Novella.
I've reached page 15 (!!!) of my novella, and I've been in a complete zone for the past couple days. The pages have been filling up rapidly and I find it hard to stop writing. It's a wonderful feeling knowing that I'm writing an actual book, instead of the kinds of books I've written for the past two years. It's exciting knowing that I've written fifteen pages of one story, and I'm not even close to completion, plus I am proud of the writing I have done thus far. Please tell me what you think, and any feedback is welcome.
EDIT: I added about five more pages. Read away, suckers.
I spent the entire walk back to my room thinking about packing a giant bowl of pot as soon as I got there. It was September **th. I’d just arrived at school about two weeks ago, and had already broken close to ten of the rules I dared not tamper with only one year ago.
Being a junior in high school felt abnormally different from being a sophomore. I had spent a year and a half of my past two years of high school at the Ethel Walker School- an all girl’s boarding school in some quaint town in Connecticut. I’d just returned from my semester away from the estrogen-drenched society of private school, and had received a fair amount of weird looks just for being in the student body after having disappeared for so long. Nevertheless, I was there, and I was milking my growth for all it was worth.
Everyone had always known me as someone who just desperately wanted to fit in with the best crowd. I never used to smoke cigarettes or get high. I had never been able to stomach any beer, and I’d never kissed a boy until the end of my freshman year. Despite my raging desire to be just another popular girl, I was still an outcast. I was friends with practically everyone, and I followed their leads every step of the way, but I never quite made it into any particular group of girlfriends. As a result, I was seen as some needy weird girl that was trying way too hard.
Halfway through my sophomore year of high school, the pressure of getting exactly what I wanted drove me to an extremely moronic, pitiful, and pathetic cry for help and attention. I swallowed over 80 Advil in the course of an hour and dug a kitchen knife into my skin to create six or seven cuts in my arm. After that dramatic experience, my parents decided to withdraw me from the private school system, and I spent a semester in the halls of a school filled with brand new things to me: drugs, boys, and spirited sports teams.
Oddly enough, however, as new and exciting as public school was, I didn’t find myself feeling very enthusiastic about my place of education. So after months of thought, I decided to show my face on Ethel Walker’s campus again. The difference this time around was not only that I had grown into someone that acknowledged the stupidity of teenage angst and officially despised myself for taking such prepubescent actions, but I had changed physically, too. My hair had gone from long red locks to jet black spikes. My outfit had gone from tight Levis jeans to faded jeans from the Salvation Army, complete with wallet wears. My cute Gap purse had turned into a messenger bag that I’d decked with underground band pins, and my belt went from black leather to studded and sharp. Needless to say, I’d made it fairly obvious that I wasn’t the annoying girl that wanted to fit in anymore.
Room C219. Way back in the farthest corner of my dorm. Unfortunately, I was one of the eight people in the entire dorm to be unlucky enough to have a roommate. I’d always had the worst roommates of anyone I knew. Everyone in my halls always seemed to get along perfectly with their roommates, eventually becoming the closest of the girls in any given group of friends. My situations, however, were a bit more difficult. My freshman roommate, Jessica Hardingham, refused to wear socks, and had a crazy obsession for bad 80s movies and even worse alternative rock. After she moved out, I had another roommate, Nicole Pierce, for the period of about three weeks, before she stole a pair of earrings from the local superstore and got expelled for it. My sophomore roommate, Kimberly Ericson, was one of those white girls with a potbelly that did everything in her power to convince herself and everyone else that she was black. And the girl sitting contently at her desk in room C219 under the dim light of her Hello Kitty lamp was Hyun Jung Kim. She spoke about three words of English, and from what I could understand, they sounded like “Medium-rare, please.” I noted this only after skimming her Korean-English dictionary and finding that there were more mock restaurant scenarios than actual English-speaking assistance. Because of this, we rarely talked, and wandered through our gigantic room minding our own business as much as we could.
I was a bit angry to see her sitting there, because every second that I wasn’t smoking a bowl was another second that I was becoming more anxious. Since returning to private school, I’d already smoked a couple packs of cigarettes on campus, and participated in a good amount of drug-induced activities with girls that once knew me as completely innocent. She was sitting in what seemed to be the only position I ever saw her in; Indian style in her uncomfortable wooden chair, slaving away over her honors calculus homework. She may not have known any common English phrases other than how she wanted her steak done, but she was incredibly smart, and for that, I always watched myself around her. I never knew what that Korean was capable of, or how many times she had made fun of me for being an American in her native language. Almost every night for the first three weeks, she’d stay up until three in the morning with her calculus homework, and I was convinced that it had to be because of one of two things: She was either permanently jetlagged, or her math teacher was just assigning some insane amount of homework, and Hyun Jung was too foreign to understand the concept of blowing it off.
I sat at my desk that sat only a foot away from hers and faced the gigantic window that spread across the width of our room and looked out on the bike path and the ropes course during the daytime. I didn’t bother to acknowledge her presence as I opened up the single drawer in my desk and pulled out a safety pin and a rolled up plastic bag, and placed them both in my pocket.
I didn’t want to smoke alone, so I took the less-discrete approach of blatantly asking most of the girls I knew if they wanted to smoke a bowl with me. Chelsea McCann was too busy working on her Latin homework and had gotten high the past three days. She was a senior that year, and probably my best friend at the entire school. I’d been riding horseback with her since I was only seven years old, and she was the one that had convinced me to attend private school in the first place, saying that the equestrian team was one of the best in the district. With her help, I made the riding team and therefore spent the majority of my day sweating under the brutal spring heat. For the first six months of freshman year, she was practically the only person I knew, and luckily, she rode in the same lesson group as me. I used to call her Man McCann when you could see giant circles of sweat forming under her armpits during our lessons.
Katherine Wade was too concentrated on picking all the seeds out of her own bag. She was the middleman of all the drug deals that had been going on for the past week. She and Tori Safferin had somehow gotten their hands on a good amount of decent weed, which send all the pot-smokers of the school into a frenzy. Before Tori somehow became everyone’s hookup, there was not one single way for a girl to get any kind of substance that would mess with her mind. As a result, Tori was becoming very wealthy very fast. Unfortunately, she had never dealt drugs before, and was therefore completely inexperienced at everything that was involved with her job. So Katherine stepped in for her, taking over the duty of dividing it all into equal portions and telling Tori what kind of price to charge for each amount.
Katherine was also the one doing the deliveries to all sections of the dorm, with her hand tightly wedged in her pocket until reaching her destination: the jonesing student that had called for her services. Tonight, however, Katherine was putting all deliveries aside, as she focused primarily on separating Tori’s most recent shipment.
Molly Stroud was already high. Her favorite pastime was leaving the school on the miniature bus and wandering the town’s commons for a while before finding a nice dumpster to crouch behind. She found some indescribable thrill in coming back onto her precious campus in an altered state of mind. She claimed that something about knowing how illegal it was made it more of a hell-bent mission for her, and she lived for adrenaline rushes. Tonight she was too busy falling into the walls to take part in a much riskier mission, and I closed the door to her room behind me as soon as her laughing spasms began to send her flying into all the corners of her room. She was too weird for my taste.
Flora Mendoza was too paranoid to do it in the dorm, and the outside doors had already been locked. It was after 11, so leaving the dorms could not only result in Saturday morning detention, but would leave us locked out until some dorm faculty let us in. Flora had only smoked about three times before, but she showed great promise in becoming the next burnout of the school.
Mary Michael was talking to her boyfriend. Drew Sonder was in the shower. Natalie Pares had just ordered a pizza, and couldn’t stray from the door to wait for the delivery. Rachael Perkell was apparently angry with me for accidentally scratching her leather saddle after today’s riding lesson, and was no longer on speaking terms with me. Lindsay Sweet was in the middle of a Lifetime TV movie. I searched throughout the entire dorm, asking anyone I knew that liked to indulge in an occasional smoking session. But tonight didn’t seem to be the night. Just when I was about to head back to my lovely abode in room C219, I saw a girl I knew walking toward her room, only a couple doors down from mine.
I ran to her door and swung it open just as she was entering it. Callie Speed listened intently to me as I told her about the bowl of weed I had stored away at the bottom of my pocket. Her brown eyes lit up when I finally asked her to join me for the bowl, and she immediately responded with a yes.
She followed me down the length of the hallway into room C240. It sat directly across from my room, and despite the overcrowding of the dorms that year, there was nobody living in it. There was no light, and the door didn’t latch very well. On the west wall sat one of those old and uncomfortable mattresses with thin blue stripes. It sat on a rickety metal bed frame that screeched painfully whenever anyone sat on it. The bottom two drawers of the dresser were jammed, and the carpet was starting to peel away from the corner. The closet door didn’t exactly slide with grace, and the knobs on the window required a two-person maneuver to turn. When I thought about it, it was fairly obvious why there was nobody living in the room, but it’s amazing what some people will prefer over living with a roommate.
After slaving over the window for a good five minutes, Callie and I finally managed to get it open enough to smoke safely. I reached my right hand into my pocket and pulled out my lighter. I flicked it a couple times before it finally spat out its flame and I touched it lightly to the bowl I was holding. Little did I know of the trouble that the little flame rising from my miniature pink lighter was capable of causing.
Callie’s mouth now held my hit tightly behind her closed lips and in between her two puffed cheeks. Katherine had most definitely not spoiled me with the amount she gave me in my small zip lock bag that was now empty after only two bowls. I decided to turn Callie’s head to mine and blow the smoke from my hit into her mouth to get her as high as possible. She did the same with her next hit, and we sat on our knees in the dark room for another fifteen minutes, shot-gunning our smoke to each other.
Her face was barely a dark navy blue behind the drawn shades, but the moon was shining through enough to make her facial expressions visible to me. My eyes were beginning to adjust, and I could soon make out the growing smile on her face. I could tell she was happy, but every little thing about her was a shining navy blue. The left side of her face was against the window, and she looked like a painting that had come alive more so than any ordinary person on drugs. She looked like a silhouette of a very beautifully featured half of her face. I nearly fell in love with her. She put her hands on my cheeks and propelled another cloud of smoke into my mouth, and I nearly kissed her.
She pulled away and coughed. Her eyes widened when she coughed, as if she was asking me to help her. She tried relentlessly to stop, but her lungs forced more unwanted air up through her mouth in nauseating sounds. Her eyes started to water, still ridiculously wide and staring right at me. She looked so powerless and stunning with her hands cupped tightly over her mouth, as she was practically convulsing to keep her coughing inside. I put my right hand over her mouth and smiled, like her loud noises were just a joke to me. I wasn’t afraid of being caught. I wasn’t really afraid of anything at that point. My high was starting to kick in, and all I could think about was the perfection of the situation Callie and I were in, and how much I enjoyed her presence in that state of mind.
I was loving the navy blue color of the darkness in that room, but the color soon turned into a virtually decked out room designed only for the hippies. I started to see flowers in Callie’s hair, and her face was decorated in pink, purple, and yellow vegetation. A minute ago she was like my own personal art show. She was the embodiment of every teenager under the influence of drugs, and the angst of living with so many stresses that she, and all like her, had become a unique junkie. But now, she had become a flower. She was pink at the edges and bright yellow on the inside. Her light brown lipstick reminded me of an old Volkswagen bus, but when my eyes strayed from her, I could picture that brown bus driving along the express highways in the year 2003. It was disappointing that Callie was the only thing that could make me forget that this was the present, and I was only high. This was only marijuana… not utopia.
I returned to my room, where Hyun Jung was still slaving away at her calculus homework relentlessly. This time, however, she was covered in hundreds of bouquets of flowers. In fact, the entire room was decked in flowers of all kinds. There were no walls or floors or windows anymore, only a fourteen by fourteen cube of my own mental meadow.
I started to laugh hysterically at the sight of my room becoming a greenhouse in the small period of time I had spent away to get high. Hyun Jung, you shouldn’t have! I thought. I laughed harder at the thought of Hyun Jung decorating our humble abode with flowers while I had disappeared, as a symbol of some sort. I thought about asking her why she had done such a thing, but my state of contemplation was interrupted by a small ding sound coming from my computer.
When I blinked and looked up at my computer to see what the sound was, all the flowers were gone. The room had its normal walls, floors, and windows again, and my computer screen was providing the only source of light in the room. Hyun Jung had long since fallen asleep.
I wondered how long I had been standing there, or if I had just imagined the whole thing. Before spending any more time trying to figure out the unexplainable, I sat down at my computer and read the message that a friend had sent me. Katherine’s screen name appeared in a bold blue font on my computer screen, and she was the cause of the constant dinging that was interrupting my hallucinations and thoughts.
