2) · 8:09pm Apr 14th, 2021
Wheeeeeeee.
Previously, on Empress Theresa:
Fox stares, long hairs, government glares, operator pairs, nobody cares. Oh, and something about aliens. Maybe.
And now:
The strength and throwing accuracy HAL gave me got me on the boys’ baseball team where I was a star pitcher. I threw the ball up to eighty-five miles an hour, rarely seen in a high school kid and never in a girl.
That's actually around the average for a male at ~19 years old, at least according to MLB data. So yeas, it is quite impressive. Additionally, the fastest recorded pitch by a female high-school pitcher is 83 mph, set by Raine Padgham last year. The fastest pitch ever thrown belongs to Nolan Ryan at 108.5.
Even in a different book, I can't escape baseball.
I was on television all the time. Now I learned something about the world. People said bad things about me on the internet.
Gonna be honest, I've seen a lot of vitriol on the good ol' WWW, but never directed towards a high school baseball player for... well, playing baseball, I guess.
I wouldn’t have thought it was possible.
...You don't get out much, do you.
Complete strangers on the internet’s social media said all kinds of terrible things about me. Even worse were the websites that a few people started about me. They questioned my sexual orientation or said I must have gone to bed with the coach to get on the team. They said I was making out with everybody on the team. There was nothing I could do about these people. I didn’t know their names or addresses. They were internet trolls, jealous cowards who attack from the safety of anonymity and distance. I was told my only strategy was to ignore them.
So this is 100% the author projecting, here, but we'll push that to the side for now.
Now, I didn't exactly go to a 'normal' high school, but... when was the last time someone ever made an entire website dedicated to shitting on a single child they have never met and have no reason to care about?
And also the idea that Theressa is ego-searching herself. That's also projection, I would guess.
Man, I keep saying I'm not going to talk about the author, but they aren't exactly making it easy for me.
Anyway, she goes to get counseling.
You are beautiful, intelligent, and you’re often on television. You’re a sports star. You have straight A’s and high morals. All these things represent what people want in kids. You’re the daughter every parent wants. You’re the student every teacher wants, the young person society wants. You fulfill all the authorities’ expectations.
According to the Kindle app I'm reading this on, 9 people have highlighted the above quote.
Frankly, I want to know why.
And then her teacher/councilor says this:
“There was a TV commercial years ago I never forgot. A young woman had three horses and bought a fourth, a miniature horse only two feet high.
There's a full recount of the ad, but I'll spare you that. The ad is this one, as I'm sure many of you are aware:
Here's why this is interesting: this book was first published, as far as I can tell, in 2014.
This ad? It ran in 2015.
So either Mr. Boutin is a time traveler (god help us), or he went back and edited this in. Looking at the amazon page where I got my copy, the version I have was published in 2018. Now, the author also claims to have worked on at least the idea of this book for about twenty years before publication. So if he was still making changes in 2018, that means the total amount of time Mr. Boutin has spent on this book is at least 24 years.
(Hi! RB of the future, here. Upon reviewing the copyright page a second time, I discovered that the version I have is listed as the 2020 version, putting the actual total at 26 years. Talk about dedication!)
Just thought you should know.
I saw why the trolls were angry. They knew they couldn’t go where I was going. I’d have a good life. They wouldn’t. What they said made no sense. They were really mixed up big time! I blamed the parents for not raising them right.
You leave my parents out of this. They tried.
By the time I was fifteen I was almost grown up.
A pretty common thing to think when one is fifteen, actually.
My mom, who came from another town, went to a Catholic high school. A teacher told her something the ancient Greeks said: An unexamined life is not worth living. Know thyself. Mom said too many people never question who they are and how they’re doing. This is a fast track to disaster. They’re not equipped to get through troubles and be successful. The television news showed examples every day.
I wonder what Mr. Boutin thinks of the homeless.
My parents gave a good example of the kind of people to be. I’d have to write a book about them to explain. It’s enough to say I wanted to be a woman like mom and I wanted a husband like dad. That says it all, don’t you think?
Actually, it says nothing, because we have interacted with the mother character a grand total of one time before this, and we haven't even gotten a description of Theresa's father. Also, this is all a little Freudian, don't you think?
So I thought a lot about who I was and who I wanted to become. This assured I would get there.
A lovely sentiment, there, but those of us who live in the real world know that this is absolute bunk. Not to be cynical or anything, but it takes a whole lot of work to get much of anywhere these days.
Not that I'm bitter. Or anything.
In the beginning of my Senior year, still only sixteen after skipping the sixth grade, I began to think about college. I had one more thing to worry about that other kids didn’t. What about HAL? Did the government know anything about him that might guide me in what to study?
Unless you're thinking of majoring in throwing stones at cans, I'm pretty sure you're on your own for this one.
Theresa calls up Jan. They meet at a Burger King, and we get treated to this metaphor:
...where the noise gave privacy as good the Sahara Desert...
So that's a thing.
Jan then explains the circumstances of how HAL got to Earth. Because apparently Theresa had never been curious enough to ask in the last five years of it living inside her.
