The absentees were Chris, Adam's best friend since grade school, and Erica, the bombshell from the lunchroom, who was often late, probably talking people's ears off—
Or fucking Bain in a bathroom stall.
Adam winced at the thought.
He winced again when the hand fell upon his shoulder.
"Now don't move, punk, or else I'll hurt you baaad."
Adam was not afraid; in fact, he smiled. "Try it, asshole. I'll get medieval on your ass."
Chris sat down beside him.
His appearance was rocky, flaky, largely because of his many tattoos: a flame around his neck, a devil on his arm, a web on his thigh... and because of his three piercings: one on his eyebrow, lip, and nose. His eyes were big, curious, blue, semi-threatening. His hair was combed back, yet his bangs were sticking up crazily in front. He moved much unlike Adam, more fluidly, more energetically. He looked the part of a bully who'd tear Adam apart, not spend the night at his house three days a month. They were close. Chris was, without a doubt, the closest person to Adam. Adam trusted no one else more.
"So what's going on, Chief?" Chris asked, moving around restlessly in his chair.
"Nothing at all, really. Just sitting here like a turd."
"Where's your girlfriend?" Chris asked, looking around for Erica.
"Shhh!" Adam said, nodding toward the kids cluttered around the teacher's desk. They were all friends of Bain Wells, who probably knew more people than God.
"Speak of the devil," Adam said.
Erica and the teacher entered. Mrs. Gavin took her seat at her desk, and Erica plunged into a conversation with her friends.
"You going to ask her out?"
"I wish I could ask her to be my girlfriend," Adam said.
Chris laughed. "Getting ahead of yourself, aren't you? Gotta date before you can go steady."
"Why?" Adam asked, far too seriously.
"I don't know. You don't
have to
, but that's the way it's usually done. You see, there's a difference in asking a girl—do you want to go out, and do you want to go with me? One's a date and one's a commitment. Sort of."
A moment of silence…
“
You just want pussy—"
"Shhh!" Adam said, spraying saliva. "No I don't. God, be quieter!
"Adam's in love, Adam's in love," Chris joked.
"Dammit, man, knock it off," Adam said, cracking a smile. He stared at her … her short, jet-black hair, those huge black eyes, those soft, well-placed lips, and those tight, low-rider jeans.
"You want me to ask her out for you?"
"No!" Adam said. But he looked unsure. "I will ask her someday.”
Chris looked at her and said, "Erica?"
"Shhhhh!" Adam said, heart racing.
"Erica!" he said again, laughing at Adam, whose face was turning red.
She turned to Chris, curious. Chris pointed to his buddy and said, "Adam likes you. He wants to go with you."
Adam looked away but listened closely.
Oh, shit. My heart's going to explode.
Everyone waited for her to answer, even the teacher. Adam reached inward and tried to find hope, tried to believe she'd say yes.
But the miracle did not come.
The hope was extinguished.
Not only did she say no; she giggled, sighed, made a gagging sound, and replied, "Not a chance in a million years. Better be careful. My boyfriend would hurt you." She turned back to her friends.
The teacher looked utterly disgusted at her. But nobody felt worse than Adam, who wanted to scream the F word really loud and throw his desk across the room. Deep down inside, he'd expected her to say what she'd said.
Adam had never dated before, had never known a girl to be interested in him.
“
So, am I still staying at your house Friday?" Chris asked Adam.
Adam nodded. "I should get the movie on Thursday."
"What is it again?"
"Re-animator. An eighties horror movie based on a Lovecraft story. It's about a guy that creates this green liquid that brings the dead back to life. It's like that one idea I had—"
He forgot about the dumb bitch. One of his best remedies for pain and frustration was writing stories. In many of his shorts, his antagonists, even protagonists—whether warm-blooded or cold-blooded, demon, alien, or human—usually ended up killing or maiming people his own age.
And
boy
did it make him happy to get even with them, even in fantasy worlds.
The teacher secretly watched Adam as he watched Erica, the unattainable dame. She even considered changing Erica's recent test from a B to a D.
"What's your favorite slasher film?" Chris asked him.
"All of them. Probably Halloween. Best time of the year, by the way. My favorite holiday by far. Anything's better than fucking Valentine’s Day."
"Definitely. That's just a way for candy and flower businesses to make a profit."
"Yeah, and make single people feel like shit." Adam watched her all this time. "Worst day of the year."
Adam spent the rest of his time in class drawing a gruesome picture of a bullheaded man holding the severed head of a young woman. Chris took a little nap. Adam, who needed to finish some homework, instead scribbled on his book cover, envious of Chris for dozing off. Adam could not sleep in unfamiliar territory; he especially could not sleep in a place that, to him, rivaled the concentration camp. Only at home could he completely relax.
***
At a quarter after one, the bell screeched. Adam sighed, bid his farewells to Chris, and ventured through those dreadful hallways again with only two more classes to endure. Bigger kids poked and shoved him, which was not uncommon, and girls threw crumpled pieces of paper at him. He ignored it the best he could.
In no time he entered his fifth-period art class, a room filled with beautiful works of art pasted messily on the walls. The splendid smell of warm clay hung in the air like melted candy. Pictures of simple orbs, rectangles and cones, some drawn in charcoal, some airbrushed, some exquisite, and some ugly, were tacked everywhere. Hands down, Adam's favorite room in the building.
Adam sat.
Two older boys, Charles and Ben, entered the room secondly and took their seats, one in front of Adam and one beside him. Neither boy had ever done a thing wrong to him, and neither boy had ever so much as greeted him. They were sitting too close to him, violating his space. He did not like touching his mother or best friend, let alone total strangers.