“Rachel? Rachel, you there? Hey. Are you around? You there, Rach? Rachel? Rachel are you around?” Katherine had been trying to get a hold of me for the past twenty minutes, sending me frequent internet messages to see if I was safely back in my room yet.
“Yeah, I’m here,” I finally responded.
Seconds later, the message flashed, causing me to blink before reading the screen again.
“WadeWeM6504 is no longer signed on.” Katherine had gone to bed. I glanced at my screen aimlessly for another minute or so before letting my eyes wander to the top right corner. It was 1:34 AM. I had no idea where the time had gone. All I remembered at that point was Callie, and I figured that was a good thought to end the day on. I climbed into bed, not bother to remove any of my clothing, and pulled the covers up over my head. Despite how happy I was, I didn’t sleep much that night.
The next morning and afternoon came and went as if the night before had been nothing special. My mind had returned back to its normal state, and I had never felt so bored with my surroundings. I didn’t see Callie roaming the hallways, and I couldn’t find her anywhere in the dorms, so I figured she was out and about doing her own thing. I wondered if the night before had been anything out of the ordinary to her, as it had been to me. I couldn’t stop thinking about her that whole day, and wondering what she was doing, and what she was thinking about. Me, perhaps? I hoped so.
I had a riding lesson that afternoon around three o’clock. It ended around four thirty, and just as I was about to hop out of my saddle and get off of my horse’s sweating back, Sakira Wang called my name from the other side of the arena.
Sakira’s dreadlocks looked like someone could squeeze and entire bucket of sweat from them. It was abnormally warm that day, and her face was barely shaded by the rim of her helmet when she trotted her horse down the length of the arena towards me.
“We need to talk,” she said. Sakira wasn’t normally the person to stimulate a “talk,” and the look on her face suggested an interrogation in my near future.
Reluctantly, I asked her what it was she wanted to discuss.
“I-I’m not pointing any fingers at you, but I’ve heard a lot about you having a lot to do with this whole Tori thing,” she said, stuttering a little. I could tell she was nervous to bring up whatever topic it was with me, but frankly, I had no clue what she was referring to.
“What Tori thing?”
“Uh…” She continued talking, pretending that my question was a remark of sarcasm. “Look, what I’m hearing is that you gave the dean a list of names, and now you’ve fucked a lot of people over.”
I was baffled. Not only did I have absolutely not idea what Sakira was talking about with this “list,” but I had no idea what was going on. “What the hell are you talking about?” I demanded.
“The dean’s been called people into her office all day! People left and right are on the verge of getting expelled!” she hammered. I wanted to answer her questions, but the last momentous thing that I remember happening in my life was getting high with Callie Speed in the empty room across from mine. As I recalled, nobody knew of that situation except me and Callie, and I planned on keeping it that way. There was no way for anybody else to know about it.
Sakira began to explain the circumstances that she was referring to in detail. Apparently, the dean of students, a burly woman by the name of Dianne Cleary, had been calling select girls into her office all day. Nobody was exactly sure why, but Tori Safferin was at the very top of that list. She continued to inform me that the rumor circulating the school was that a number of faculty members had knocked on my door last night around eleven o’clock. They supposedly interrogated me, saying that they knew I had been getting high, but they would not use it against me, as long as I provided them with a list of names. The list of names was to include all the girls that I knew of that were using drugs or doing anything that was at all against the rules of the school.
“And you think that this actually happened?” I asked, nearly shouting at her.
“Are you saying that it didn’t?”
“Of course it didn’t! Do you realize how incredible illogical that entire scenario is?” I honestly couldn’t comprehend who would actually believe something like that. If a school’s administration knew about a students drug use, they’d make their punishments fit the crime. Or so I thought. But a school as prestigious as a well-ranking private school like my own most likely wouldn’t be giving girls a lucky break and interrogating them instead. That all seemed insane to me, but not nearly as insane as the fact that every girl thought it had really happened.
I ripped my saddle off my horse’s back and ran my firmest brushes up and down her back and the barrel of her body in absolute fury. I wasn’t to bash my face into the closest metal thing I could find. I felt like I was the main character in a story that was written in a different language. I read on and on but still remained clueless as to what was going on. It felt like that school of mine was falling into a black pit of endlessness, but whether that was really the case or not, I’ll never really know.
“Were you at the Commons last Friday?” I quickly turned to see who was behind me, and was rudely greeted by the school’s embodiment of perfection. Alexi Wigstrom had gorgeous waving locks of soft, blonde hair that flowed about six inches beyond her shoulders. Her eyes were the softest color of blue, and her lips formed a shape that couldn’t exactly be defined geometrically, but looked nothing short of incredible protruding from the rest of her perfect face. I envied her and everything that surrounded her; her consistently perfect grades, and her consistently perfect horse, who floated around the arena like a shining black Pegasus. I envied her consistently perfect group of friends that shared their perfectly fitted American Eagle t-shirts every day, and most of all, her consistently perfect reputation. She looked like she’d come straight out of a 50s black and white romance film- the kind that made a glow form around her face. She may have been the epitome of perfection, but for that reason, I despised her.
She looked at me with her blue eyes and stood there in front of me like she’d come out of nowhere, waiting for a response. I gathered myself, still a little startles by her random appearance, and answered her question. “Yeah, I was.”
“Did you come back to the dorms really high?” She spat out her response like she would have said it whether I’d answered yes or no to her previous question. She ticked me off a little with her blatant desire to get in on the story, and I didn’t trust her intentions with whatever facts she could get. So I opened my mouth and told her what she wanted to hear.
“No. Umm… let me think…” I took a minute to remember last Friday night, trying not to confuse it with any other random nights I had spent out at the Simsbury Commons. “No, Friday I had a major anxiety attack,” I said. “I probably looked and acted like I was high, but I wasn’t. I was just… freaking out.” I would have cooked up some outrageous story to tell Alexi if I really had gotten high that night, but what I told her was actually the truth. The concrete wall outside the movie theater had been covered with kids from butt cheek to butt cheek. That wall was where I usually sat to watch the stupid townies roam around. Instead, I parked myself on the bench that was bolted into the ground, just about ten feet from the wall.
The townies were all so stupid. They were all those white trashy kind of people that all wanted to be black, and had to use a slur of politically incorrect terms in every single one of their sentences. The fat girls wore tiny clothing, and the scrawny boys wore clothing that would probably still be too large for a six-foot muscle man. That’s why I liked watching them. They were so pathetic that they served as a completely different form of entertainment. Rarely did they ever try to talk about anything remotely intelligent, but when they did, it left me in hysterics. Those townies knew so little about the important things in life I wondered what the hell they ever talked about. If anything, I knew those stupid townies could probably tell you every little different between a Burger King cheeseburger and McDonald’s cheeseburger. Friday nights were when they’d all flock to the dome outside of the movie theater with the photo booths, arcades, and stadium seating. I never saw any of them actually go in, but I always saw them outside, whether in their souped up Honda Civics, or in their black pleather pants and high heals that they didn’t know how to walk in. Quite a sight, those stupid townies.
I didn’t like sitting on the bench- I could feel it making permanent ridges in my ass, and I was beginning to feel uncomfortable in my surroundings for the first time. I hadn’t gotten high in close to a month, and had spent my entire summer smoking day in and day out without the complication of being without a never-ending stash. But I hadn’t even found anyone in the area that knew how to get to my favorite drug, and I was beginning to get antsy about it. I figured that was what was causing me to feel a little uneasy at the time, so I tried to let it pass and get over it, but the anxious feeling in my head refused to let go. I moved from the bench to the foot-high concrete surrounding the flower bed that randomly sat attached to the brick wall, and sat there for a good five minutes before deciding that watching townies for another second was going to drive me insane. I had to get up and go somewhere else, but found myself lacking the strength to do so. I started to freak out when I noticed my hands shaking frantically, and I figured that I was just having some minor anxiety issues.
To calm myself, I took out my sketchbook that I’d been writing in, and removed the green pen from my back pocket. But to my dismay, I found myself flipping through my book for an empty page, and being deprived of any room to write. Writing was the only thing that could calm me at the point, so I found the blankest page I could find (which was one practically covered in writing already) and wrote in every tiny space that wasn’t already filled, thinking that it would help. Unfortunately, the cluttered page only made me feel more anxious about where I was, and I had no idea what to do with myself to make my head feel balanced again.
Eventually I picked myself up from the small cement border and started walking. I walked toward the massive hoard of townies gathered outside the movie theater, and pushed my way through them like I was walking through a mosh pit of sweaty, wife-beater-wearing, white trash. My brain was on overdrive to the point where I was sure I could feel the condensation dripping from their skin and from the walls that protected the inside of the movie theater from their havoc. I felt their fat bodies pushing against each other in slow motion, and their voices got deep and slow, as their screams got louder and their words harder to understand. I was in a raging pile of garbage and I was being suffocated for the matter of ten or fifteen seconds that it really took me to walk through the crowd of people. It was nothing nearly as intense as it felt, but I finally emerged from the crowd, now standing in front of the bookstore where the crowd was starting to die down a little. Those fuckers need to lose weight, I thought to myself, as I started to walk again.
I turned the corner at the end of the bookstore and started to walk along the ten or twelve-foot brick wall that towered over my right side. I ran my fingers along the bricks, feeling them leaving little scratches on my fingertips. My normal walking pace felt like I was walking backwards, so I started to walk faster. And I walked faster. And faster. And faster. I was practically running when I reached the crosswalk and headed for the pick-up station where the bus picked students up. I wanted to get out of the commons so desperately, but I knew I would get there no sooner or later than the girls that were already sitting on the benches at the waiting station, conversing on their typical Friday nights. This was no typical Friday night to me. I wanted to die on this Friday night. I was having one of the worst anxiety attacks of my life on this Friday night, and I just wanted to go home and pace around on my floor until I had burned a mark into my carpet. The girls I could see about fifty feel away from me made me sick. They all looked so happy, so problem-free. I had always envied the girls at my school for their seemingly endless good moods and pleasant days. I wasn’t as fortunate as they always were to be in such good spirits. When I saw them sitting there on the bench, I wanted to turn around and run from them. No, I’ve been doomed to unhappiness ever since I stopped being like you and started thinking with my brain, instead of my blonde hair, I thought. Sadly, it was the truth.
I was so focused on hating the girls I was walking towards that I failed to notice the line of six or seven buses parked to my left. When I finally turned my head and noted their existence, I noticed the bold writing printed on the side of all of them. “Avon Old Farms.” Great. As if being surrounded by the assholes I went to school with every day, and the stupid white trash townies that populated the Commons were enough, now I could catch glimpses of good-looking future-frat boys running amok, too.
Avon Old Farms was the all-guy’s school located only about twenty minutes from my school. Every girl that was an official Ethel Walker girl dated an Avon Old Farms guy. It was tradition. Anybody who was anybody from Ethel Walker wanted to date an Avon boy. All the seniors wore their boyfriends’ Avon windbreakers day in and day out so as to show off their healthy relationships. Wearing an Avon jacket was like a twisted form of Ethel Walker school spirit. If that wasn’t reason enough for me to avoid wearing one, the fact that most Avon boys were complete assholes was. As a freshman, I’d dated a guy from the South Kent School for Boys, and since been doomed to be an outcast.
I stared at their buses in utter awe that they were there. How had I forgotten that Fridays were the one night that Avon Old Farms had out on the town, and why the hell had I gone out on that night? I hated Avon boys with a passion, and I hated the girls from my school that flocked to them at first sight. Upon seeing their busses parked in the Shaw’s parking lot, I only wanted to get home sooner. I walked frantically to the benches, sat myself down, and
waited impatiently for the bus to arrive.
The small crowd of girls that were also waiting for the bus were all Asians, and minded their own business in their own language, which I was thankful for. The last thing I wanted was to interact with anyone at the point, so I was happy that the only people waiting for the bus with me were people that barely spoke the same language as me. I twiddled my thumbs in my lap and blew my breath in hopes to hear a whistling sound come from my mouth, but failed to realize that I never learned how to whistle.
