Less Than Alive: Still Kicking

Libraries: Noisy Rooms

I shall continue my little tale on the proceeding morning. That being, sometime after I entered school and found out that I had been assigned the worst seat in class—front row, spitting distance from the teacher’s desk. To add to my list of amusing discoveries, I found out that the person behind me was an air-headed ingrate girl that liked to kick at the back of people’s chairs, notably, mine.

Now, it’s not all bad. The desks that we are provided are not actually desks, but interfaces to the school’s server computer that fold out of the floor along with our seats; they even make a gnarly Star Trek-ish sound as they do so.

Of course, having one’s own computer in class would usually mean that some idle moments would be wasted playing video games. But, as aforementioned, I’m in the front row. And some of the other level one drop-outs in my class are ass-kissing dweebs.

I won’t go in depth about how dreadfully lame school is, how boring Miss Bearskin--our teacher--turned out to be, or how the first few hours in the new classroom became a display foreshadowing the rest of my school year. I will touch on one thing, one strange event that happened during an intermission.

Some of the not-so-fine-looking girls behind me were whispering to one another. You know that particular kind of whisper a girl can do that manages to cross the entire room and reach the ear of every person in a kilometre radius? Allthewhile still somehow conveying that you shouldn’t be listening?

Yeah, that kind.

“I know! I got one of the letters last night too, it was awesome!” said airhead Numero One.

Numero Two leaned in closer. “Me too! And, I got to see the Great Protagonist, in person.”

They kyaaa’d.

I almost puked.

“Well, are you going to go to the gathering tonight? I heard that it’s going to be, like, super risky to go there,” said Numero One.

Airhead Three nodded. “I know, but it’s going to be so awesome. I heard, and this is the truth, I heard it from my cousin’s brother’s boyfriend’s aunt’s best friend from childhood. Anywho, they’re saying that they can increase your level there. Tell you how to become way stronger, too. And they’re talking about bringing down the entire level system in the school.”

My ears perked; suddenly these boring archetypal and highly stereotypical schoolgirls were interesting. So, I did the stupidest thing ever: I turned around. “Hey, is that true?” I tried to whisper like they did, but ended up sounding like a suffocating frog with rabies.

“Like, duh, of course it’s true,” Airhead One said, her eyes spinning like an off-balance gyroscope. “Here, take this and leave us alone,” she said with all the politeness that I was expecting from someone whose IQ was in the lower (single) digits. She then grabbed a ratty piece of paper and shoved it close enough to my face that I went crosseyed to read it.

Unfortunately, class restarted soon after and the time I had to actually check out the pamphlet ended. (It looked like it had been printed by an elder who did not know the ass-end of a printer from that of a donkey.)

When the bell finally rang, I bolted. The nifty thing about not having to bring anything to class is that you don’t need to bring things out of class.

Lunch gave us a whole hour to cram food into our gullets, finish off homework we should have done last night, and wander around talking to our friends. Fortunately for me, there was no homework, I was too cheap to wait in the long lines to eat a hot lunch, (and so had packed myself a manwich) and I had no friends. (As of yet.) That left me with an entirely too big quantity of time to do nothing but wander around the school.