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Scribe
Join Date: Feb 2007
Location: Inside your computer
Gender: Female
Posts: 50
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My friends are nuts, I thought. Leslie was juggling apples she’d stolen from...
...everyone’s cafeteria trays, and every once in a while she would pretend to mess up just so she could let one hit someone in the head. That person would then try their best to make her miss a catch without touching her or the apples, just to bother Leslie. But she was very good at clowning around—I smiled at my horrible mental pun—and so she never let them break the circle of fruit.
I shook my head at her. Leslie grinned, not missing a beat. “You’re just jealous, Brett. You wish you had my mad juggling skillage.”
After she hit Leonard for the third time, he broke the Stay Seated (#27) tip for teenage laziness and tackled her to the ground. Apples flew everywhere. People complained, and we all laughed.
“Leonard,” Leslie gasped, pretending to be scandalized. “Are you hitting on me?”
I just chuckled and watched John hopelessly crack up, his glasses falling off of his nose every time he went to hold his stomach.
After lunch, I reluctantly headed to American History. I consistently failed to see why we had to take the class about every other year. All right, I get it. Columbus, Ponce de León, King George, Washington, Lincoln. Geez, I was tired of hearing about Lincoln. It was bad enough having to hear people talk about today’s politics.
I sat at my desk and blew a strand of hair away from my right eye. I liked having hair that wasn’t too long, nor too short, but it did mean I had to get my hair cut pretty often to stop myself looking like a sheepdog. I was due for another trim.
I wondered if other boys ever thought about their hair for more than two seconds, but less than two hours. It wasn’t like I was vain or anything; I just liked my hair to look presentable and not irritate me. I frowned at one of my classmates that I didn’t know very well. His hair was obviously full of various gel-y, mousse-y things, and probably ironed or straightened or whatever girls called it. Ew.
I turned my attention back to my history teacher. He was droning about the War of 1812, which was vaguely interesting in at least some parts because of the whole shanghaiing of sailors thing. Good. I wouldn’t fall asleep in here, not this period. The last time I’d nodded off in his class, Mr. Stilnen had whipped out an air horn from under his desk and pressed the button about five inches from my face. He wouldn’t have to wake bored students up if he made any attempt to interest us, I thought.
“…British naval crew didn’t so much shanghai American sailors into service, which was usually done by getting the crewmen incredibly drunk and simply leading them onto the foreign ships…” Good job, Mr. Stilnen. You’ve managed to make even drunken seamen sound boring. You fail at life. “…as much as attacking American ships, military and commercial alike, and fighting and kidnapping their crews, as well as either taking or sinking the boats full of American goods and weapons. The main motivation behind…”
Maybe I’d been wrong. I was starting to feel a little drowsy, wondering why people even bothered with writing lullabies if they could just lecture someone into a coma.
My head jerked up suddenly. How long had I been asleep?
“Mr. Keating, do you have an answer or not?” Mr. Stilnen snapped.
I struggled for a way out of the trap. “Can you repeat the question, sir? I wasn’t paying attention.” I had figured out a couple of years ago that telling a teacher right off the bat what they were planning on dragging out of you disarmed them. This year’s history teacher was no different.
He blinked a few times. “Yes, I suppose. What was the name of the American vessel that defeated three enemy ships off of the coast of Nova Scotia?”
I sighed in relief and supplied the correct answer.
I got through the rest of the day and was in the process of moving to the parking lot where I’d wait for my mom to pick me up. When I was passing through the school’s overly crowded mixmaster, for some reason I looked over to the main doors —I probably saw a bird fly by outside, or something. Sometimes I think I might have mild ADD—and saw a new girl that I recognized from a few of my classes coming in, probably from seminary. She hugged a binder and textbook tightly to herself, as if she was trying to hide from something, maybe the whole world (though she was both far too tall and far too wide for it to work), looking unhappy.
She didn’t look sad in a typically angsty teenage type of way, or in a my-dog-just-died sort of way. Not being able to guess meant that I needed to know what she was so blue about.
I waited in a spot where she would have to pass me in a minute. When she did, I grabbed her arm. “What’s wrong?”
She looked startled, like she wondered why I was talking to her all of a sudden. “N...nothing.”
“Oh, come on. I’m officially calling your bluff.”
She deliberated for a moment, and then sighed. The halls were emptying around us. “I just came from seminary.”
“Yeah, I thought so. What happened?”
“Well…” She looked like she wasn’t sure whether to tell me or just kick my shin and run as fast as she could, which probably wasn’t too fast. The girl shook her head, giving up. “Brother Jacobs was talking about his favorite seminary students or whatever, and about how we can ‘all be his favorites,’ and he mentioned me.”
“And?” I prompted. She still seemed like she didn’t really want to talk to me, but I was intrigued.
“He called me quiet,” she told me mournfully.