When the bus finally arrived, I let all the Asians walk up the steps and find their seats before I got up from my seat. Surprisingly, I got a seat to myself, which I was more than thankful for. Simona Tsu sat across from me, on the outside of the seat which she was sharing with her friend. She spoke in Korean, so I had no idea what she was saying, but in the midst of her conversation, I could swear she knew something about me. I looked and felt terrible, like I was on a mixture of drugs I’d never taken before. I was a physical and emotional wreck, and I wanted to explode. The looks she sent my way made me so nervous, that I pulled my wrist band that reeked of weed, clove cigarettes, and menthols from my wrist and threw it around in my hands madly. I needed to keep my hands busy, otherwise I knew I’d end up taking out a cigarette and lighting it right there on the bus. I was petrified. I needed to either get off the bus or not move a muscle until everyone else was gone. If I moved at all, a blood-curdling scream would probably escape from my boiling mouth, so I stood still with the exception of my frantic fingers. I reeked of cigarettes. The bus felt like it was traveling at the speed of light, but I knew it was still going far too slow for me. I had to get away from Simona. She was reading my mind- I could tell she was.
When the bus pulled into the driveway of my school, I was breaking out in a cold sweat. I waited again for all the Asians to make their way off the bus, despite Simona’s courteous gesture for me to go in front of her. I raced up the steps to the lobby, where I signed my name into the sign-in sheet in the penmanship of a three-year-old.
I blinked and found myself standing in front of Alexi in the aisle of the barn again. She was looking at me with a dazed look like I was crazy or something. There’d only been about five seconds of silence between us, and I could tell her bizarre look was because of my mentioning of an “anxiety attack,” a concept she was obviously unfamiliar with.
“An… anxiety attack?” she said, looking confused.
“Yea… people who aren’t perfect tend to get them sometimes,” I snapped, getting annoyed with her presence by that point. Being around Alexi for too long made me feel like I was going head-first down a chute that would lead me straight into the depths of hell. I guess she has that affect on people that aren’t so completely perfect.
She cocked her eyebrow and gave me one last weird look before turning around and walking towards her horse again. I contemplated my awkward encounter for the rest of the hour I spent at the barn. I barely ever conversed with Alexi, and her reasoning for talking to me on such a random occasion confused me. What good would Alexi have with that information, anyway, and how many other people besides her were so conveniently interested in my drug use? I shrugged the burden off my shoulders and eventually decided that Alexi’s curiosity must have just been a coincidence.
My walk to dinner was a little too bizarre to be comforting. It was mid-Fall, and the gigantic trees in the front lawn were all different shades of maroon and marigold and bright fluorescent orange. The breeze felt so refreshing after an hour-long riding lesson, but the air itself didn’t feel as nice. Everything seemed so quiet, yet it felt like there was such a buzz going around; everyone was whispering. There was nobody else around outside on my short walk, so I was left to ponder the silence of the school I was walking towards. It felt like something was going to happen soon, and the silence was just the quiet wind before the real storm. Things were beginning to scare me, and I wanted to get out. I kept spinning a wheel of the same thought around the circumference of my brain, saying it to myself over and over again. I wanna get out of here. I wanna get out of here. I wanna get out of here. Aparently, while constantly repeating the thought in my head, somebody sitting inside their office of authority must have been reading my mind.
Dinner was lonely that night, and I felt like I should have had some sort of lame soundtrack trailing behind me. There was a constant tune of lurking sadness wherever I walked around that campus, and I felt like there was no escaping the fact that as I walked from the dining room to the giant wooden doors of my dorm, rumors were circulating about me. I didn’t know what they were, nor did I care. I cared more about the fact that they were there in the first place, and how I seemed to be the center of attention when I had done nothing more than my other friends. I was growing unhappier with my situation with every thought of punishment that circulated through my head. I reached my room in the far corner of the dorm, room C219, swung it open to find it empty, and threw myself onto the bed, where I stayed in contemplation for a solid five minutes. I sat up and reached for my stereo remote, pressed play, and enjoyed the sounds of my own personal music box playing the only songs I wanted to hear at that moment. I lied back on my bed and placed my hands on the back of my head, and enjoyed the music alone in my room. I had no distractions, no limits, and no Korean pop to suffer through- just me, my music, and my thoughts.
I woke up to the Wednesday sun coming slightly through my drawn blinds. The day went by in
a blur of nothingness. School molded into my riding lesson, which molded into whatever random conversations I had had with people that day, which molded into the macaroni and cheese I ate for dinner. The day didn’t start to stand out until that night when I was turning the corner at the end of Borders, and started to run my fingers along the brick of the wall that towered over my right side.
I was only out to run a very specific errand for a friend. I’d crawled out of bed from a late afternoon nap, tossed on a pair of baggy pants and a small black hoodie, and caught the bus on my mission for her. My task was simple: retrieve a tub of vanilla frosting for my desperate friend waiting for me in her room. It seemed simple enough upon entering the bus, but as I was running my fingers along the brick wall, lightly scratching the surface of my fingertips, my mission to retrieve frosting for my friend became a little more complicated than I could have expected.
I had been dreaming about finding someone in the town of Simsbury that seemed remotely interesting. But only in my dreams had I been able to find a guy that I related to- one that listened to underground music, and one that went to local shows. Only in those dreams had I met a guy that wore a black hoodie and small jeans every day- the guy that strummed a guitar out of boredom, instead of jacking off to Penthouse like the typical Avon boys. I’d been dreaming about him since the beginning of sophomore year, and after failing to find him after a year of looking, I decided that boys like that must not exist in this town. I was beginning to feel like the only person that was anything like me in all of Simsbury and Avon. I was beginning to think that until an old Toyota drove by the sidewalk I was walking on, and a boy stuck his head out of the window… and spit at me.
A Polish-looking white boy with a shaved head stuck his head out the window and made foolish gagging noises at me while his friend drove by me. I could tell it was in a joking manner, because the boy sticking his head out the window looked like he belonged in the same crowd of people as I did, which sparked a hint of optimism through my back. But it wasn’t actually that boy that I noticed so quickly while walking down the length of that brick wall.
It wasn’t until after the car drove by that I noticed another head in the back seat. I didn’t get a good look at him, but I saw him enough to realize that he was particularly good-looking, and noticed that as I kept my eyes on him, he kept his eyes glued to me. For a second, we, dare I say, had a moment.
I figured that would be the end of it. I had caught a short glimpse of a good-looking guy in the back seat of a car, shared a moment with him, and watched him drive off until I could no longer see the car he was in. I figured I’d never learn his favorite color, or when his birthday was, or how many brothers or sisters he had. I figured I’d never learn his name or the names of his friends, and I’d never know which restaurant he liked to eat at when he didn’t have to pay, or what he liked to do on Friday nights. I figured I’d watch him drive off until I could no longer see the car he was in, and then I’d never see the boy in the back seat ever again.
I walked into the grocery store, straight into the correct aisle, grabbed my friend’s tub of frosting, and headed towards the checkout. But I stopped dead in my tracks when I turned toward the checkout lanes and spotted a familiar face. The boy that had stuck his head out of his window and spit at me was standing right smack at the end of aisle five, with two other boys. One of them was one I hadn’t seen. The other was a tall and skinny figure that wore a black t-shirt and dark jeans. He had a black hat over his clearly blonde hair, and when he turned around, I saw the face of the gorgeous punk-rocker that I’d spent a year looking for.
Out of complete nervousness, I turned the other way and headed away from them, hoping that I hadn’t been noticed. I headed for the self-checkout lane, where I was pretty sure I could get out disregarded. I scanned the tub of frosting and followed the easy step-by-step nature of the self-checkout machine. I’d always been told these damn machines put poor teenagers out of jobs. Trying to stray my mind from the beautiful male standing only a few aisles away from me, I tried to think of random things instead. I shoved a wrinkly five dollar bill into the anxiously blinking slot, and watched it spit the bill back out at me. I hated it more than anything when vending machines did that to people.
Everything felt so frantic at that point, and I was in a rushed mess to get out of there overlooked by the boys I’d just seen. I don’t know exactly why I was so scared of an encounter with them, but I assumed it was because I hadn’t even seen people like them in what seemed like ages. I had convinced myself that the kind of boys like the boys I liked only existed in my hometown, and I hadn’t seen or conversed with one in such a long time. Everything was moving in fast-motion. The supermarket was jammed with beeping noises of random machines all over the store, and people were yelling and talking and rapidly crashing their carts into each other like a rush-hour frenzy. I wanna get out of here. I wanna get out of here. I wanna get out of here. I feared in the back of my mind, but in reality, I wanted nothing more than to talk to those boys. I told myself that I wanted to avoid them, and I wanted to get back to the dorm and put an end to this mission, but only my mind knew how badly I really wanted to talk to them, how badly I really wanted them to talk to me.
I was so frantically checking out that I didn’t notice the three boys walk through the automatic exit door. When I walked out holding my plastic Shaw’s bag containing a small tub of vanilla frosting, I was looking down at the ground. I walked about five feet with my head facing the ground, when I noticed a pair of black Converse All-Stars come into my field of vision. I looked up reluctantly, completely started by the person in front of me wearing the logo shoes of my hometown. I slowly raised my head. I noted a familiar pair of dark jeans wrapping around the top of the shoes, and a familiar black t-shirt draped over the studded belt at the top of those jeans. When my head was finally looking straight again, I was staring straight into the eyes of the boy that I was convinced I’d never see again.
“Do you know what’s fun to do around here?” he said. I ignored his question at first, thinking that he wasn’t talking to me as I walked by. His voice was deep, and its tone fit nicely with the baby blue color of his eyes. I stopped in my tracks and turned around to look at the three boys behind me.
“…Wait… Are you asking me?” I asked them.
“Yeah,” the one with the shaved head replied.
“No. I don’t live around here,” I said.
“Where are you from?” the good-looking one asked.
“Vermont.”
“So what are you doing around here?” he asked, blatantly curious to know what the hell I was doing in Simsbury, Connecticut.
“I go to school around here,” I said.
There was a taller male that hadn’t spoken yet. He had obviously been the driver of the old Toyota that had driven by me earlier, and the one of the three that I hadn’t gotten a good look at yet. His hair was greasy and combed over his face. He had a fairly large nose and a giant pimple right in the center of it. He seemed a lot nerdier than the other two, to the point where it seemed almost as if he didn’t really fit in with them. “College girl?” he asked.
“No. I go to the private school up the road a little bit.” I was stuttering a little bit. It was nearly impossible to get any good words out of my mouth without a stutter of nervousness.
They laughed at my answer, clearly surprised that they were looking at a private school girl. “Don’t take offense, but you don’t look like you fit in much in a private school,” the good-looking one said, looking me up and down. I remembered the baggy pants I was wearing and immediately felt a little embarrassed with my wardrobe, wishing I was wearing something a bit cooler.
I was about to respond to his comment when I decided to drop the conversation of my education, and find out more about the boys standing in front of me. “Who are you,” I blatantly asked.
The boy with the shaved head looked at me first and responded “I’m Mark.”
The nerdy boy introduced himself next as Luke.
I looked at the good-looking boy last and waited for his response. “My name’s Darcy,” he said.
The words “I’m Rachel” seemed to come out of my mouth in slow motion, and I can only imagine how jumbled and slurred they were, due to my fascination with the good-looking boy with the unique name standing in front of me.
Mark abruptly interrupted my eye contact with Darcy and spat out, “So do you like ska?”
I immediately turned to him with a disgusted look on my face and responded with a gross “No” and an insulted face. I hated ska. Ska was probably the worst excuse for good music I had heard in a long time, and I was surprised that I resembled someone that listened to such a thing to a stranger. After I snapped my answer to his random question, I asked for an explanation as to why he was so curious.
“Well I saw the strap on your bag and figured you were a ska kid. That’s why I spit at you. But if you don’t like ska, then I take it back. You’re cool.” Aha. I recognized the checkerboard pattern of the strap on my messenger bag, and realized why I had come off as a ska kid at first glance.
I started to walk off again, heading toward the pick-up benches to wait for the bus, but Darcy opened his mouth and obviously spoke for the sake of saying something before I walked off. “Want to come with us?”
I stopped. A boy as good-looking as the one I had just barely been introduced to, the boy I had been having dreams about since sophomore year, the boy I had been dying to find since realizing how little I fit in at private school, was asking me if I wanted to spend the rest of the evening with him and his two accompanying friends. I stopped dead in my path that was headed for the pick-up benches. “Yes. Yeah, I’ll go with you,” I said. I could feel the boy making my heart melt. I could feel a giant crush forming.
