Kendall & Me [discontinued]

11 | I Dub Thee Christine

I didn’t know whether to feel relieved or flustered when I finally made it to my English class.  Though we had made it on time, Chemistry class had been absolute hell.  The teacher, Mrs. Teller, was one of those crappy teachers that always believed she was right when she wasn’t.  It took her ten minutes to actually believe that I was a part of her class.  Even when a guy told her that he had English with me, and I was, in fact, new, she didn’t seem to quite understand.  She kept insisting that I must have had the wrong class because I wasn’t on the roster.  And then she saw that I was on the roster and pretended that she’d known I was there all along.  None of the class bought it, which I’m sure she knew.

However, when my eyes landed on Ashlynn’s desk I decided that I wasn’t relieved, wasn’t even flustered.  There were no real words to describe the feeling that passed through me.

She wasn’t there.

“You have got to be kidding me,” Kendall hissed as we walked further into the room and down.  Seeing how Ashlynn wasn’t there, I thought that Kendall was going to sit at her desk, but she didn’t.  It seemed that she preferred the seat beside me, though I knew for a fact the owner of the seat was here today (he was the kid from Chemistry class I mentioned earlier).  I couldn’t really blame her.  If I were in her position, I wouldn’t want to sit in her seat either.  “Seriously.  Please tell me that you’re pulling a sick prank on me.  Ashlynn’s obviously here today.  She’s just standing right outside the hall giggling her ass off because she pulled a fast one on me.”

I gave her a pointed look as I pulled out my copy of In Cold Blood and the notebook that contained my homework assigned last class.  It was a wonder I finished the questions on time.  There were only five, but it was kind of hard to get homework done when most of my time was spent talking or plotting with Kendall.  As it was, Kendall had made fun of me the entire time I worked on them.

“This sucks.  Life is so unfair—or, you know, the afterlife.”  Kendall groaned, letting her head fall on the desk.  I winced as her head smacked against the wood.  “Why?  Just.  Why?”

I wanted to comfort her, but what could I say?  Not only was I in the middle of a nearly full classroom, but we also needed Ashlynn to admit what she’d done, and we couldn’t do that if she was nowhere to be found.

“It’s not like I did anything overly horrible to deserve this,” Kendall muttered to herself as she lifted her head from the desk.  I watched with a frown as she placed her head in her hands.  “I was six.  So I ran off to go swing on a swing.  Was that so horrible that I deserved to die and then just disappear?”

“You haven’t disappeared yet,” I said before I could stop myself.

A few students glanced my way, eyebrows arched curiously.  One girl glanced down at my lap, as though searching for a cell phone.  When she didn’t find one, she gave me one last look (this one more weirded out than anything else) and turned her attention to the chalkboard at the head of the room.

Oops.

“I know I haven’t, but it’s only a matter of time,” Kendall replied before pausing.  Then she broke out in a small grin, all of her dismay seeming to evaporate in an instant.  I stared at her blankly.  How was she able to do that?  Be unbearably unhappy one moment and then ridiculously amused the next?  “Dude, are you aware that you totally just talked to yourself in the middle of a classroom?”

I resisted the urge to glare at her and faced the front of the room, deciding that ignoring her would be the best thing—at least until the end of class.

“Aw, are you ignoring me?  That’s not very nice.”  Kendall snickered.  “Come on, Iz—hey!”

My eyes snapped over to the right at the anger in my sister’s voice.  Why was she mad?  It wasn’t like I hadn’t ignored Kendall in front of other people before.  In fact, it was kind of the norm.  So why—?