Love and War

Chapter Nine: Trace Miles

Monday March 1st 2010

Ryan Gabriel Tramblay

    A new month always had me feeling excited, partially because I could change the face of my calendar to something new. Though before I switched the months I drew a little star on February 28th, because that was the day that Holiday had gotten together.

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Wednesday March 3rd 2010

Holiday Joss Boulstridge

    Piper didn’t show up for World History two days in a row, and usually that wasn’t like her. Piper loved the social sciences and was hoping to go to university and study history so that she could come back and teach other high school students to love history as much as she did.

     I hadn’t seen Piper at all since Friday, the day that I had broken up with her. I had cursed myself because Piper and I sat together in class and now we had had to look at each other after the fact that we were broken up. To say things had become awkward would have been a vast understatement.

     I was hoping today would be the day that Piper would show up so that I could at least talk to her. I wanted to know that she and I could still be friends despite what had happened between us.

      I sat down in the class, which smelt strongly of armpits because of Logan Spinelli who rode his bike to school for nearly an hour every day. When he stepped into the class his forehead was soaked with sweat, even though winter was hardly over.

      Mrs. Fowler was writing notes on the board about the Church of England’s succession from Rome which I found absolutely ridiculous. I mean Henry VII changed the face of religion in England just because he wanted to bone Anne Boleyn. Did he want Anne that much that he was willing to cast aside the perfectly good Catherine of Aragon for Anne Boleyn? So what if Catherine wouldn’t have given him a son? That wasn’t her fault, all eggs are female it’s the male’s sperm that decides the gender for a baby.

      Mrs. Fowler pardoned herself and then left the room, presumably to look for a video. One thing I liked a lot about Mrs. Fowler was that she often showed us videos about the things that we were talking about. I remember last year when I took her World History to the 16th Century course she let us watch a scene from 300 because we were learning about Spartans and their warfare.

      Piper stormed into the room and took one look at me before sitting at the first desk in front of her. I cursed under my breath and looked back at her, trying to beam the message COME OVER HERE into her head. She slipped the headphones to her mp3 into her ears and blasted her music. She put her head down on her desk and her red hair made a burnt orange sheet over her desk.

     I took my pencil and broke it against the surface of my desk and scrambled around in my pencil case for my metal sharpener. I tried to casually walk over to Piper, but she refused to meet my eyes. I coughed as I twisted the pencil in the sharpener, willing the pencil’s lead to come out as slowly as possible so I could try and get Piper to notice me.

     When I realized that what I was doing was absolutely futile, I clutched the pencil sharpener in my hand which had now become hot and trudged back to my desk. I guess she was still mad. I would give her a few more days before I tried to talk to her again.