Luke’s old Toyota wasn’t at all spacious or comfortable. It was old and rusty and I could feel it crumbling underneath my seat. Darcy sat next to me in the back seat, crammed between me and the pile of random crap shoved onto the right side of the back seat. I didn’t know where we were headed, but this was the first time I’d ever been in a car in the town of Simsbury that wasn’t either the bus or one of my parents’ cars. It was so weird feeling like I’d finally met people I could hang out with. I had finally met people that could come and pick me up from school and take me out on any given nights, and people that I could meet up with when I had nothing to do. It was the first time I had ever ridden in a teenager’s car since first attending private school, and it was a feeling I was quickly growing fond of.
When I heard Darcy tell me that we were almost there, I pulled out my nearly emptied pack of cigarettes and slid one into my mouth. A thin, black stick of tobacco hung from my mouth for the rest of the car ride, and when Luke looked in his rear-view mirror and saw me sitting there, he let out a startled gasp of joy and asked me if that was a clove.
“Yes it is,” I replied. “Do you want one? You can have my last one.” He politely turned down the offer to take my last cigarette, but I handed it to him anyway and told him he was probably helping me out by taking it. There was nowhere to get clove cigarettes around here, and I hated the taste of regular cigarettes, so I’d probably go a while without smoking anything at all. Besides, I figured a cigarette was a good way to break the ice more with these boys.
We exited the car as I lit my cigarette. I handed my little pink lighter to Luke, as he lit his and took a long and harsh drag of his cigarette. Darcy held out his two fingers and moved them so as to motion that he wanted a taste of my cigarette. I slid it between his two fingers, and he inhaled its candy-like taste between his lips and into the back of his throat. His cheeks went in a little bit, and his face went long as he smoked. His fingers were long and boney around the cigarette, and he held it in such a manner that it looked almost classy. I couldn’t help but admire him. He looked good when he smoked.
When I looked around, I noticed we were standing in the parking lot of a McDonalds. I was a bit nervous about why that was our destination, because I absolutely hated fast food, and hoped that I wouldn’t already be finding things I didn’t have in common with these boys. Fortunately, we headed into an alley between the McDonalds and another random building, as Darcy pointed to a fire escape that lead up to the roof of the taller building. It was steep and looked rickety and slightly dangerous, but I climbed it anyway behind the rest of the boys. When I finally reached the top, Darcy slid the half-smoked cigarette back in between my fingers. My heart raced a little bit when I felt his hand make contact with mine, but stopped my nervousness when I realized I was no longer a third grader holding hands for the first time. He smiled at me, turned around, and headed for the edge of the roof, where Mark and Luke were already standing.
When I walked to the edge with them, I saw a beautiful slur of lights below me that it nearly took me by surprise- I had no idea Simsbury had so many lights in the first place. I guess I was higher than I’d imagined I would be, because I could see practically the entire Commons from where I was standing. It seemed so fitting that it was the first time I was seeing anything remotely spectacular about the town I was now living in, and the people that had showed it to me were the people that I knew existed somewhere in the underground of this place.
I could see all the traffic lights of all the major intersections, and all the headlights and tail-lights of all the cars sitting at them. I could see all the neon lights of the stores, and all the streetlights shining down on the parking lots filled with cars. I could see tiny specs in front of the movie theater that I figured were all the townies that flocked outside. I returned my glance to my left, and I could see three boys that had already made my night memorable by 7 PM.
We progressed from the roof to the benches that sat outside the gigantic Petco about a half an hour later. I sat between Darcy and Mark, who eventually got up from his seat to wrestle with Luke on the lawn, leaving Darcy and I alone on the bench for a couple minutes. The silence was a bit awkward, but I felt so comforted by his presence at the same time. I was tempted to kiss him right there, and thank him for existing in a part of the world that I was almost certain had become extinct of his kind. He looked away at Mark and Luke on the ground about ten feet away, and then turned around and looked at me again. “What’s private school like?” he asked.
A slur of thoughts rushed through my head when he opened his mouth and asked me that question. I didn’t know whether to make my answer short and simple, or to actually get into what private school was like for a girl like me. If I wasn’t in danger of being someone that talked until their head came off, I would have told him plainly how much I hated it, and how obvious it was that I didn’t belong there.
Well, my freshman roommate soaped up my toothbrush and claimed my favorite pair of pants here ‘luckies’ because of all the times they’d gotten her laid in the bathroom at the school dances. And my sophomore roommate thinks she’s black, I thought. No, no that’s not a good way to start.
The entire student body is obsessed with their images. They’re mirror reflections of their asshole parents who send them away to private school in hopes that the simple fact that the name of the school is on their child’s transcript will automatically get them into a prestigious school where they’ll excel in life and make millions. They run around with their straight A’s and don’t know what to do with themselves when they score half a point off for adding instead of subtracting on their math quiz, I thought to myself, trying to think of a good way to answer his question. No, that’s not good either.
Everyone’s a robot. The Dean of students is like their master that- no, no that’s not good either.
Everyone walks around with their hands in their pants trying to relieve their horniness. At first sight of a guy, every girl falls head over heals, whether he’s a heart-throb, or a cow. I mean, just the other day, this- I stopped my train of thought again. No, I don’t want to say that either.
“Rachel?” My thoughts were interrupted by his voice again, making sure I’d heard his question.
“It’s like…” I paused, trying to quickly think up a good explanation for private school without carrying off on too much of a tangent. “It’s like playing metal as loud as your speakers can go, and instead of enjoying it, you’re banging your face into the wall instead. And while you do it, a group of gorgeous girls are standing at your doorway wondering why you’re banging your face into things, and all you can think is how funny it is that they have no idea, because your reasoning seems so obvious to you,” I finally said.
“What’s the reason?” he asked, clearly intrigued by my answer.
“The reason is private school sucks,” I said, skipping straight to the point. “Instead of enjoying the fact that you’re getting a good education, you’re stuck with the fact that you’re in a private school packed with girls that you have nothing in common with. And while you react the way your body and mind will inevitably react to all of it, sort of like the way you’re trained to react, everyone around you will look at you with a bizarre look and just wonder what the hell you’re doing. ‘Who in the right mind would do such a thing?’ they think. ‘Why would anyone want to play music with screaming in it? Why would anyone want to bang their head up and down until it hurts?’ they want to know. The funny thing is that throughout all their wondering where your head could possibly be at, you’re wondering the same thing about them. It seems so profound that anyone could enjoy themselves at a place like private school. It seems so fucked up that anyone wouldn’t want to choke themselves trying to suffer for four years in a place like that. It just seems weird to me that anyone would listen to metal and not want to bash their face into things,” I spat out. I was pretty sure he understood my point by then.
He gave me a huge smile and laughed at my response. “You’re pretty awesome,” he said, still chuckling.
I could feel my cheeks turning red, and I immediately turned the other way. I was damn satisfied with my answer, and a bit surprised at my ability to explain private school in such a metaphor.
Mark and Luke walked back over to the bench we were sitting on just as I thought my face was returning to its normal color. Mark sat himself down next to me and said something random to me, but I was too busy paying attention to Luke, who was walking closer to the windows of the giant store we were sitting in front of. Mark’s voice turned into a monotone hum in the back of my head, and my vision stayed plastered on Luke, who was slowly walking closer and closer to the windows. Judging by the way he was walking, and the way Mark’s voice became unheard in front of me, I could tell that something was about to happen. Luke had a certain stride to his walk that made me anxiously await whatever was about to happen.
When he finally reached the window, he turned around with a gigantic smile on his face and started to yell something back at us. He pointed his finger to the inside of the store. “Hey, guys! Look at-” He was immediately cut off by the sound of a loud beeping coming from the outside of the building. The alarm sounded for about three beeps before all my thoughts were interrupted by the feeling of water hitting the top of my head from behind. The sprinklers had gone off full throttle and were drenching us where we sat. Within the five seconds it took us to realize that we were being soaked by the Petco security, we were already completely saturated.
Realizing that there was no avoiding walking away from the mess sopping wet, we didn’t bother running away from it. Instead, I jumped up from my seat spontaneously with my eyes closed and the palms of my hands out. Mark was the only one that ran with his arms covering his head, but he soon realized that he was no dryer than any of us, and ran back under the frantic sprinklers. Darcy had jumped up at about the same time that I had, but had run to grab Luke instead. We were laughing so hysterically by that point that it was hard to stand, but Darcy somehow managed to grab a hold of Luke’s arms and pull him into the torrential downpour that had surrounded us.
Each of us was a victim of the monsoon from head to toe, but there didn’t seem to be a care shared between any of us about how disgustingly wet were all were. We had reached the point where we were so drenched that we obviously didn’t care anymore, and with the sound of the beeping alarm in the background, the moment in time seemed untouchable. We were utter teenagers running amok and doing as we pleased, absorbing every careless accident and random glitch in the system as just another way to have a good time. I felt like I had acquired three new best friends, until I looked at Darcy rolling around on the wet grass and absorbing every last drop of water into his clothing. I looked at his gorgeous face and lanky figure, and decided I had acquired two new best friends, and a love interest.
I lost all recollection of what time the books stated that underclassmen were supposed to return back to the dorms, but by the time Luke’s car reached the entrance of my school, I didn’t exactly care. It was around 10:15, and I was positive I was breaking some kind of rule, whether it was arriving too late, or riding in a car with another teenager without granted permission from my parents. I had blown off a good number of the strict rules I promised to abide by upon attending that stupid school, and right at that second, I honestly didn’t give a shit. I had just experienced the best night I’d had since moving to that town, all because of my fateful run-in with those three boys.
“So, are you gonna want to hang out again sometime?” Luke glanced back at me from the driver’s seat, with a hopeful look on his face.
“Yeah,” I responded, while removing the tiny pad of paper that I always carried in my back pocket. My “memopad,” as I called it, had served for years as the small notebook shoved into my left butt pocket, which I pulled out and wrote whatever outrageous quotes happened to be said in front of me. Over the times of drug use and merrymaking of the summer, I had recorded hundreds of random thoughts and witty quotes. I’d used it to write obscene notes, which I would rip out and place under the windshield wipers of unfortunate cars. I’d used it to rolling paper. I’d used it to make tiny origami when I was bored stiff. I’d used that wonderful memopad for tons of things in the past, and giving my number out had been one of them in the past, but never before had I written my dorm room number on one of those tiny pieces of paper, and handed it to a guy as gorgeous as the one sitting next to me.
As I wrote the seven digits of my room number, I could feel myself becoming more and more excited for what waited for me and these boys in the future. How many of their friends would I meet, and would they all be this cool? How many local shows would I go to with them, and how good or awful would the bands be? I could only imagine the good things that were waiting for me now that I had associated myself with such an amazing group of people. My excitement was overwhelming. I nearly leaned over and kissed Darcy when I had finished the last digit of my phone number, but instead I just reached out my arm and handed him the folded piece of lined paper that contained the seven digits he would eventually call, and the name of the girl he would eventually ask for on the other line.
I walked into the lobby to see Richard Pragar, the assistant Dean of Students, sitting at the receptionist desk. It was 10:15, and I was sure that juniors were due back to the campus sometime during the 9 o’clock hour. He was a burly man with droopy eyes and big glasses, and had a ridiculously friendly look to him that matched his attitude perfectly. He had gigantic lips and buck teeth, and his hair was always combed over with a side part, barely revealing the graying portion in the front. He always had a little bit of black stubble around his face, but never a mustache or a beard, but he never looked unprofessional. Anyone could tell he had been a nerd since childhood, but nobody held it to him because he was such a nice guy. I’d had a good number of random conversations with him in the past about simple things, and had always enjoyed conversing with him. He was so easy to talk to and so friendly, no matter what the circumstances were, and for those reasons, he was probably the only person with authority at that school that I liked.
I strolled up to the desk he was sitting at, my clothes still entirely soaked with water. My shoes made a squishing sound on the marble floor as I walked towards him, and my hair was flat against the shape of my head, dripping water down my face. I trailed a puddle of water behind me as I walked up to the desk and looked at Mr. Pragar with an innocent look. He had been smiling at me goofily since I had opened the door and entered the lobby, and I was comforted that he was the one sitting behind the sign-in sheet, instead of the 80-year-old witch of a receptionist that usually sat there.
“10:15,” he said.
I thought about explaining myself. I thought about telling him to cut me a break because of the amazing night I had just had. I started shuffling through my thoughts for a good enough story to tell him, but before I had the chance to open my mouth, he smiled at me and said, “You look like you had an interesting night.”
“Interesting is an understatement.”