“What’s wrong with quiet?” I asked her, puzzled. “Quiet people are nice. They’re easy to be around and they’re way less aggressive. Being quiet isn’t a bad thing.”
When she looked up at me, her entire face seemed tired and her dolefully hazel basset-hound eyes stared out at me. There was something immensely sad in that expression.
“Because I’m not. I’m not quiet.” Anything still bright in her face crumpled. She looked ready to cry. “Or maybe I am. I don’t know. But I know I didn’t used to be.”
I’d figured out that she was a fairly intuitive person pretty quickly, just with how I'd seen her talk to other people, and when I saw that she recognized my burning question without me having to vocalize it, I knew that I was right.
“I was quiet when I needed to be—listening to the rain, paying attention in class, tasting the sweetness in a silent moment with someone special. But as soon as it was appropriate, I talked about anything I felt like to whoever would listen.” She smiled tremblingly. “I did have a someone special, you know. My own personal him. Even if I really, really shouldn’t have, especially because of how it turned out in the end. There wasn’t more he liked more, I think, than to laugh and make fun of me a little bit for chattering about whatever.”
I eyed her double chin and solemn face doubtfully. Special someone? Chattering? Then I stopped myself. I was being rude and prejudiced, and she could probably tell.
She shook her head. “You don’t believe I had a someone?” Ignoring my protests, she continued. “All right, I’ll have to convince you. His name was Chris. He was maybe five-foot-seven, and had short black hair and the smoothest brown eyes ever. He was mulatto and adopted, but if he hadn’t told me I never would have known—especially since I’d never really met his adoptive parents and they were an interracial couple anyway. Sometimes I see that exact coffee-and-cream color on someone else’s skin and I remember.” She grew forlornly thoughtful and quiet for a moment, then resumed persuading me that a person existed.
“He loved cars and wanted to design them as a career when he got out of school. He had two adorable little brothers. He also had asthma. He told me at some point, and that surprised me, too. It’s not like he was pulling out his inhaler every five minutes, or anything, so it wasn’t bad. I nearly had a conniption one time, when I found out he had been absent Friday because he’d had an asthma attack on Thursday night and had to go to the hospital. He kept telling me it was no big deal, and I made him promise not to die on me, and then I guess I calmed down.
“Sometimes, sitting in our group of friends, everyone would be talking about whatever and I’d look at him and catch him staring into my eyes. It always caught me by surprise, but it didn’t take me long to stare back into those pools of smooth brown, and after a minute or two my friends would notice and threaten to turn the hose on us.”
Her eyes took on a faraway look, and for a second I thought I caught a glimpse of the happy girl whose eyes some lovesick boy had gazed into.
She detected the shift in me belief of her story and smiled at me briefly. Then, suddenly, her expression grew hard.
“Then I learned I was moving. I was desperate to see all of my friends as much as I possibly could, but especially him. For some reason, though, wrongly deduced by the frequent calls I made to their home, his mom decided I was a rare species of Yellow Bellied Warbler Whore who just wanted to, um, ‘make it’ with her son.” Her eyes were sad again, but she pretended to smile as she poked her belly pointedly. “Obviously she’d never met me. A fat Mormon girl.” She laughed bitterly. “She told him not to answer his phone when I called. I don’t know if he argued—I still hope he did—because I was afraid he would listen to her and wouldn’t want to talk to me if I did try to call.
“Then I moved and never talked to him again.”
She looked up at me, apologetically this time, as though repentant for bothering me with the story of her sorrows. Far from irritated or bored, I wanted to hug her and make sure she knew she was okay by me.
Instead, I tried to meet her eyes with the same blatant honesty that she had met mine with. “I’m sorry. I know it can’t help anything, but I am.”
“’S’ not your fault,” she mumbled, lowering her face again. But this time I did hug her. I don’t know what instinct made me, but I wanted to make her feel better, quiet or not.
I felt her breathe shudderingly and lean her head gently against my shoulder. She was warm and soft, and holding her felt nice. Warm water slowly soaked a spot on my shirt. She was crying. Quietly, of course. She was quiet now.
Even when I thought she was done, I kept holding her until she took a breath and pulled away.
“Thank you,” she said, avoiding my eyes out of embarrassment. “I usually don’t let people see me cry.”
“Well, why not?” I asked incredulously. “What’s wrong with crying?”
“Nothing, I guess. It’s just that whoever hears or sees always asks what’s wrong, and if it’s making me cry, then I usually am not secure enough about whatever it is to talk to someone about it.” She smiled wryly. “But there’s no point now.”
She turned away, but before she left I put my hand on her shoulder. She turned back around expectantly.
“You…I mean, I don’t even know you that well, so I know that you don’t really know me, and…Just, if you need to talk or you need anything, I’m here.”
She flashed me a genuine, if small, smile. “I’d like that.”
As she turned again to leave, I watched her and realized that I didn’t even know her name.
I would see her smile again.
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Yeah I'm not sure what this was, but...concrit please?
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