Growing Pains

Chapter 7 - Life was a favor I was doing someone else

C A I T L Y N

Someone had scratched the words kill me on one of the school's stone windowsills, right next to the very insightful sentence, Allora is a slut. I didn't know who Allora was, but I thought whoever wrote it was on to something with their first take. Most days, life was a favor I was doing someone else, one I would rather pass on, but couldn't.

"Hi."

I turned around at the voice, almost burning Tristan with the end of my cigarette. He moved away from it just in time, wiping the ashes that fell on his t-shirt.

"Good morning," I said.

"So good," he mumbled, frowning as he stuffed his hand in the pockets of his black jeans instead. There was a big rip on his knee, not because he had bought it that way or even because he had fallen on it, but because once I ashed a cigarette there and he didn't find the burn mark fashionable enough. It hadn't been my best moment, but I hardly had good ones anyway.

I leaned against my locker. I had meant to open it and get at least some of my textbooks out of it. Mom had been happy to get me the schoolbooks for this year even after I told her I wouldn't use them. I did mean to get some of them out today, but that was all it was.

"What did you end up doing last night?" I asked him, taking the cigarette up to my lips again.

"Substance abuse," he said. "Can you believe my parents hired another babysitter for Sam?"

I exhaled in his face. He didn't care for it.

"They really can't take a hint, can they?"

Tristan's little brother wanted desperately to prove to his parents that he was old enough to stay home alone – having Tristan in the house fell in the realm of home alone – so last time they left him with a stranger, usually, a fifty-year-old woman recommended by an array of rich friends, he locked her out of the house.

He made himself dinner and would have put himself to bed too if only the woman hadn't almost died of heart failure and called the police, who thought Sam was somehow too special to know how to open doors and broken in to save him. He had been in bed, happily reading a comic book with his little night light on.

"I know," Tristan said in front of me, frowning. "But it's worse this time. She's like our age or something. I'm pretty sure she goes here."

I looked around. I didn't know any of the girls at our school. He would have to be more specific.

"What's she like?"

"I don't know, boring?" He shrugged. "Sam liked her somehow. He didn't pull any shit."

"Boring –"

"Hey, you can't smoke in here!" I turned around. "You can't even smoke! You're a child!"

A teacher stood behind me, hands on her meaty waist, a floral dress falling over bright orange tights, hair that said, I teach arts! I suspected she was actually our Precalculus teacher.

"Really?" I asked, putting on a confused look like putting on a jacket, "I can't smoke?"

She nodded. I didn't know her name, but her arm was stretched out to me, hand wide open, waiting for my cigarette like I was a kid eating something I shouldn't. I could have given it to her. She wasn't thinking this through. The end of the cigarette would burn the palm of her hand. I decided against it.

"Oh look," I said instead, taking the cigarette up to my lips and smoking the rest of it in one long inhale. "I'm smoking!"

I exhaled. She looked like I had just flashed her.

"It's a miracle." I shrugged, stubbing the cigarette on the bin lid behind her and throwing the rest in.

"That was really cold," Tristan told me, a small smile on his lips as he studied our Precalculus teacher, "I think your nipples are showing."

She looked down at her breasts, mouth wide open, eyes too.

Tristan laughed, "Made you look."

She didn't find it as funny as I did, crossing her arms over her chest and urging away instead, probably on the way to Mr. Colton's office to snitch on us, as she should.

"We're probably gonna get detention for that," I told him.

Tristan shrugged, "I didn't have breakfast. I needed this."

I smiled, glancing over at the stairs that led up to the rooftop if we climbed past the Not Allowed sign. Tristan noticed, and followed me when I started walking.

We skipped Spanish. We were going to Spain anytime soon, and the rooftop was time-off, like pressing pause on life. No one ever came here, either because they respected the sign or because they knew we were here and didn't want our company. I was yet to cry myself to sleep over this.

There was a collection of empty beer bottles lined up against the edge - proof no one really ever came up here – which Tristan and I were trying to fill up with cigarette butts and smoked joints. If we eased on the beer, we might be able to pull it off before winter break.

"I knew she wasn't all there," Tristan said suddenly, leaning over the edge, a cigarette dangling precariously on his lips. I followed his eyes.

On the football field, gym class played out without us in it. The second period had just started, and Tristan and I had decided Spanish would feel bad if it found out we had skipped it but then went to gym class after. It just didn't seem fair.

"Who?" No one seemed to be all there at all, not the boys running laps around the field, and certainly not the girls practicing their long jump into the sandpit, toilet to all the stray cats in the neighborhood.

Tristan pointed at the two girls in the back of the line for the sandpit dive (exciting!). I didn't actually know any of them, but recognized them from English class last year. One of them had cried her eyes out when the teacher had us watch some movie about World War II, and the other tended to pick fights over book analysis every other week.

The crybaby was wearing the kind of thing I wore to bed, a pair of high-waisted grey cotton shorts and a white t-shirt she had tucked in the way little kids do. I figured she was the one Tristan was talking about since she was the one doing all the dancing. Her friend, dressed in checked cyclist shorts I could not miss even from here, was bent over with laughter.

"Maybe she's on drugs," I said. I suspected there was no music playing, since usually gym class didn't come with a soundtrack. "Either way, I want what she's having."

Tristan shook his head, his face a frown, teeth working on his lip ring.

"How did she get the job?" he asked, "Let her stick around and my brother will grow up to be the kind of man who can't keep an erection."

I grinned, "Can you keep an erection?"

"Fuck you," was his answer, but he was grinning too.

I looked at the girl again. She was still dancing. I would have paid to see her friend piss herself laughing. She looked like she could.

"She looks happy," I said. "Maybe that's why she got the job."

"Madness, I'm telling you," Tristan said, unimpressed. "To be happy in a world like this? Absolute fucking madness."

"Right." My cigarette was finished. "I'm bored. Let's go to the beach."

Tristan had his head on his hands, elbows on the edge we were leaning against. He rolled it slowly my way. There was a smirk in there somewhere, "The beach?"

"Yeah." I looked up. Leftover summer hung in the air like the new autumn breeze.

"I'm not gonna walk like last time," he said, rubbing his face with his hand. He had a sad face tattooed on his middle finger.

I looked at the parking lot to our left. Mr. Colton's car had been broken into last week and he still hadn't fixed the window on the passenger's seat. His temporary fix was clingfilm.

Both Tristan and I carried pocketknives.