He laughed out loud and told me that he’d let it slide this one time. I nearly collapsed in a heap of relief, and sighed heavily, thanking him endlessly. I strolled back to my dorm, once again trying to whistle. But the fact that I lacked the ability to make a joyful whistling sound escape from between my puckered lips didn’t tamper at all with the elevation that my head was at. I was in the clouds. I was untouchable on that walk back to my dorm. God only knew how brightly I was glowing.
EDIT: I added about five more pages. Read away, suckers.
I spent the entire walk back to my room thinking about packing a giant bowl of pot as soon as I got there. It was September **th. I’d just arrived at school about two weeks ago, and had already broken close to ten of the rules I dared not tamper with only one year ago.
Being a junior in high school felt abnormally different from being a sophomore. I had spent a year and a half of my past two years of high school at the Ethel Walker School- an all girl’s boarding school in some quaint town in Connecticut. I’d just returned from my semester away from the estrogen-drenched society of private school, and had received a fair amount of weird looks just for being in the student body after having disappeared for so long. Nevertheless, I was there, and I was milking my growth for all it was worth.
Everyone had always known me as someone who just desperately wanted to fit in with the best crowd. I never used to smoke cigarettes or get high. I had never been able to stomach any beer, and I’d never kissed a boy until the end of my freshman year. Despite my raging desire to be just another popular girl, I was still an outcast. I was friends with practically everyone, and I followed their leads every step of the way, but I never quite made it into any particular group of girlfriends. As a result, I was seen as some needy weird girl that was trying way too hard.
Halfway through my sophomore year of high school, the pressure of getting exactly what I wanted drove me to an extremely moronic, pitiful, and pathetic cry for help and attention. I swallowed over 80 Advil in the course of an hour and dug a kitchen knife into my skin to create six or seven cuts in my arm. After that dramatic experience, my parents decided to withdraw me from the private school system, and I spent a semester in the halls of a school filled with brand new things to me: drugs, boys, and spirited sports teams.
Oddly enough, however, as new and exciting as public school was, I didn’t find myself feeling very enthusiastic about my place of education. So after months of thought, I decided to show my face on Ethel Walker’s campus again. The difference this time around was not only that I had grown into someone that acknowledged the stupidity of teenage angst and officially despised myself for taking such prepubescent actions, but I had changed physically, too. My hair had gone from long red locks to jet black spikes. My outfit had gone from tight Levis jeans to faded jeans from the Salvation Army, complete with wallet wears. My cute Gap purse had turned into a messenger bag that I’d decked with underground band pins, and my belt went from black leather to studded and sharp. Needless to say, I’d made it fairly obvious that I wasn’t the annoying girl that wanted to fit in anymore.
Room C219. Way back in the farthest corner of my dorm. Unfortunately, I was one of the eight people in the entire dorm to be unlucky enough to have a roommate. I’d always had the worst roommates of anyone I knew. Everyone in my halls always seemed to get along perfectly with their roommates, eventually becoming the closest of the girls in any given group of friends. My situations, however, were a bit more difficult. My freshman roommate, Jessica Hardingham, refused to wear socks, and had a crazy obsession for bad 80s movies and even worse alternative rock. After she moved out, I had another roommate, Nicole Pierce, for the period of about three weeks, before she stole a pair of earrings from the local superstore and got expelled for it. My sophomore roommate, Kimberly Ericson, was one of those white girls with a potbelly that did everything in her power to convince herself and everyone else that she was black. And the girl sitting contently at her desk in room C219 under the dim light of her Hello Kitty lamp was Hyun Jung Kim. She spoke about three words of English, and from what I could understand, they sounded like “Medium-rare, please.” I noted this only after skimming her Korean-English dictionary and finding that there were more mock restaurant scenarios than actual English-speaking assistance. Because of this, we rarely talked, and wandered through our gigantic room minding our own business as much as we could.
I was a bit angry to see her sitting there, because every second that I wasn’t smoking a bowl was another second that I was becoming more anxious. Since returning to private school, I’d already smoked a couple packs of cigarettes on campus, and participated in a good amount of drug-induced activities with girls that once knew me as completely innocent. She was sitting in what seemed to be the only position I ever saw her in; Indian style in her uncomfortable wooden chair, slaving away over her honors calculus homework. She may not have known any common English phrases other than how she wanted her steak done, but she was incredibly smart, and for that, I always watched myself around her. I never knew what that Korean was capable of, or how many times she had made fun of me for being an American in her native language. Almost every night for the first three weeks, she’d stay up until three in the morning with her calculus homework, and I was convinced that it had to be because of one of two things: She was either permanently jetlagged, or her math teacher was just assigning some insane amount of homework, and Hyun Jung was too foreign to understand the concept of blowing it off.
I sat at my desk that sat only a foot away from hers and faced the gigantic window that spread across the width of our room and looked out on the bike path and the ropes course during the daytime. I didn’t bother to acknowledge her presence as I opened up the single drawer in my desk and pulled out a safety pin and a rolled up plastic bag, and placed them both in my pocket.
I didn’t want to smoke alone, so I took the less-discrete approach of blatantly asking most of the girls I knew if they wanted to smoke a bowl with me. Chelsea McCann was too busy working on her Latin homework and had gotten high the past three days. She was a senior that year, and probably my best friend at the entire school. I’d been riding horseback with her since I was only seven years old, and she was the one that had convinced me to attend private school in the first place, saying that the equestrian team was one of the best in the district. With her help, I made the riding team and therefore spent the majority of my day sweating under the brutal spring heat. For the first six months of freshman year, she was practically the only person I knew, and luckily, she rode in the same lesson group as me. I used to call her Man McCann when you could see giant circles of sweat forming under her armpits during our lessons.
Katherine Wade was too concentrated on picking all the seeds out of her own bag. She was the middleman of all the drug deals that had been going on for the past week. She and Tori Safferin had somehow gotten their hands on a good amount of decent weed, which send all the pot-smokers of the school into a frenzy. Before Tori somehow became everyone’s hookup, there was not one single way for a girl to get any kind of substance that would mess with her mind. As a result, Tori was becoming very wealthy very fast. Unfortunately, she had never dealt drugs before, and was therefore completely inexperienced at everything that was involved with her job. So Katherine stepped in for her, taking over the duty of dividing it all into equal portions and telling Tori what kind of price to charge for each amount.
Katherine was also the one doing the deliveries to all sections of the dorm, with her hand tightly wedged in her pocket until reaching her destination: the jonesing student that had called for her services. Tonight, however, Katherine was putting all deliveries aside, as she focused primarily on separating Tori’s most recent shipment.
Molly Stroud was already high. Her favorite pastime was leaving the school on the miniature bus and wandering the town’s commons for a while before finding a nice dumpster to crouch behind. She found some indescribable thrill in coming back onto her precious campus in an altered state of mind. She claimed that something about knowing how illegal it was made it more of a hell-bent mission for her, and she lived for adrenaline rushes. Tonight she was too busy falling into the walls to take part in a much riskier mission, and I closed the door to her room behind me as soon as her laughing spasms began to send her flying into all the corners of her room. She was too weird for my taste.
Flora Mendoza was too paranoid to do it in the dorm, and the outside doors had already been locked. It was after 11, so leaving the dorms could not only result in Saturday morning detention, but would leave us locked out until some dorm faculty let us in. Flora had only smoked about three times before, but she showed great promise in becoming the next burnout of the school.
Mary Michael was talking to her boyfriend. Drew Sonder was in the shower. Natalie Pares had just ordered a pizza, and couldn’t stray from the door to wait for the delivery. Rachael Perkell was apparently angry with me for accidentally scratching her leather saddle after today’s riding lesson, and was no longer on speaking terms with me. Lindsay Sweet was in the middle of a Lifetime TV movie. I searched throughout the entire dorm, asking anyone I knew that liked to indulge in an occasional smoking session. But tonight didn’t seem to be the night. Just when I was about to head back to my lovely abode in room C219, I saw a girl I knew walking toward her room, only a couple doors down from mine.
I ran to her door and swung it open just as she was entering it. Callie Speed listened intently to me as I told her about the bowl of weed I had stored away at the bottom of my pocket. Her brown eyes lit up when I finally asked her to join me for the bowl, and she immediately responded with a yes.
She followed me down the length of the hallway into room C240. It sat directly across from my room, and despite the overcrowding of the dorms that year, there was nobody living in it. There was no light, and the door didn’t latch very well. On the west wall sat one of those old and uncomfortable mattresses with thin blue stripes. It sat on a rickety metal bed frame that screeched painfully whenever anyone sat on it. The bottom two drawers of the dresser were jammed, and the carpet was starting to peel away from the corner. The closet door didn’t exactly slide with grace, and the knobs on the window required a two-person maneuver to turn. When I thought about it, it was fairly obvious why there was nobody living in the room, but it’s amazing what some people will prefer over living with a roommate.
After slaving over the window for a good five minutes, Callie and I finally managed to get it open enough to smoke safely. I reached my right hand into my pocket and pulled out my lighter. I flicked it a couple times before it finally spat out its flame and I touched it lightly to the bowl I was holding. Little did I know of the trouble that the little flame rising from my miniature pink lighter was capable of causing.
Callie’s mouth now held my hit tightly behind her closed lips and in between her two puffed cheeks. Katherine had most definitely not spoiled me with the amount she gave me in my small zip lock bag that was now empty after only two bowls. I decided to turn Callie’s head to mine and blow the smoke from my hit into her mouth to get her as high as possible. She did the same with her next hit, and we sat on our knees in the dark room for another fifteen minutes, shot-gunning our smoke to each other.
Her face was barely a dark navy blue behind the drawn shades, but the moon was shining through enough to make her facial expressions visible to me. My eyes were beginning to adjust, and I could soon make out the growing smile on her face. I could tell she was happy, but every little thing about her was a shining navy blue. The left side of her face was against the window, and she looked like a painting that had come alive more so than any ordinary person on drugs. She looked like a silhouette of a very beautifully featured half of her face. I nearly fell in love with her. She put her hands on my cheeks and propelled another cloud of smoke into my mouth, and I nearly kissed her.
She pulled away and coughed. Her eyes widened when she coughed, as if she was asking me to help her. She tried relentlessly to stop, but her lungs forced more unwanted air up through her mouth in nauseating sounds. Her eyes started to water, still ridiculously wide and staring right at me. She looked so powerless and stunning with her hands cupped tightly over her mouth, as she was practically convulsing to keep her coughing inside. I put my right hand over her mouth and smiled, like her loud noises were just a joke to me. I wasn’t afraid of being caught. I wasn’t really afraid of anything at that point. My high was starting to kick in, and all I could think about was the perfection of the situation Callie and I were in, and how much I enjoyed her presence in that state of mind.
I was loving the navy blue color of the darkness in that room, but the color soon turned into a virtually decked out room designed only for the hippies. I started to see flowers in Callie’s hair, and her face was decorated in pink, purple, and yellow vegetation. A minute ago she was like my own personal art show. She was the embodiment of every teenager under the influence of drugs, and the angst of living with so many stresses that she, and all like her, had become a unique junkie. But now, she had become a flower. She was pink at the edges and bright yellow on the inside. Her light brown lipstick reminded me of an old Volkswagen bus, but when my eyes strayed from her, I could picture that brown bus driving along the express highways in the year 2003. It was disappointing that Callie was the only thing that could make me forget that this was the present, and I was only high. This was only marijuana… not utopia.
I returned to my room, where Hyun Jung was still slaving away at her calculus homework relentlessly. This time, however, she was covered in hundreds of bouquets of flowers. In fact, the entire room was decked in flowers of all kinds. There were no walls or floors or windows anymore, only a fourteen by fourteen cube of my own mental meadow.
I started to laugh hysterically at the sight of my room becoming a greenhouse in the small period of time I had spent away to get high. Hyun Jung, you shouldn’t have! I thought. I laughed harder at the thought of Hyun Jung decorating our humble abode with flowers while I had disappeared, as a symbol of some sort. I thought about asking her why she had done such a thing, but my state of contemplation was interrupted by a small ding sound coming from my computer.
When I blinked and looked up at my computer to see what the sound was, all the flowers were gone. The room had its normal walls, floors, and windows again, and my computer screen was providing the only source of light in the room. Hyun Jung had long since fallen asleep.
I wondered how long I had been standing there, or if I had just imagined the whole thing. Before spending any more time trying to figure out the unexplainable, I sat down at my computer and read the message that a friend had sent me. Katherine’s screen name appeared in a bold blue font on my computer screen, and she was the cause of the constant dinging that was interrupting my hallucinations and thoughts.