“’
Sup, man?" Charles asked Ben. "Didn't see you in class yesterday."
"Oh, I had a bad hangover. I basically put Sunday night in place of Saturday. Weekend was way off schedule.”
"I get that way sometimes." He chuckled.
Adam got the impression that both of these kids ignored him on purpose.
"I can't wait till spring break. I'm doing it like the frats are doing it. I wish I could go to Cancun or something."
"Same here."
Adam listened closely. He loved overhearing conversations, other people's businesses. He was so interested in other peoples' lives because he felt he didn't have one of his own. At least not a normal, healthy one. Yet. Till then he thought he'd observe, see how they did it, and discover their unyielding flaws.
Adam's own twenty four/seven a day soap opera. He'd heard many things behind these school walls, on the street, and back in junior high. From talks of smoking pot and drinking, which he heard an awful lot about, to upcoming fist fights waiting to be announced. He’d heard one wild rumor about a fifteen-year-old boy who took PCP and killed his girlfriend, to another rumor of one twenty-year-old boy purposely giving AIDS to a well-known slut in Blake. Of course, the good news was always less interesting to Adam than the bad. Wasn't it for everybody?
While Adam listened to their conversation, the teacher had entered and started the class. She'd been talking for almost five minutes before he realized that she, along with the rest of the students, were now present. He had zoned out from the outside world like he sometimes did.
"And then I'll grade them," Mrs. Galliger, the most stunning redhead in the county, said. Every boy in Blake fantasized about her, and all the girls wanted to mature as gracefully as she did.
She handed out today's assignment to the rest of the class. Adam watched her as she moved, watched the folds of her tight black stretch pants pull against her slender thighs, the blood vessels in his brain drooling. Whereas he longed to hold Erica; he longed to fuck Mrs. Galliger.
Quickly, he turned his mind elsewhere, uncomfortable with the thought of her keeping him after class and doing him. Sexual repression was Adam's motto; he thought it was a bad thing, a big no-no, an indecent mistake. Why, he could not fathom. He had not been raised that way. The poor boy had never even seen a naked woman in a dirty magazine. Before, when approached by either Chris or Josh to watch a porno, he, in every case, had reluctantly declined.
"Go ahead and start," she said, "I will be back in a few." She left the room.
Ben passed back the classwork papers to Adam, who took one and passed the rest to the girl behind him.
"God, maybe I shouldn't take this now. Might get a disease," she said. Arrogantly.
Adam closed his eyes, let the insult cut. Then he reopened them and looked at today's assignment. It was a very detailed photocopy of the exterior of a million-dollar mansion.
I can't do this.
The other kids started. They began tracing, sketching, roughing in the details. Adam did love that melody of lead against paper, the act of creation being developed into some sort of reality. Just one catch: he wasn't as good as any of them.
Heeding, Adam started to draw the frame, his shaking hand laying in the foundation of the picture in many long, uneven lines. He wished he could have drawn something else on his page—a severed head lying in a pool of blood, maybe an oversized rat devouring human brains. Anything but a stupid mansion which was probably owned by some rich asshole who sold illegal narcotics.
His numb mind led his sloppy hand, but some likeness of the photocopy took shape. Some confidence came. He erased very little, not because he made mistakes but because he didn't care much about the subject matter. Getting it finished as quickly as possible was his priority.
He roughed in the nuts and bolts in under ten minutes—the windows, the rooftop, the three-door garage. Then he went on to the shading—the hardest part, in his mind. He'd tried shading on many occasions but could never get it down to a real science like most of his peers could. He didn't know where to darken or how much to. Instead, he usually shaded a couple small areas and left it at that.
To get a better idea of how to accomplish the task, and to see how his drawing compared to the others', Adam looked over at Charles' picture. His was not quite as finished as Adam's, but it looked much cleaner. Each pencil stroke seemed perfect. Very little shading had been done, and it was almost an exact blueprint of the photocopy itself.
Adam stared at it, at Ben, wondering why he was so talented.
I should be. I want it more than he—more than any of these kids do!
He did not want to finish it now that he knew somebody was doing a better job than he was.
I've been doing it longer, I bet.
"Hey, jackass," Charles said to Adam, "mind if you keep your eyes off my paper?"
"Huh?"
Some girl in class giggled.
"Mind your own business. It's not my fault you can't draw worth a shit. Dumbass."
Another laceration. He couldn't help but question why God had given this bastard a gift and not him.
But I'm nicer.
Dumbass.
I love art and writing with all my heart.
Not my fault you can't draw worth a shit.
If I drew that well, I'd help people, not criticize them.
Adam looked back down at his own picture and went back to work. He suddenly hated art for the rest of the period.
That monstrous shriek called yet again at five after two. Art was history and math was next. Adam's drawing was still not finished.
***
The East-End of the halls were always less cluttered than any other, partly because some rooms were being redone and partly because it was closer to the Principal Remmy's Office (Andrew Remmy was the biggest A-hole in Blake County, according to some students). Adam walked toward Mr. Saunter's Math Class, carrying his books in his hands like a food tray with a bomb on it. After rounding a corner, he stopped mid-step, almost running into Diana, a short, overweight girl with actual splotches of facial stubble. She giggled loudly enough to make him feel uncomfortable, a thing she always did when she saw him—since sixth grade.
She was not higher class or a prep. She lived in a trailer, in fact.
I must be lower-class than even her.
Adam sped up, came to a curve in the hall, and turned right, where he bumped into the chest of a kid twice his size.