Honestly, this part is multiple pages long and not worth quoting, so I'll summarize: An astronomy hobbiest saw something like a big ball of light landing on Earth. The government quickly heard about this (somehow), and were able to get close enough to watch it touch down. Except it didn't touch down; it just passed through the ground and then it was gone. Where did it land? Framingham.
We also learn the name of the department Jan works for. I kid you not, it's called the Office of Orbital Phenomena Surveillance. OOPS.
This entire book is an oops.
“When you rented that 2001 movie they knew you were aware of HAL.
Ah yes, just like how people who rent Christmas movies are actually agents of Santa Claus. We'll get that jolly bastard someday.
Theres another few pages where the two muse on the existence of HAL, but I'm skipping them because the most interesting thing in them is a brief reference to Robert Zemeckis' Contact.
Noticing a trend yet?
I had to be ready for anything. Other people thought about their home, their neighborhood, their town. I had to think globally. This was a new concept for me. In every book, movie and TV show I’d ever seen, the issue was about something local. Never did the whole world become part of the story. It was nearly overwhelming.
Man, you need to watch more movies.
“How much do you expect from me?” I asked.
“Don’t lose sleep over it. You have the United States government ready to help you. But if HAL starts talking and asking questions, he may demand instant answers. You may have to act quickly. You might need the knowledge of Thomas Jefferson, and the wisdom of Abraham Lincoln.”
But not the rapey bits of Jefferson. You can skip those.
I got home from school before my parents got back from work and brought in the mail. In late March of my Senior year I got a letter with no postage stamp...
See, this is what I mean about whiplash. This is the start of the scene after the previous excerpts, meaning that the first sentence takes place immediately after it, and then the second sentence jumps multiple months ahead in time. Why have that first sentence at all? Skip time between scene breaks, it's much easier to read.
Anyway, Theresa gets a mysterious letter asking where Jan is from someone named Jeremy Benton.
Jan had given me an email address I used to contact her to set up meetings such as the update meeting last Fall. It was janswatchers at snoop.gov.
Snoop.gov.
Brilliant.
She brings the priest from earlier and meets with Benton at the local library. He introduces himself thussly:
“Hello. I’m Jeremy Benton, personal aide to Prime Minister of England Peter Blair. Please sit down.”
Oh boy, a fellow Englishman. Right-o.
Also, here's something to keep in mind, Mr. Benton is in his late fourties.
Think about that as you read on.
We sat. But instead of talking Jeremy stared at me.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“Seeing you close like this took my breath away. Do you realize the effect you have on people?”
Yeah.
Anyway, it turns out Jan sent a bunch of information about Theresa and HAL to the Prime Minister via the Canadian Prime Minister, because obviously that's the easiest way to do things. She then disappeared off the face of the Earth.
The volumes contain thousands of pictures of you from age ten
Yes, and I'm sure you were very interested in those.
The implication being made here is that Jan was disappeared by the new POTUS, who had been sworn in at about the same time she vanished. The package was insurance. Typical espionage intrigue. For the first time, I'm actually kind of interested.
“You could talk to President Martin yourself or come to England with your parents. We’ll give you new identities.”
Father Donoughty spoke. “The Holy Father is interested in your case. He’ll protect you in Rome.”
Why is the Pope in on it? This seems like a serious violation of whatever agreement he had with Jan.
Anyway, we're given two options here. Either one would take the plot in what could even possibly be an interesting direction. The entire rest of the novel is at stake, here. Faced with such a dilemma, which does Theresa take?
“No, I’ll wait a while and see what happens.”
Because of course, OF COURSE she would. That's basically been Theresa's thing since this book started.
Moving on, they decide that they should go public with the info. Then they undecide that in the next paragraph. Because that would make things TOO INTERESTING.
It's really hard to convey through text how utterly boring this novel is. I'd rather watch paint dry. At least there's a change of state there.
And as for President Martin! I’d learned that somebody with eloquence may not have seen his powers of understanding receive any aid from education. Ignorance and deficiency of mental improvement could still remain. There’s some quirk in their personality that keeps them from becoming wise. The President gave great orations, but he was a babe in the woods when it came to dealing with me.
God, and then it has to go and get preachy. Fuck off, you.
It was like some of my fellow Seniors. Twelve years of education hadn’t taught them a thing about human nature. They labeled people. They were suspicious. They bullied or were obnoxious in some way. They were not worth much to themselves or anybody else.
The irony of Boutin writing this statement while labeling people is amazing. How many layers of self-importance do you have to have to write something like this?
Anyway, that's the end of the chapter. I feel like I got older while reading this. Does that make sense? I don't care, the damn kids are on my lawn again, my knees hurt, and I have enough problems to deal with already. Now, if you excuse me, I'm going to go poison my liver for a bit.
See you soon.
:D
She needs to become a magical girl with the superpowers of American presidents!
Just don't use the recent onesIt's really amazing how many of these bad novels suffer from interesting things just never happening.
5497820
Boy oh boy will you regret that statement starting two chapters from now.
This book is as old as I am. Yet its contents are less developed than the contents of my lower colon.
I feel sick.