“Rachel? Rachel, you there? Hey. Are you around? You there, Rach? Rachel? Rachel are you around?” Katherine had been trying to get a hold of me for the past twenty minutes, sending me frequent internet messages to see if I was safely back in my room yet.
“Yeah, I’m here,” I finally responded.
Seconds later, the message flashed, causing me to blink before reading the screen again.
“WadeWeM6504 is no longer signed on.” Katherine had gone to bed. I glanced at my screen aimlessly for another minute or so before letting my eyes wander to the top right corner. It was 1:34 AM. I had no idea where the time had gone. All I remembered at that point was Callie, and I figured that was a good thought to end the day on. I climbed into bed, not bother to remove any of my clothing, and pulled the covers up over my head. Despite how happy I was, I didn’t sleep much that night.
The next morning and afternoon came and went as if the night before had been nothing special. My mind had returned back to its normal state, and I had never felt so bored with my surroundings. I didn’t see Callie roaming the hallways, and I couldn’t find her anywhere in the dorms, so I figured she was out and about doing her own thing. I wondered if the night before had been anything out of the ordinary to her, as it had been to me. I couldn’t stop thinking about her that whole day, and wondering what she was doing, and what she was thinking about. Me, perhaps? I hoped so.
I had a riding lesson that afternoon around three o’clock. It ended around four thirty, and just as I was about to hop out of my saddle and get off of my horse’s sweating back, Sakira Wang called my name from the other side of the arena.
Sakira’s dreadlocks looked like someone could squeeze and entire bucket of sweat from them. It was abnormally warm that day, and her face was barely shaded by the rim of her helmet when she trotted her horse down the length of the arena towards me.
“We need to talk,” she said. Sakira wasn’t normally the person to stimulate a “talk,” and the look on her face suggested an interrogation in my near future.
Reluctantly, I asked her what it was she wanted to discuss.
“I-I’m not pointing any fingers at you, but I’ve heard a lot about you having a lot to do with this whole Tori thing,” she said, stuttering a little. I could tell she was nervous to bring up whatever topic it was with me, but frankly, I had no clue what she was referring to.
“What Tori thing?”
“Uh…” She continued talking, pretending that my question was a remark of sarcasm. “Look, what I’m hearing is that you gave the dean a list of names, and now you’ve fucked a lot of people over.”
I was baffled. Not only did I have absolutely not idea what Sakira was talking about with this “list,” but I had no idea what was going on. “What the hell are you talking about?” I demanded.
“The dean’s been called people into her office all day! People left and right are on the verge of getting expelled!” she hammered. I wanted to answer her questions, but the last momentous thing that I remember happening in my life was getting high with Callie Speed in the empty room across from mine. As I recalled, nobody knew of that situation except me and Callie, and I planned on keeping it that way. There was no way for anybody else to know about it.
Sakira began to explain the circumstances that she was referring to in detail. Apparently, the dean of students, a burly woman by the name of Dianne Cleary, had been calling select girls into her office all day. Nobody was exactly sure why, but Tori Safferin was at the very top of that list. She continued to inform me that the rumor circulating the school was that a number of faculty members had knocked on my door last night around eleven o’clock. They supposedly interrogated me, saying that they knew I had been getting high, but they would not use it against me, as long as I provided them with a list of names. The list of names was to include all the girls that I knew of that were using drugs or doing anything that was at all against the rules of the school.
“And you think that this actually happened?” I asked, nearly shouting at her.
“Are you saying that it didn’t?”
“Of course it didn’t! Do you realize how incredible illogical that entire scenario is?” I honestly couldn’t comprehend who would actually believe something like that. If a school’s administration knew about a students drug use, they’d make their punishments fit the crime. Or so I thought. But a school as prestigious as a well-ranking private school like my own most likely wouldn’t be giving girls a lucky break and interrogating them instead. That all seemed insane to me, but not nearly as insane as the fact that every girl thought it had really happened.
I ripped my saddle off my horse’s back and ran my firmest brushes up and down her back and the barrel of her body in absolute fury. I wasn’t to bash my face into the closest metal thing I could find. I felt like I was the main character in a story that was written in a different language. I read on and on but still remained clueless as to what was going on. It felt like that school of mine was falling into a black pit of endlessness, but whether that was really the case or not, I’ll never really know.
“Were you at the Commons last Friday?” I quickly turned to see who was behind me, and was rudely greeted by the school’s embodiment of perfection. Alexi Wigstrom had gorgeous waving locks of soft, blonde hair that flowed about six inches beyond her shoulders. Her eyes were the softest color of blue, and her lips formed a shape that couldn’t exactly be defined geometrically, but looked nothing short of incredible protruding from the rest of her perfect face. I envied her and everything that surrounded her; her consistently perfect grades, and her consistently perfect horse, who floated around the arena like a shining black Pegasus. I envied her consistently perfect group of friends that shared their perfectly fitted American Eagle t-shirts every day, and most of all, her consistently perfect reputation. She looked like she’d come straight out of a 50s black and white romance film- the kind that made a glow form around her face. She may have been the epitome of perfection, but for that reason, I despised her.
She looked at me with her blue eyes and stood there in front of me like she’d come out of nowhere, waiting for a response. I gathered myself, still a little startles by her random appearance, and answered her question. “Yeah, I was.”
“Did you come back to the dorms really high?” She spat out her response like she would have said it whether I’d answered yes or no to her previous question. She ticked me off a little with her blatant desire to get in on the story, and I didn’t trust her intentions with whatever facts she could get. So I opened my mouth and told her what she wanted to hear.
“No. Umm… let me think…” I took a minute to remember last Friday night, trying not to confuse it with any other random nights I had spent out at the Simsbury Commons. “No, Friday I had a major anxiety attack,” I said. “I probably looked and acted like I was high, but I wasn’t. I was just… freaking out.” I would have cooked up some outrageous story to tell Alexi if I really had gotten high that night, but what I told her was actually the truth. The concrete wall outside the movie theater had been covered with kids from butt cheek to butt cheek. That wall was where I usually sat to watch the stupid townies roam around. Instead, I parked myself on the bench that was bolted into the ground, just about ten feet from the wall.
The townies were all so stupid. They were all those white trashy kind of people that all wanted to be black, and had to use a slur of politically incorrect terms in every single one of their sentences. The fat girls wore tiny clothing, and the scrawny boys wore clothing that would probably still be too large for a six-foot muscle man. That’s why I liked watching them. They were so pathetic that they served as a completely different form of entertainment. Rarely did they ever try to talk about anything remotely intelligent, but when they did, it left me in hysterics. Those townies knew so little about the important things in life I wondered what the hell they ever talked about. If anything, I knew those stupid townies could probably tell you every little different between a Burger King cheeseburger and McDonald’s cheeseburger. Friday nights were when they’d all flock to the dome outside of the movie theater with the photo booths, arcades, and stadium seating. I never saw any of them actually go in, but I always saw them outside, whether in their souped up Honda Civics, or in their black pleather pants and high heals that they didn’t know how to walk in. Quite a sight, those stupid townies.
I didn’t like sitting on the bench- I could feel it making permanent ridges in my ass, and I was beginning to feel uncomfortable in my surroundings for the first time. I hadn’t gotten high in close to a month, and had spent my entire summer smoking day in and day out without the complication of being without a never-ending stash. But I hadn’t even found anyone in the area that knew how to get to my favorite drug, and I was beginning to get antsy about it. I figured that was what was causing me to feel a little uneasy at the time, so I tried to let it pass and get over it, but the anxious feeling in my head refused to let go. I moved from the bench to the foot-high concrete surrounding the flower bed that randomly sat attached to the brick wall, and sat there for a good five minutes before deciding that watching townies for another second was going to drive me insane. I had to get up and go somewhere else, but found myself lacking the strength to do so. I started to freak out when I noticed my hands shaking frantically, and I figured that I was just having some minor anxiety issues.
To calm myself, I took out my sketchbook that I’d been writing in, and removed the green pen from my back pocket. But to my dismay, I found myself flipping through my book for an empty page, and being deprived of any room to write. Writing was the only thing that could calm me at the point, so I found the blankest page I could find (which was one practically covered in writing already) and wrote in every tiny space that wasn’t already filled, thinking that it would help. Unfortunately, the cluttered page only made me feel more anxious about where I was, and I had no idea what to do with myself to make my head feel balanced again.
Eventually I picked myself up from the small cement border and started walking. I walked toward the massive hoard of townies gathered outside the movie theater, and pushed my way through them like I was walking through a mosh pit of sweaty, wife-beater-wearing, white trash. My brain was on overdrive to the point where I was sure I could feel the condensation dripping from their skin and from the walls that protected the inside of the movie theater from their havoc. I felt their fat bodies pushing against each other in slow motion, and their voices got deep and slow, as their screams got louder and their words harder to understand. I was in a raging pile of garbage and I was being suffocated for the matter of ten or fifteen seconds that it really took me to walk through the crowd of people. It was nothing nearly as intense as it felt, but I finally emerged from the crowd, now standing in front of the bookstore where the crowd was starting to die down a little. Those fuckers need to lose weight, I thought to myself, as I started to walk again.
I turned the corner at the end of the bookstore and started to walk along the ten or twelve-foot brick wall that towered over my right side. I ran my fingers along the bricks, feeling them leaving little scratches on my fingertips. My normal walking pace felt like I was walking backwards, so I started to walk faster. And I walked faster. And faster. And faster. I was practically running when I reached the crosswalk and headed for the pick-up station where the bus picked students up. I wanted to get out of the commons so desperately, but I knew I would get there no sooner or later than the girls that were already sitting on the benches at the waiting station, conversing on their typical Friday nights. This was no typical Friday night to me. I wanted to die on this Friday night. I was having one of the worst anxiety attacks of my life on this Friday night, and I just wanted to go home and pace around on my floor until I had burned a mark into my carpet. The girls I could see about fifty feel away from me made me sick. They all looked so happy, so problem-free. I had always envied the girls at my school for their seemingly endless good moods and pleasant days. I wasn’t as fortunate as they always were to be in such good spirits. When I saw them sitting there on the bench, I wanted to turn around and run from them. No, I’ve been doomed to unhappiness ever since I stopped being like you and started thinking with my brain, instead of my blonde hair, I thought. Sadly, it was the truth.
I was so focused on hating the girls I was walking towards that I failed to notice the line of six or seven buses parked to my left. When I finally turned my head and noted their existence, I noticed the bold writing printed on the side of all of them. “Avon Old Farms.” Great. As if being surrounded by the assholes I went to school with every day, and the stupid white trash townies that populated the Commons were enough, now I could catch glimpses of good-looking future-frat boys running amok, too.
Avon Old Farms was the all-guy’s school located only about twenty minutes from my school. Every girl that was an official Ethel Walker girl dated an Avon Old Farms guy. It was tradition. Anybody who was anybody from Ethel Walker wanted to date an Avon boy. All the seniors wore their boyfriends’ Avon windbreakers day in and day out so as to show off their healthy relationships. Wearing an Avon jacket was like a twisted form of Ethel Walker school spirit. If that wasn’t reason enough for me to avoid wearing one, the fact that most Avon boys were complete assholes was. As a freshman, I’d dated a guy from the South Kent School for Boys, and since been doomed to be an outcast.
I stared at their buses in utter awe that they were there. How had I forgotten that Fridays were the one night that Avon Old Farms had out on the town, and why the hell had I gone out on that night? I hated Avon boys with a passion, and I hated the girls from my school that flocked to them at first sight. Upon seeing their busses parked in the Shaw’s parking lot, I only wanted to get home sooner. I walked frantically to the benches, sat myself down, and
waited impatiently for the bus to arrive.
The small crowd of girls that were also waiting for the bus were all Asians, and minded their own business in their own language, which I was thankful for. The last thing I wanted was to interact with anyone at the point, so I was happy that the only people waiting for the bus with me were people that barely spoke the same language as me. I twiddled my thumbs in my lap and blew my breath in hopes to hear a whistling sound come from my mouth, but failed to realize that I never learned how to whistle.
When the bus finally arrived, I let all the Asians walk up the steps and find their seats before I got up from my seat. Surprisingly, I got a seat to myself, which I was more than thankful for. Simona Tsu sat across from me, on the outside of the seat which she was sharing with her friend. She spoke in Korean, so I had no idea what she was saying, but in the midst of her conversation, I could swear she knew something about me. I looked and felt terrible, like I was on a mixture of drugs I’d never taken before. I was a physical and emotional wreck, and I wanted to explode. The looks she sent my way made me so nervous, that I pulled my wrist band that reeked of weed, clove cigarettes, and menthols from my wrist and threw it around in my hands madly. I needed to keep my hands busy, otherwise I knew I’d end up taking out a cigarette and lighting it right there on the bus. I was petrified. I needed to either get off the bus or not move a muscle until everyone else was gone. If I moved at all, a blood-curdling scream would probably escape from my boiling mouth, so I stood still with the exception of my frantic fingers. I reeked of cigarettes. The bus felt like it was traveling at the speed of light, but I knew it was still going far too slow for me. I had to get away from Simona. She was reading my mind- I could tell she was.
