°˖✧◝ ground control ◜✧˖° || נαℓεx

one

So yeah, you could say my life wasn't that bad, that I was living a good life compared to other people, but parties and football matches ended up being boring after some time.

I sighed and took a bite of my peanut butter and jelly sandwich. God, I loved those. My love for pj sandwiches came from a long time back, and everyone knew I was a slut for those.

"What's wrong? Failed the math test from last week?" Asked me Rian, mocking me.

"I got a three-point-something, so I technically passed."

Zack winced, in response to how I almost failed. Sometimes I thought I had too much luck, that, or the teachers liked me.

"Then, what's wrong?" Zack said this time, taking a bite of his own sandwich.

I looked around the cafeteria, watching everyone in their groups, with their conversations, with their own dramas and problems. If you thought about it, it was almost difficult to get your head around the fact of how everyone had their own lives, how everyone was the main character of said lives.

"Aren't you tired of the same shit every day?" I ended up saying, straight to the point, looking back at them.

They exchanged looks and seemed to think about it.

Rian was the first to answer. "I mean, I'm pretty satisfied with how my life is."

"Yeah, some classes can be boring, sure, but football makes up for that." Agreed Zack, hi-fiving Ri.

And that was the thing, life wasn't bad, but it wasn't good either, there was something missing.

I sighed again. "But it's always the same shit. Don't you want something different to happen?"

They exchanged looks again and, at the end, Zack was the one to word the question. "Then what do you want to happen?"

I stayed silent for a moment. Right. What did I want? It was clear I wanted something exciting to happen but there wasn't much that could happen to a regular high school student. I wouldn't become a superhero nor a zombie. Given how life was, the most exciting and rebellious thing a teenager could do was drop out of school and run away somewhere. But where? How?

I sighed again.

"Right. Look, if you're going through some emo phase and 'life's shit' 'everyone's just the same' go somewhere new, meet new people, get a girlfriend, join a club. I don't know, man, you might as well become friends with that Barakat kid, seems pretty lonely and like he wants to be friends with you." I knew Rian didn't mean bad with that comment, but I still felt kind of hurt and offended at the fact that he would just look down on my existencial crisis like that.

I turned around, seeing how my friend was looking right behind me when he spoke about that Barakat dude and, sure enough, there he was, sitting alone in one of the tables in the back of the cafeteria. When he saw me looking at him, he quickly averted his gaze and focused on his food.

I didn't know much about him, I just knew that he moved to the USA when he was a kid, just like me -even though I didn't know where he originally came from-, and that he was your typical example of outcast and bullied emo kid. The bullies were usually football players, so at least I was glad my two friends here didn't join the ones who liked to do such things to people. That was just making somebody else's life rougher.

I stared at him for a bit longer, taking in how he seemed to want to make himself smaller, or disappear, as if he was deeply hoping to go unnoticed. I felt bad for him. I considered for a second what Rian said, to stand up and go talk to him, but I didn't want to stand out and have the football team on my ass either, and I also didn't know what to tell him if I did go talk to him, so I discarded that option, turned around and kept talking with my friends until lunch was over and we were forced to sit in a deathly boring class for some more hours.