I was the first person to science.
Way back in the beginning of middle school, when I still had morals and integrity and all that shit, I got to class as close to immediately after the bell ringing as possible. It was the next year – seventh grade, during which something happened that caused all of my principals to get destroyed and taken over by the idea that it didn’t matter how I got good grades, as long as I did – that all of my peers collectively decided to never show up to class until approximately point five seconds before the bell rang. Awkward conversations with teachers due to being the only person in the room deterred me from my old early habits, and I’d taken to arriving as near the late bell as I could.
But, like every system, this had its failures.
While I had yet to be late to a class that year – except for that one time I had to drive May because it was raining, and she refused to leave the house until literally five minutes before school started – there had been numerous close calls. Half the time I very purposefully ended up on the other side of the school from my class by refusing to abandon my friends’ side and had to power walk to beat the bell, thankful for my long stride. But on that day, Rian had a doctor’s appointment, Zack ran off for a last minute bathroom break just as the first bell rang, and none of my other half-friends showed up to help me waste time.
I took the longest route possible, walking to class in a very unnecessary semicircle, and still managed to get there just as the second ball went off. There were three bells – the first warned that we had ten minutes to get to class, the second rang five minutes before the period started, and the third made you late. So I ended up slinking to my desk in the back of the room quietly, hoping that Ms. Garcia wouldn’t notice my existence until someone else showed up. As long as there was at least one other person in the room, teachers never seemed to feel obligated to make conversation, which I greatly appreciated.
I huffed out a sigh of relief as the door swung open, some redhead girl I sort of recognized from being in a few of my classes, but had no idea what her name was, walking in. I was pretty sure that she was one of those people who didn’t talk and thought that all her peers were idiots. Honestly, I would happily be the same way if total silence didn’t drive me insane.
Four minutes of needlessly flipping through my notebook and re-crossing my legs in an attempt to make the blue plastic chair comfortable later, Alex slid into his seat next to me just as the bell shrieked. We had science in the classrooms that had been finished right before the start of this year, and something was wrong with the bells, making them ridiculously loud. Ms. Garcia herself rolled her eyes at the unnecessary noise as we suffered through it. She simply gestured to the board, which showed our bell work – a term that I’d never understood, considering that it almost always took place after the bell – which was to be completed. It had easy instructions to open to and title the next page in our spirals. Apparently, were we starting to learn about the periodic table.
“What’s today?” Alex asked, glancing up at me from searching through his pencil case. I slanted my head to the side, considering the answer to that question while scribbling a barely legible title for the page. My handwriting stopped improving after second grade.
“Uh… the nineteenth?” I said, lack of certainty obvious in my voice. I barely knew that it was Friday, let alone the day of the month.
“October nineteenth? Fuck, I thought that school started, like, last week,” he responded with a frown, shrugging noncommittally and scribbling the date on the corner of the page.
I was about to say something about how, yeah, how the fuck had an entire quarter of the school year passed without my noticing, when our teacher decided to trudge up to the front of the class and start to teach. She began blabbering about how the periodic table was organized – didn’t they teach us this in eighth grade? – and I zoned out, figuring that I could get the necessary information for whatever we were doing from someone at my table who was actually paying attention. There had to be at least one person.
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Twenty minutes later, we were coloring in half page periodic tables according to the different metal statuses. All of my colored pencils were dull except for red, skin peach, and teal, and I lacked a sharpener, so they were all I could use. A horrible combination, but I figured it would suffice as I dully scribbled over the left half in teal.
Alex was groaning next to me, flipping through the science text book pulled off the stack in the middle of our table. He seemed to be trying to find the proper location of semi-metals, and I would have loved to help, if I had any fucking clue where they were. I didn’t even fully know what semi-metals were.
He eventually slammed the book closed, dropping it back onto the pile with a loud smash as he muttered under his breath. I shifted in my seat to face the boy as he brushed fringe out of his eye, the blond streak tangling through the rest of his brunette hair, most of it hidden under the red beanie he was wearing. I raised an eyebrow at him as he glared at the blank paper before him, cursing, “I give the fuck up. I hate this class.”
I laughed quietly, shrugging with a grin under the glower he threw me, defending, “Don’t give me that look, you’re acting ridiculous!”
“I already have a C in this class, I need to be able to do the class work!” he whined, huffing with a pout and shrinking into his seat, crossing both his dark denim covered legs and bare arms. The October air was officially too cold and damp to go without a coat of some sort, but the heating in our room was screwy, making the fact that Alex’s denim jacket was draped over the back of his chair and his torso was only covered in a slim fitting, white v-neck understandable.
I was still cold, even with my black hoodie, not that I would have taken it off if weather permitted. The healing scratches on my arm were actually itchy, causing me to accidently scratch the scabs off, making them grow. I found it sickly funny, since I was the type of person who saw the humor in every situation, even when there really was none. A phantom scratch concealing the desire to hurt myself caused an actual incessant itch.
“Why would you have such a bad grade? I mean, we haven’t even really done anything yet,” I asked, vaguely wondering if we actually had learned stuff and I was too stuck in my little oblivious world to notice. If I thought about, we had already had a unit test, which probably meant that we’d finished at least one unit. Weird.
