Smile On His Lips and Cuts On His Hips (Jalex)

Thirteen - Happiness Is Circumstantial

I was the first person to science.

Way back in the beginning of middle school, when I still had morals and integrity and all that shit, I got to class as close to immediately after the bell ringing as possible. It was the next year – seventh grade, during which something happened that caused all of my principals to get destroyed and taken over by the idea that it didn’t matter how I got good grades, as long as I did – that all of my peers collectively decided to never show up to class until approximately point five seconds before the bell rang. Awkward conversations with teachers due to being the only person in the room deterred me from my old early habits, and I’d taken to arriving as near the late bell as I could.

But, like every system, this had its failures.

While I had yet to be late to a class that year – except for that one time I had to drive May because it was raining, and she refused to leave the house until literally five minutes before school started – there had been numerous close calls. Half the time I very purposefully ended up on the other side of the school from my class by refusing to abandon my friends’ side and had to power walk to beat the bell, thankful for my long stride. But on that day, Rian had a doctor’s appointment, Zack ran off for a last minute bathroom break just as the first bell rang, and none of my other half-friends showed up to help me waste time.

I took the longest route possible, walking to class in a very unnecessary semicircle, and still managed to get there just as the second ball went off. There were three bells – the first warned that we had ten minutes to get to class, the second rang five minutes before the period started, and the third made you late. So I ended up slinking to my desk in the back of the room quietly, hoping that Ms. Garcia wouldn’t notice my existence until someone else showed up. As long as there was at least one other person in the room, teachers never seemed to feel obligated to make conversation, which I greatly appreciated.

I huffed out a sigh of relief as the door swung open, some redhead girl I sort of recognized from being in a few of my classes, but had no idea what her name was, walking in. I was pretty sure that she was one of those people who didn’t talk and thought that all her peers were idiots. Honestly, I would happily be the same way if total silence didn’t drive me insane.

Four minutes of needlessly flipping through my notebook and re-crossing my legs in an attempt to make the blue plastic chair comfortable later, Alex slid into his seat next to me just as the bell shrieked. We had science in the classrooms that had been finished right before the start of this year, and something was wrong with the bells, making them ridiculously loud. Ms. Garcia herself rolled her eyes at the unnecessary noise as we suffered through it. She simply gestured to the board, which showed our bell work – a term that I’d never understood, considering that it almost always took place after the bell – which was to be completed. It had easy instructions to open to and title the next page in our spirals. Apparently, were we starting to learn about the periodic table.

“What’s today?” Alex asked, glancing up at me from searching through his pencil case. I slanted my head to the side, considering the answer to that question while scribbling a barely legible title for the page. My handwriting stopped improving after second grade.

“Uh… the nineteenth?” I said, lack of certainty obvious in my voice. I barely knew that it was Friday, let alone the day of the month.

“October nineteenth? Fuck, I thought that school started,  like, last week,” he responded with a frown, shrugging noncommittally and scribbling the date on the corner of the page.

I was about to say something about how, yeah, how the fuck had an entire quarter of the school year passed without my noticing, when our teacher decided to trudge up to the front of the class and start to teach. She began blabbering about how the periodic table was organized – didn’t they teach us this in eighth grade? – and I zoned out, figuring that I could get the necessary information for whatever we were doing from someone at my table who was actually paying attention. There had to be at least one person.