When the bus pulled into the driveway of my school, I was breaking out in a cold sweat. I waited again for all the Asians to make their way off the bus, despite Simona’s courteous gesture for me to go in front of her. I raced up the steps to the lobby, where I signed my name into the sign-in sheet in the penmanship of a three-year-old.
I blinked and found myself standing in front of Alexi in the aisle of the barn again. She was looking at me with a dazed look like I was crazy or something. There’d only been about five seconds of silence between us, and I could tell her bizarre look was because of my mentioning of an “anxiety attack,” a concept she was obviously unfamiliar with.
“An… anxiety attack?” she said, looking confused.
“Yea… people who aren’t perfect tend to get them sometimes,” I snapped, getting annoyed with her presence by that point. Being around Alexi for too long made me feel like I was going head-first down a chute that would lead me straight into the depths of hell. I guess she has that affect on people that aren’t so completely perfect.
She cocked her eyebrow and gave me one last weird look before turning around and walking towards her horse again. I contemplated my awkward encounter for the rest of the hour I spent at the barn. I barely ever conversed with Alexi, and her reasoning for talking to me on such a random occasion confused me. What good would Alexi have with that information, anyway, and how many other people besides her were so conveniently interested in my drug use? I shrugged the burden off my shoulders and eventually decided that Alexi’s curiosity must have just been a coincidence.
My walk to dinner was a little too bizarre to be comforting. It was mid-Fall, and the gigantic trees in the front lawn were all different shades of maroon and marigold and bright fluorescent orange. The breeze felt so refreshing after an hour-long riding lesson, but the air itself didn’t feel as nice. Everything seemed so quiet, yet it felt like there was such a buzz going around; everyone was whispering. There was nobody else around outside on my short walk, so I was left to ponder the silence of the school I was walking towards. It felt like something was going to happen soon, and the silence was just the quiet wind before the real storm. Things were beginning to scare me, and I wanted to get out. I kept spinning a wheel of the same thought around the circumference of my brain, saying it to myself over and over again. I wanna get out of here. I wanna get out of here. I wanna get out of here. Aparently, while constantly repeating the thought in my head, somebody sitting inside their office of authority must have been reading my mind.
Dinner was lonely that night, and I felt like I should have had some sort of lame soundtrack trailing behind me. There was a constant tune of lurking sadness wherever I walked around that campus, and I felt like there was no escaping the fact that as I walked from the dining room to the giant wooden doors of my dorm, rumors were circulating about me. I didn’t know what they were, nor did I care. I cared more about the fact that they were there in the first place, and how I seemed to be the center of attention when I had done nothing more than my other friends. I was growing unhappier with my situation with every thought of punishment that circulated through my head. I reached my room in the far corner of the dorm, room C219, swung it open to find it empty, and threw myself onto the bed, where I stayed in contemplation for a solid five minutes. I sat up and reached for my stereo remote, pressed play, and enjoyed the sounds of my own personal music box playing the only songs I wanted to hear at that moment. I lied back on my bed and placed my hands on the back of my head, and enjoyed the music alone in my room. I had no distractions, no limits, and no Korean pop to suffer through- just me, my music, and my thoughts.
I woke up to the Wednesday sun coming slightly through my drawn blinds. The day went by in
a blur of nothingness. School molded into my riding lesson, which molded into whatever random conversations I had had with people that day, which molded into the macaroni and cheese I ate for dinner. The day didn’t start to stand out until that night when I was turning the corner at the end of Borders, and started to run my fingers along the brick of the wall that towered over my right side.
I was only out to run a very specific errand for a friend. I’d crawled out of bed from a late afternoon nap, tossed on a pair of baggy pants and a small black hoodie, and caught the bus on my mission for her. My task was simple: retrieve a tub of vanilla frosting for my desperate friend waiting for me in her room. It seemed simple enough upon entering the bus, but as I was running my fingers along the brick wall, lightly scratching the surface of my fingertips, my mission to retrieve frosting for my friend became a little more complicated than I could have expected.
I had been dreaming about finding someone in the town of Simsbury that seemed remotely interesting. But only in my dreams had I been able to find a guy that I related to- one that listened to underground music, and one that went to local shows. Only in those dreams had I met a guy that wore a black hoodie and small jeans every day- the guy that strummed a guitar out of boredom, instead of jacking off to Penthouse like the typical Avon boys. I’d been dreaming about him since the beginning of sophomore year, and after failing to find him after a year of looking, I decided that boys like that must not exist in this town. I was beginning to feel like the only person that was anything like me in all of Simsbury and Avon. I was beginning to think that until an old Toyota drove by the sidewalk I was walking on, and a boy stuck his head out of the window… and spit at me.
A Polish-looking white boy with a shaved head stuck his head out the window and made foolish gagging noises at me while his friend drove by me. I could tell it was in a joking manner, because the boy sticking his head out the window looked like he belonged in the same crowd of people as I did, which sparked a hint of optimism through my back. But it wasn’t actually that boy that I noticed so quickly while walking down the length of that brick wall.
It wasn’t until after the car drove by that I noticed another head in the back seat. I didn’t get a good look at him, but I saw him enough to realize that he was particularly good-looking, and noticed that as I kept my eyes on him, he kept his eyes glued to me. For a second, we, dare I say, had a moment.
I figured that would be the end of it. I had caught a short glimpse of a good-looking guy in the back seat of a car, shared a moment with him, and watched him drive off until I could no longer see the car he was in. I figured I’d never learn his favorite color, or when his birthday was, or how many brothers or sisters he had. I figured I’d never learn his name or the names of his friends, and I’d never know which restaurant he liked to eat at when he didn’t have to pay, or what he liked to do on Friday nights. I figured I’d watch him drive off until I could no longer see the car he was in, and then I’d never see the boy in the back seat ever again.
I walked into the grocery store, straight into the correct aisle, grabbed my friend’s tub of frosting, and headed towards the checkout. But I stopped dead in my tracks when I turned toward the checkout lanes and spotted a familiar face. The boy that had stuck his head out of his window and spit at me was standing right smack at the end of aisle five, with two other boys. One of them was one I hadn’t seen. The other was a tall and skinny figure that wore a black t-shirt and dark jeans. He had a black hat over his clearly blonde hair, and when he turned around, I saw the face of the gorgeous punk-rocker that I’d spent a year looking for.
Out of complete nervousness, I turned the other way and headed away from them, hoping that I hadn’t been noticed. I headed for the self-checkout lane, where I was pretty sure I could get out disregarded. I scanned the tub of frosting and followed the easy step-by-step nature of the self-checkout machine. I’d always been told these damn machines put poor teenagers out of jobs. Trying to stray my mind from the beautiful male standing only a few aisles away from me, I tried to think of random things instead. I shoved a wrinkly five dollar bill into the anxiously blinking slot, and watched it spit the bill back out at me. I hated it more than anything when vending machines did that to people.
Everything felt so frantic at that point, and I was in a rushed mess to get out of there overlooked by the boys I’d just seen. I don’t know exactly why I was so scared of an encounter with them, but I assumed it was because I hadn’t even seen people like them in what seemed like ages. I had convinced myself that the kind of boys like the boys I liked only existed in my hometown, and I hadn’t seen or conversed with one in such a long time. Everything was moving in fast-motion. The supermarket was jammed with beeping noises of random machines all over the store, and people were yelling and talking and rapidly crashing their carts into each other like a rush-hour frenzy. I wanna get out of here. I wanna get out of here. I wanna get out of here. I feared in the back of my mind, but in reality, I wanted nothing more than to talk to those boys. I told myself that I wanted to avoid them, and I wanted to get back to the dorm and put an end to this mission, but only my mind knew how badly I really wanted to talk to them, how badly I really wanted them to talk to me.
I was so frantically checking out that I didn’t notice the three boys walk through the automatic exit door. When I walked out holding my plastic Shaw’s bag containing a small tub of vanilla frosting, I was looking down at the ground. I walked about five feet with my head facing the ground, when I noticed a pair of black Converse All-Stars come into my field of vision. I looked up reluctantly, completely started by the person in front of me wearing the logo shoes of my hometown. I slowly raised my head. I noted a familiar pair of dark jeans wrapping around the top of the shoes, and a familiar black t-shirt draped over the studded belt at the top of those jeans. When my head was finally looking straight again, I was staring straight into the eyes of the boy that I was convinced I’d never see again.
“Do you know what’s fun to do around here?” he said. I ignored his question at first, thinking that he wasn’t talking to me as I walked by. His voice was deep, and its tone fit nicely with the baby blue color of his eyes. I stopped in my tracks and turned around to look at the three boys behind me.
“…Wait… Are you asking me?” I asked them.
“Yeah,” the one with the shaved head replied.
“No. I don’t live around here,” I said.
“Where are you from?” the good-looking one asked.
“Vermont.”
“So what are you doing around here?” he asked, blatantly curious to know what the hell I was doing in Simsbury, Connecticut.
“I go to school around here,” I said.
There was a taller male that hadn’t spoken yet. He had obviously been the driver of the old Toyota that had driven by me earlier, and the one of the three that I hadn’t gotten a good look at yet. His hair was greasy and combed over his face. He had a fairly large nose and a giant pimple right in the center of it. He seemed a lot nerdier than the other two, to the point where it seemed almost as if he didn’t really fit in with them. “College girl?” he asked.
“No. I go to the private school up the road a little bit.” I was stuttering a little bit. It was nearly impossible to get any good words out of my mouth without a stutter of nervousness.
They laughed at my answer, clearly surprised that they were looking at a private school girl. “Don’t take offense, but you don’t look like you fit in much in a private school,” the good-looking one said, looking me up and down. I remembered the baggy pants I was wearing and immediately felt a little embarrassed with my wardrobe, wishing I was wearing something a bit cooler.
I was about to respond to his comment when I decided to drop the conversation of my education, and find out more about the boys standing in front of me. “Who are you,” I blatantly asked.
The boy with the shaved head looked at me first and responded “I’m Mark.”
The nerdy boy introduced himself next as Luke.
I looked at the good-looking boy last and waited for his response. “My name’s Darcy,” he said.
The words “I’m Rachel” seemed to come out of my mouth in slow motion, and I can only imagine how jumbled and slurred they were, due to my fascination with the good-looking boy with the unique name standing in front of me.
Mark abruptly interrupted my eye contact with Darcy and spat out, “So do you like ska?”
I immediately turned to him with a disgusted look on my face and responded with a gross “No” and an insulted face. I hated ska. Ska was probably the worst excuse for good music I had heard in a long time, and I was surprised that I resembled someone that listened to such a thing to a stranger. After I snapped my answer to his random question, I asked for an explanation as to why he was so curious.
“Well I saw the strap on your bag and figured you were a ska kid. That’s why I spit at you. But if you don’t like ska, then I take it back. You’re cool.” Aha. I recognized the checkerboard pattern of the strap on my messenger bag, and realized why I had come off as a ska kid at first glance.
I started to walk off again, heading toward the pick-up benches to wait for the bus, but Darcy opened his mouth and obviously spoke for the sake of saying something before I walked off. “Want to come with us?”
I stopped. A boy as good-looking as the one I had just barely been introduced to, the boy I had been having dreams about since sophomore year, the boy I had been dying to find since realizing how little I fit in at private school, was asking me if I wanted to spend the rest of the evening with him and his two accompanying friends. I stopped dead in my path that was headed for the pick-up benches. “Yes. Yeah, I’ll go with you,” I said. I could feel the boy making my heart melt. I could feel a giant crush forming.
Luke’s old Toyota wasn’t at all spacious or comfortable. It was old and rusty and I could feel it crumbling underneath my seat. Darcy sat next to me in the back seat, crammed between me and the pile of random crap shoved onto the right side of the back seat. I didn’t know where we were headed, but this was the first time I’d ever been in a car in the town of Simsbury that wasn’t either the bus or one of my parents’ cars. It was so weird feeling like I’d finally met people I could hang out with. I had finally met people that could come and pick me up from school and take me out on any given nights, and people that I could meet up with when I had nothing to do. It was the first time I had ever ridden in a teenager’s car since first attending private school, and it was a feeling I was quickly growing fond of.