I suppose I had realized that first quarter passed, since the occasion was marked with report cards being sent out. I had a low eighty in math and A-PUSH, borderline B minus in gym, and As in all my other classes. My PE grade had managed to miraculously skyrocket after the swimming unit ended, a couple semi decent mile times and actual participation in the sport we had moved on to, bringing it up. By decent miles, I mean eleven minutes of jogging slowly with Alex while not giving a shit, and sports participation points got handed out freely as long as we had the proper gear. The students stopped trying long ago, and the teachers graded accordingly. Thank God for that - otherwise I would literally have an F.
“’Cause I’ve gotten, like, half points on every quiz we took, and you know that project we did? Yeah, my group didn't turn it in.” I could see how that might be an issue. Alex didn’t really seem like the type to actually be bothered by grades, though – but, then again, what did I really know about him?
After that night panicking about the boy figuring out my secret however long ago, I’d started to doubt if I knew anything about anybody, Alex being a prime example of someone who was the exact opposite of what I guessed. This boy, who was constantly cheerful and bouncy at school, couldn’t possibly be the same person who was so depressed. But, then again, wasn’t I the same?
When I was doubled over from laughing painfully hard at some stupid joke Brendon made in art earlier, I wasn’t faking. The grins I threw at people during school were genuine – I’d never really felt the need to sham anything. Sure, I lied more than politicians and pretended to be happy, but the later was because most of the time, during school, I was happy. Joking around with my friends and being an idiot was fun. I was just when I was home alone, or isolated in the back corner of Spanish because I had no friends in that class, that the sadness set in.
It almost made me feel more like a fake, in a way. Like, my life wasn’t bad enough for my unhappiness to be justified. I didn’t deserve to be depressed if I was fine some of the time. What right did I have to resort to hurting myself when so many had it so much worse? I should appreciate what I had and get over myself, but the fact that others were sadder didn’t mean I was happy, and I somewhat resented that idea. Starving African orphans didn’t mean I couldn’t be discontented with having Indian for dinner when I hated spicy food.
I think my problem was that I needed to be distracted from myself, and other people were the best remedy for that. If I was immersed in a conversation, however stupid it may be, it held my attention, which was where almost everything else failed. I could barely focus on anything anymore, which not only led to my trying to accomplish anything taking forever, but self deprecating thoughts starting. It was when I had the opportunity and time to think that things got bad.
So, for all I knew, Alex was just like me. Maybe when we were kidding around during PE and he almost drowned from laughing while treading water last week – on the last day of the unit – he really was happy. It was hard to comprehend, how somebody could be so joyful and despondent at the same time. Maybe it was that it wasn’t really at the same time, but, still, since when is happiness circumstantial?
It made me wonder what Alex was really like. What he would say without any limitations holding back his words, what the thoughts he didn’t want anybody to know about were. Honestly, I’d love to know the same thing about myself, but I’d have to find someone I actually trusted enough to really confide in to figure that out.
Even though the boy next to knew more about what was happening to me lately than anybody else – which was profoundly fucked up on its own – we didn’t know jack shit about each other. What was his favorite color? I don’t know. When was his birthday? I don’t know. What did his parents do? I don’t know. But I did know that he had scars.
Definitely the weirdest, most screwed up relationship I’d ever been a part of. We spent our classes together laughing about immature nonsense and shamelessly flirting, then exchanged messages about the most personal shit I’d ever told anybody at night. Like two different people in completely separate relationships, but, no, we did not change from day to night. Not technically, at least.
“Jack?” I looked back over to Alex, who was smiling at me with this annoyingly adorable look, eyes changing back and forth between me and the board.
“Huh?” I asked, shaking my head subconsciously, trying to snap back into the real world. Stepping out of my thoughts was always stupidly difficult.
“There’s, like, five minutes left in class and if we don’t finish this, it’s homework.” He replied, referring to the still unfinished, halfheartedly colored paper in front of me.
“Oh. Shit.” I responded, glancing at his paper and beginning to copy the non-metal squares as he laughed. I decided to focus on my work rather than try to restore the dignity I’d lost from idiotically spacing out – well, I didn’t really have any dignity anyways, so why bother trying to preserve the last shreds of it? I was perfectly happy with being known as the sarcastic idiot who was sometimes cracked a good joke and wasn’t too much of a giant asshole. I mean, it was better than people knowing what I was really like. If anyone knew what went on in my head…
A couple minutes later, we were shoving papers into folders, slamming books closed and stuffing pencils back into their appropriate places as the last thirty seconds of class ticked by. I ended up tapping my foot impatiently and watching the second hand of the clock move agonizingly slowly, wondering how time managed to get so distorted, depending on the situation.
But then the bell was ringing and everyone was tripping out of their seats in a rush for the door. One period left in the week, and while I intensely hated my next class – fucking Spanish – it was only sixty minutes ‘till freedom. It felt like an eternity.
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I am going to be on the other side of the country next Sunday, so there will not be an update. I considered posting the next chapter on Friday before I left, but I won't have any time to write for like, two weeks, and I don't want to be stressing about getting behind on this while I'm on vacation, which I hope is understandable? So the next chapter will be up two weeks from today, I'm sorry! Anyways, please comment and vote, and thank you so much for all the love this is getting!
xoxo
Rose