Project 1

Chapter I: Recollections

It's been nearly a decade since I was enrolled as a sophomore at Upland High School and much of my four-year experience there has left me. From what I can recall, I wasn't very popular and I was an honors student but nevertheless I always found myself around a group of close friends. Faces remain fuzzy but I know for certain that the group consisted mostly of guys. There was a Chris, a boy I had known from junior high and an avid fan of physical exercise who was rumored to have sexually pleasured much of the football team in the locker room. There was a tall slender guy named Nick whom we often referred to as"Dago"; he would constantly try to convince us that he was something called "Filipino" (the term sounded fictional to us) but we knew that squinty-eyed fuck was Italian. There was a guy named Mason who always had with him a girl named Jamie; he insisted that Jamie was his girlfriend but his questionable history of blowing strangers in the alley behind the school made him claim seem very implausible. For all we knew Jamie was a cover-up for Mason's closet homosexuality. There was a boy named Rain (yes, that was his name. What the actual fuck?) and to be completely honest, we never completely knew Rain's ethnicity. On one hand he looked European but on the other he looked Middle Eastern; he revealed to us sophomore year that he was Palestinian and we finally knew the truth. Alongside Rain there was another guy in our group, a curious mixture of French and Syrian descent named Ziad; profoundly anti-Semitic and an advocate of Sunni Islam, he committed random acts of terrorism throughout the country. He often cited his greatest accomplishments as taking his flight on a detour through the World Trade Center towers and winning the Boston Marathon. His family was extremely wealthy as a result of their share in the Saudi Arabian oil fields and thus, whenever he was arrested, he was bailed out. The last person I can remember from our group was a scroungy little fucker named Kenneth. Having defected from Spain after his father was nearly convicted for drug trafficking, Kenny, as he came to be known, was more or less a little bitch. He was, by definition, a"fuckboy" and standing at a mere 4'11, he was easily the smallest out of our entire group. And then there was me, an awkward adolescent boy with no special attributes and a hatred for my math teacher Mrs. Pages, whom Nick and I became convinced was the female embodiment of Bill Gates. We weren't perfect in any sense but we got by by sticking together...that is until the end of our tenth grade year. It was the time that lunch fell around on a Friday and we hadn't seen Kenny all day. We didn't really "miss" him in any sense, he was a little bitch after all, but still we found it odd he didn't show up for lunch. It wasn't until Chris went to the bathroom that we learned of Kenny's fate; lying face down in the toilet was Kenny. There was no blood to be found and an autopsy report revealed that drowning was not the cause of death. They told that presumably Kenny had been nut-tickled to death and we were baffled, mostly because we were never aware that Kenny had nuts to begin with. The funeral service was planned and no one attended, not even Kenny even though he was fucking dead. The search for his killer was on...