(no subject)
James was someone who had it all in a paper basket. Undeservedly blessed with a working mind, indie-rock lanky sixteen year old looks, wealthy parents, and supreme unawareness-an oil-coated ego that never snagged on an unkind word-he moved through life through a hazy stupor, taking in the sights and perfectly content with seeing only the surface to everything. He didn’t appreciate or take his good fortune seriously-he was drifting without hardship to hold himself together.
It was Monday, and a wide-empty hallway greeted him. It struck him that he had very rarely ever seen a hallway this empty, free from the leavings of the student body. He’d never been early enough. The floors were cleared with debris and waxed into a dull gleam. The hallways seemed to far too wide now, bloated from the rest of the weekend. He felt the opposite-drained, a teabag bereft of fragrance. He was tired, unfocused, blurry like a pretentious photograph. A wounded bluish swelling ringed around his eye, and his movements were loose and unplanned. He frowned and tried to walk down the corridor.
Upon attempting to walk in a straight line, he crashed into a barrier that he belatedly realized were lockers and a startled freshman. A little sharp inhale came from her as James toppled past her ordinary form and came to a dazed stop several lockers away from her. Pink tinged her cheeks.
“Are you all right?”
James replied something jaunty and unremarkable. He winked at her with his uninjured eye and then leaned against a locker. By the time he had recollected some of himself and his perception of depth, other students had filtered past the stairway doors, chattering loudly about their weekends. They stamped over the waxed tiles-not even noticing them-and disturbed the quiet with their talk. The freshman had disappeared from sight, and his locker was not too far away. One. Two. Three. There-he did it. The spins of his combination lock were ingrained in him, so the red-painted metal door swung open, He took out some books, and then shoved two of them back in without looking at what they were for. He took out a dog-eared Spin magazine, and threw in his coat. These days, he relied on luck to get him through the morning. It was, after all, only January-one of the most banal months of the year.
Unlike others, he had no taste for the optimism of a new year. A new year, new month, new day-when you thought about what you were going to do when they came, they stopped being novel. He had no uses for resolutions, giant shiny balls dropping from a pole, and warm sparkling apple cider from his well-intentioned parents who simply refused to believe that their angel boy had consumed things far more worse than champagne.
It was, however, a new week. Monday was the pink skin growing underneath the scab or a weekend. He blankly looked at his schedule. It was pinned on the locker door with a grey magnet. So he had… Spanish? Science? Health? James found it amusing that Mondays often stripped him of his ability to read. The day also came loaded with other symptoms: an inevitable headache from an ill-timed party, general hearing dysfunctions, and an inexplicable desire to listen to the Tori Amos song about cereal. He sighed and ruffled his hair, caked with day-old gel and other undesirable particles. At least, he thought without any real smell that bad. Despite not showering this morning. Or last night. Or, come to think of it, the night before. He had other things to… well, not to think about, since pondering was both narcissistic and unsatisfactory, but he did have other things to do.
He grumbled to himself in while bumping steadily against corridor wall, which was covered with fliers and a giant 2005!!!!! Seniors’ Calendar made out of blue masking tape; events like the Potluck and the Battle of the Bands tryout were written hastily on loose leaf and stuck on the wall via double-stick tape. Very slowly and deliberately, he peeled the Potluck notice from the January 13 blue tape box and crumpled it up noiselessly and delicately as possible. He stared at it, contemplating whether he should put it in a convenient jean pocket, already bunched with other forgotten school items. He was a garbage man, he thought romantically, cleaning up what people wanted. The irony! The cynical dazzle! He would surely impress his AP Lit teacher by embellishing this thought. However, James had no use for it, and forgot it quickly.
“Oh my god, James. What happened to you?” Sabrina Anderson, still bronzed from her trip to Christmas break trip to the Caribbean, detached herself from a circle of friends, and came alarmingly close. She smelled overwhelmingly of something expensive, and her eyes were outlined carefully in black. James’ tongue felt bloated and thick. He crumpled up the Potluck notice.
“I’m just swell, actually.”
“Your eye,” she replied, looking exasperated. “What did you do? Did someone beat you up? Did you beat yourself up? Were-” Her tone escalated into eagerness. Sabrina was always eager to hear about what she called bad things, the bad things that James had been doing since he was thirteen. The partying experience was still thrilling and new to her, having only been approved in the right social circles with mysterious girl-politics only recently.
“I fell,” James said, cutting her off with possibly the least interesting explanation possible. “I tripped over a television remote.” His lips twisted. Maybe now he was boring enough? What possibly gave her the right to be so obnoxious? James faintly recalled that his face and other various body parts had been mashed to hers at said ill-timed party, but then again James didn’t realize how fucking annoying she was. He didn’t take the time to listen to her inane blather, and only took in the surface-the way his hands could run through her hair, how red her lips were from powdery-tasting lipstick, how her eyelids dripped with glitter as she wriggled and made girl-noises and wrapped her arms around him. But now her cheeks were red from the cold, and she wore those godawful Eskimo boots with tufts of white fur poking out at the tips. She no longer interested him, really, and regretted ever hooking up with her in the first place.
“Oh, come on,” Sabrina replied, pushing both of her lacquered lips together and then out. If it was remotely appealing, this action would have been called a pout.
