Project Nebula

To Start Again

    I touched the lukewarm air of November that sent reluctance through my mind. My thinning jacket wouldn’t protect me from it. . . So I opted out. No way I’d put myself through that. The school cleared before my eyes, leaving me abandoned by the front doors as the buses started to leave one by one. Heated buses with comfy leather seats. And people. Indy didn’t offer me a ride home. Or that other guy. It’s been nearly three weeks since I saw his face. What good did it do for me to even think about it?

Xander tapped me on the shoulder. “Why don’t you stay after school with me? It’s actually kinda relaxing.”

    “It is Friday,” I said to myself. “I could stay, couldn’t I?”

I never saw a more inviting smile from him. The lounge door opened with a door stopper. He flicked on one of the light switches, making the room dim with orange. My toes hit the bottom of a stuffed trash bag as I walked over to the conference table. Like the one from my dream.

    “I saw this before,”  I uttered. “This is real?”

    “You haven’t been in the lounge in a while,” Xander collected a stack of paperwork from the table, like permission slips and memos. “Only you and I are allowed to handle these types of papers; suggestions and such.”

I stepped over the trash bag and to the table, where even more office supplies like staplers and scotch tape covered it. Xander studied one of the papers copied with black and white pictures of the school building. “One downside of being president.”

Xander hauled the bag of bean bag chairs into the center of the room. With his claw, he ripped into the plastic and pulled one of the smaller chairs. He tossed it next to him. I plopped down next to Xander as he set his computer in his lap. Still, I felt I couldn’t get a look at the screen or whatever he was typing. Just slamming random keys. The X key extra hard because it was already jammed. He peered at me. “Nothing special to see here, VP.”

He set the laptop between us and turned it to me. All it was, to rid me of my expectations, was Go, a Chinese board game. And the oldest. I never understood how it worked.

    “How do you even play this?” I clicked around the window like a toddler using Microsoft Paint.

    “It’s all about strategy: it’s how you plan,” he hunched over to meet eye to eye with the screen, spacing out in almost robotic concentration. “And if your plan doesn’t work, you find a workaround. The only rule is strategy.”

    “Plan? Doesn’t sound fun.”

That word: plan. Something I heard before from somewhere. The sticky note. There. In my pocket. It was still there, crumbled and damp from the washing machine. Addressing it straightforward could be a risk, but it’s my only way to avoid seeming mechanical. My plan is working, it read. The more I thought, the more it should’ve made sense before. I had my suspicions. I held it in front of his face. “You wrote these.”

    “I planned it,” he mentioned. “If I did it right, you would’ve have noticed it. But the notes weren’t my plan.”

    “How did you know where I was going to be?”

    “We’re friends, are we?”

    “How much did you plan? All the answers and you didn’t say anything? Why?”

    “Something I can control: Computers have numbers…”

He closed his eyes. His fingers twitched. “I had Peirson. Now I can have you!”

Xander inched closer to me, his voice deepening. More desperate. His whispers rose from his chest and to me. “No one was supposed to die in my plan. And at my expense. So who’s not to say I murdered them?”