When I heard Darcy tell me that we were almost there, I pulled out my nearly emptied pack of cigarettes and slid one into my mouth. A thin, black stick of tobacco hung from my mouth for the rest of the car ride, and when Luke looked in his rear-view mirror and saw me sitting there, he let out a startled gasp of joy and asked me if that was a clove.
“Yes it is,” I replied. “Do you want one? You can have my last one.” He politely turned down the offer to take my last cigarette, but I handed it to him anyway and told him he was probably helping me out by taking it. There was nowhere to get clove cigarettes around here, and I hated the taste of regular cigarettes, so I’d probably go a while without smoking anything at all. Besides, I figured a cigarette was a good way to break the ice more with these boys.
We exited the car as I lit my cigarette. I handed my little pink lighter to Luke, as he lit his and took a long and harsh drag of his cigarette. Darcy held out his two fingers and moved them so as to motion that he wanted a taste of my cigarette. I slid it between his two fingers, and he inhaled its candy-like taste between his lips and into the back of his throat. His cheeks went in a little bit, and his face went long as he smoked. His fingers were long and boney around the cigarette, and he held it in such a manner that it looked almost classy. I couldn’t help but admire him. He looked good when he smoked.
When I looked around, I noticed we were standing in the parking lot of a McDonalds. I was a bit nervous about why that was our destination, because I absolutely hated fast food, and hoped that I wouldn’t already be finding things I didn’t have in common with these boys. Fortunately, we headed into an alley between the McDonalds and another random building, as Darcy pointed to a fire escape that lead up to the roof of the taller building. It was steep and looked rickety and slightly dangerous, but I climbed it anyway behind the rest of the boys. When I finally reached the top, Darcy slid the half-smoked cigarette back in between my fingers. My heart raced a little bit when I felt his hand make contact with mine, but stopped my nervousness when I realized I was no longer a third grader holding hands for the first time. He smiled at me, turned around, and headed for the edge of the roof, where Mark and Luke were already standing.
When I walked to the edge with them, I saw a beautiful slur of lights below me that it nearly took me by surprise- I had no idea Simsbury had so many lights in the first place. I guess I was higher than I’d imagined I would be, because I could see practically the entire Commons from where I was standing. It seemed so fitting that it was the first time I was seeing anything remotely spectacular about the town I was now living in, and the people that had showed it to me were the people that I knew existed somewhere in the underground of this place.
I could see all the traffic lights of all the major intersections, and all the headlights and tail-lights of all the cars sitting at them. I could see all the neon lights of the stores, and all the streetlights shining down on the parking lots filled with cars. I could see tiny specs in front of the movie theater that I figured were all the townies that flocked outside. I returned my glance to my left, and I could see three boys that had already made my night memorable by 7 PM.
We progressed from the roof to the benches that sat outside the gigantic Petco about a half an hour later. I sat between Darcy and Mark, who eventually got up from his seat to wrestle with Luke on the lawn, leaving Darcy and I alone on the bench for a couple minutes. The silence was a bit awkward, but I felt so comforted by his presence at the same time. I was tempted to kiss him right there, and thank him for existing in a part of the world that I was almost certain had become extinct of his kind. He looked away at Mark and Luke on the ground about ten feet away, and then turned around and looked at me again. “What’s private school like?” he asked.
A slur of thoughts rushed through my head when he opened his mouth and asked me that question. I didn’t know whether to make my answer short and simple, or to actually get into what private school was like for a girl like me. If I wasn’t in danger of being someone that talked until their head came off, I would have told him plainly how much I hated it, and how obvious it was that I didn’t belong there.
Well, my freshman roommate soaped up my toothbrush and claimed my favorite pair of pants here ‘luckies’ because of all the times they’d gotten her laid in the bathroom at the school dances. And my sophomore roommate thinks she’s black, I thought. No, no that’s not a good way to start.
The entire student body is obsessed with their images. They’re mirror reflections of their asshole parents who send them away to private school in hopes that the simple fact that the name of the school is on their child’s transcript will automatically get them into a prestigious school where they’ll excel in life and make millions. They run around with their straight A’s and don’t know what to do with themselves when they score half a point off for adding instead of subtracting on their math quiz, I thought to myself, trying to think of a good way to answer his question. No, that’s not good either.
Everyone’s a robot. The Dean of students is like their master that- no, no that’s not good either.
Everyone walks around with their hands in their pants trying to relieve their horniness. At first sight of a guy, every girl falls head over heals, whether he’s a heart-throb, or a cow. I mean, just the other day, this- I stopped my train of thought again. No, I don’t want to say that either.
“Rachel?” My thoughts were interrupted by his voice again, making sure I’d heard his question.
“It’s like…” I paused, trying to quickly think up a good explanation for private school without carrying off on too much of a tangent. “It’s like playing metal as loud as your speakers can go, and instead of enjoying it, you’re banging your face into the wall instead. And while you do it, a group of gorgeous girls are standing at your doorway wondering why you’re banging your face into things, and all you can think is how funny it is that they have no idea, because your reasoning seems so obvious to you,” I finally said.
“What’s the reason?” he asked, clearly intrigued by my answer.
“The reason is private school sucks,” I said, skipping straight to the point. “Instead of enjoying the fact that you’re getting a good education, you’re stuck with the fact that you’re in a private school packed with girls that you have nothing in common with. And while you react the way your body and mind will inevitably react to all of it, sort of like the way you’re trained to react, everyone around you will look at you with a bizarre look and just wonder what the hell you’re doing. ‘Who in the right mind would do such a thing?’ they think. ‘Why would anyone want to play music with screaming in it? Why would anyone want to bang their head up and down until it hurts?’ they want to know. The funny thing is that throughout all their wondering where your head could possibly be at, you’re wondering the same thing about them. It seems so profound that anyone could enjoy themselves at a place like private school. It seems so fucked up that anyone wouldn’t want to choke themselves trying to suffer for four years in a place like that. It just seems weird to me that anyone would listen to metal and not want to bash their face into things,” I spat out. I was pretty sure he understood my point by then.
He gave me a huge smile and laughed at my response. “You’re pretty awesome,” he said, still chuckling.
I could feel my cheeks turning red, and I immediately turned the other way. I was damn satisfied with my answer, and a bit surprised at my ability to explain private school in such a metaphor.
Mark and Luke walked back over to the bench we were sitting on just as I thought my face was returning to its normal color. Mark sat himself down next to me and said something random to me, but I was too busy paying attention to Luke, who was walking closer to the windows of the giant store we were sitting in front of. Mark’s voice turned into a monotone hum in the back of my head, and my vision stayed plastered on Luke, who was slowly walking closer and closer to the windows. Judging by the way he was walking, and the way Mark’s voice became unheard in front of me, I could tell that something was about to happen. Luke had a certain stride to his walk that made me anxiously await whatever was about to happen.
When he finally reached the window, he turned around with a gigantic smile on his face and started to yell something back at us. He pointed his finger to the inside of the store. “Hey, guys! Look at-” He was immediately cut off by the sound of a loud beeping coming from the outside of the building. The alarm sounded for about three beeps before all my thoughts were interrupted by the feeling of water hitting the top of my head from behind. The sprinklers had gone off full throttle and were drenching us where we sat. Within the five seconds it took us to realize that we were being soaked by the Petco security, we were already completely saturated.
Realizing that there was no avoiding walking away from the mess sopping wet, we didn’t bother running away from it. Instead, I jumped up from my seat spontaneously with my eyes closed and the palms of my hands out. Mark was the only one that ran with his arms covering his head, but he soon realized that he was no dryer than any of us, and ran back under the frantic sprinklers. Darcy had jumped up at about the same time that I had, but had run to grab Luke instead. We were laughing so hysterically by that point that it was hard to stand, but Darcy somehow managed to grab a hold of Luke’s arms and pull him into the torrential downpour that had surrounded us.
Each of us was a victim of the monsoon from head to toe, but there didn’t seem to be a care shared between any of us about how disgustingly wet were all were. We had reached the point where we were so drenched that we obviously didn’t care anymore, and with the sound of the beeping alarm in the background, the moment in time seemed untouchable. We were utter teenagers running amok and doing as we pleased, absorbing every careless accident and random glitch in the system as just another way to have a good time. I felt like I had acquired three new best friends, until I looked at Darcy rolling around on the wet grass and absorbing every last drop of water into his clothing. I looked at his gorgeous face and lanky figure, and decided I had acquired two new best friends, and a love interest.
I lost all recollection of what time the books stated that underclassmen were supposed to return back to the dorms, but by the time Luke’s car reached the entrance of my school, I didn’t exactly care. It was around 10:15, and I was positive I was breaking some kind of rule, whether it was arriving too late, or riding in a car with another teenager without granted permission from my parents. I had blown off a good number of the strict rules I promised to abide by upon attending that stupid school, and right at that second, I honestly didn’t give a shit. I had just experienced the best night I’d had since moving to that town, all because of my fateful run-in with those three boys.
“So, are you gonna want to hang out again sometime?” Luke glanced back at me from the driver’s seat, with a hopeful look on his face.
“Yeah,” I responded, while removing the tiny pad of paper that I always carried in my back pocket. My “memopad,” as I called it, had served for years as the small notebook shoved into my left butt pocket, which I pulled out and wrote whatever outrageous quotes happened to be said in front of me. Over the times of drug use and merrymaking of the summer, I had recorded hundreds of random thoughts and witty quotes. I’d used it to write obscene notes, which I would rip out and place under the windshield wipers of unfortunate cars. I’d used it to rolling paper. I’d used it to make tiny origami when I was bored stiff. I’d used that wonderful memopad for tons of things in the past, and giving my number out had been one of them in the past, but never before had I written my dorm room number on one of those tiny pieces of paper, and handed it to a guy as gorgeous as the one sitting next to me.
As I wrote the seven digits of my room number, I could feel myself becoming more and more excited for what waited for me and these boys in the future. How many of their friends would I meet, and would they all be this cool? How many local shows would I go to with them, and how good or awful would the bands be? I could only imagine the good things that were waiting for me now that I had associated myself with such an amazing group of people. My excitement was overwhelming. I nearly leaned over and kissed Darcy when I had finished the last digit of my phone number, but instead I just reached out my arm and handed him the folded piece of lined paper that contained the seven digits he would eventually call, and the name of the girl he would eventually ask for on the other line.
I walked into the lobby to see Richard Pragar, the assistant Dean of Students, sitting at the receptionist desk. It was 10:15, and I was sure that juniors were due back to the campus sometime during the 9 o’clock hour. He was a burly man with droopy eyes and big glasses, and had a ridiculously friendly look to him that matched his attitude perfectly. He had gigantic lips and buck teeth, and his hair was always combed over with a side part, barely revealing the graying portion in the front. He always had a little bit of black stubble around his face, but never a mustache or a beard, but he never looked unprofessional. Anyone could tell he had been a nerd since childhood, but nobody held it to him because he was such a nice guy. I’d had a good number of random conversations with him in the past about simple things, and had always enjoyed conversing with him. He was so easy to talk to and so friendly, no matter what the circumstances were, and for those reasons, he was probably the only person with authority at that school that I liked.
I strolled up to the desk he was sitting at, my clothes still entirely soaked with water. My shoes made a squishing sound on the marble floor as I walked towards him, and my hair was flat against the shape of my head, dripping water down my face. I trailed a puddle of water behind me as I walked up to the desk and looked at Mr. Pragar with an innocent look. He had been smiling at me goofily since I had opened the door and entered the lobby, and I was comforted that he was the one sitting behind the sign-in sheet, instead of the 80-year-old witch of a receptionist that usually sat there.
“10:15,” he said.
I thought about explaining myself. I thought about telling him to cut me a break because of the amazing night I had just had. I started shuffling through my thoughts for a good enough story to tell him, but before I had the chance to open my mouth, he smiled at me and said, “You look like you had an interesting night.”
“Interesting is an understatement.”
He laughed out loud and told me that he’d let it slide this one time. I nearly collapsed in a heap of relief, and sighed heavily, thanking him endlessly. I strolled back to my dorm, once again trying to whistle. But the fact that I lacked the ability to make a joyful whistling sound escape from between my puckered lips didn’t tamper at all with the elevation that my head was at. I was in the clouds. I was untouchable on that walk back to my dorm. God only knew how brightly I was glowing.