He didn’t dignify her with an answer, but it didn’t faze the girl, who then demanded to see his wounded eye because her mother was a physician. While that didn’t make very much sense since her mother wasn’t anywhere near, he permitted her to gingerly touch it and shriek about how something like this could not have possibly come from a television remote, and must have been the result of something far more interesting.
“I don’t suppose you’ve ever seen a malicious television remote before.” James said. She laughed at him for a bit, and asked why he wasn’t in American History. He had to admit that she had a fair point, but disappeared by the time she asked him if they could smoke a joint in the nearby playground. He found the classroom seven minutes too late, but walked in as if nothing else was wrong.
“I’m glad to you decided to join us, James.” He scratched his head-and frowned at his nails when flakes from his scalp became wedged underneath them-and looked at his teacher, unbearably crisp in her chic-teacher pastels. He mumbled something and wedged his way to the back of the classroom. “Does anyone want to inform James of what we’ve been discussing?”
It was completely expected that no one wanted to talk, and James did not begrudge this deprivation of information. “Carolyn?” Ms. Chic Young Teacher pretended to ask, her pen poised over her grade book. The unfortunate girl fidgeted and stuttered something about trade embargos imposed on Cuba; in reply, James nodded understandingly. He had even done his homework Saturday morning. He slid a white binder onto his desk. He decided that the fact that it was titled “Math” in block letters was quite irrelevant, and stretched out his arms in a careful horizontal manners o no one could possible interpret such an act as desire to-god forbid-participate. James fiddled with his jeans, realizing that his fly had been open the whole while.
It seemed rather pointless to sit through fifty-minute blocks of what everyone pretended to be an “education” when it was clear that the whole concept was uninspiring and failed to fire any youth up, who was generally more concerned about the bottom line-grades-and the hookup prospects of a locker buddy. But James was willing to play the game, mostly because classes filled time so effortlessly. He couldn’t conceive waking up to a hangover every single day, so in this sense school was a vacation, no matter how banal is was.
A scrap-paper missile hit him on the back of the head. He picked it up gingerly, tilting it so as to read it. Amongst nearly undecipherable scrawl, he picked apart words like “eye” and “wasted” and rather large smiley face. A friend of Sabrina? Either way, he didn’t bother to read it, and ripped it in half for emphasis. He even thought about sticking it in his mouth and chewing on it for a bit to prove something, but eventually decided against it. James then turned to other matters-for one, his fly was still unzipped. With an audible, satisfied sigh, he slouched forward and zipped his jeans up loudly. The class froze from their discussion. He smiled to himself.
It took him several bites of a sandwich to recognize that his throat was sore. His insides felt raw, scrubbed down with exfoliant and they nagged at him whenever he tried to swallow. He had decided to eat alone, bereft of anyone’s talk. He wasn’t in any mood for conversation, really-his mood was actually a lack of one, and that did not translate into a desire to care about what anyone had to say. So he had bought a sandwich, went to the playground-slash-park, and sat on a bench to eat. Meanwhile, two sophomore girls looked at him avidly, then looked away and promptly began whispering loudly. James shrugged and left them and the park, sandwich in hand. Their faces fell.
Ah, the park, that park! It was expressly forbidden by hyper-careful PTA parents to go there; in retaliation, not only did the offspring of those parents visited Merry Mary Park frequently, they also made friends with the drug dealers and the bums. And often bought stuff from them too, if the bathrooms at their school and their smells meant anything. It was amusing, really, that his school was supposedly so unforgivably academic while anyone who was anyone partied and made fools out of themselves by doing so. James was certainly included, but at least did not have the conceit to believe that his actions were good ideas.
James clearly suffered from a lack of intellect when he made his way back to school, entered the cafeteria, and sat at Sabrina Anderson’s table among her equally trendy friends. They flipped their hair, pursed their lips, picked at their painted nails, and immediately fell silent when he sat down.
“So,” James said brightly, feeling his abused insides contract in distaste.
“So!” she echoed wearily, looking down.
Maybe she had finally gotten the point, James thought. A glimmer of hope-maybe she wasn’t too obtuse and ridiculous, and actually understood when she was unwanted. Maybe, just maybe she understand the concept of “undesirable to be the significant other to anyone with a working cranium”. And maybe, just maybe…
“You’re a real asshole, you know that?” Sabrina’s voice was uncharacteristically quiet, and she wouldn’t stop fiddling with her nails, picking the paint off. It startled James out of his rather shallow thoughts, and for the first time this day, his eyes actually sought her out.
“Oh, of course,” James quipped. “Why don’t you continue?” The vague threat alarmed Sabrina’s friends, but she didn’t notice or care.
“You go around acting like you’re better than everyone else-like you think you’re this higher life form-and you do the same stupid shit as everyone else. You’re a… a… self-important sanctimonious asshole, you like playing games because I’m stupid, sure, and maybe it would be more tolerable if you weren’t so goddamn self-satisfied.” The last parts of her diatribe flattened out and it reduced her to something sincere-not as bronzed, not as flawless, not as perfectly vapid. James said nothing in return-so, he stood up, wordless, and turned away.
James was someone who had it all in a paper basket. Undeservedly blessed with a working mind, indie-rock lanky sixteen year old looks, wealthy parents, and supreme unawareness-an oil-coated ego that never snagged on an unkind word-he moved through life through a hazy stupor, taking in the sights and perfectly content with seeing only the surface to everything. He didn’t appreciate or take his good fortune seriously-he was drifting without hardship to hold himself together.
Or was he?