Permanent Adhesives (3 page)

After class I followed him out and down the hall. I caught up and fell in step beside him. He looked over at me and kept walking. While walking next to him, I noticed that he wasn’t all that much taller than me, might have had a couple of inches on me if that. He definitely wouldn’t qualify as tall, not sure if he’d even qualify as average.

“Hey, I remember you,” I said. I couldn’t think of anything else.

He kept going.

“I’m sorry,” I said, thinking an apology would elicit some sort of response from him. He stopped walking in the middle of the hall, almost making the kids behind walk right into us. He crossed his arms and just looked at me.

“We were outta line that day.” Why’d I say that? I sounded like somebody’s mother.

He crinkled up his nose and continued walking. Kids shoved past us trying to get to class. “Fine,” he said, turning left down another hall, getting ahead of me. Well, he actually said
pine
, but I knew what he was getting at. Students started to separate us, and he got away, on to his next class. I went on to mine, Chemistry. I had the slightest idea what was going on in that class. I generally copied everything from the paper of this girl Lisa, who usually sat near me. I sat on a stool at the back lab table letting my mind wander. My encounters with Elias couldn’t have gone any worse. He probably thought I was a flake. I’m not sure exactly what I wanted from him. Did I really just want to apologize? Because I did apologize, or tried at least, but that didn’t seem to be all of it. Did I want to find out about his life? Did I want to be his friend? I really didn’t know the answers to those questions. Has he ever had to call the cops on my dad? I had to, quite a few times. It was generally because he came home drunk and was trying to get back in the house because my mom locked him out. Afterwards, he’d break through a window or something, and then a fight would ensue.

The bell then rang, interrupting my thoughts. I slowly got up and went on with the rest of my school day. When I got home, I logged onto my computer, my super old and slow computer. A relic I inherited from my sister, who got it from some co-worker of hers eons ago. The computer was crap, but it did come with a flatbed scanner. My sister made me do her laundry for months so I could inherit the computer and scanner as a package deal. As my computer ran through its painfully slow process of turning on, I dug through my backpack and pulled out my sketchbook and started cleaning up some of my drawings so I could color and ink them in. I finished the page with the fighting scene with Dranyan.

Now I guess is a good time to fill you in on what occupies most of my spare time—my comic. It is called
The Society of Prodigious Superbness
, and it follows a teen named Sasha Santiago who lives with her grandparents after the mysterious disappearance of her parents. After their parents disappeared, her brother, who’s actual name is Leonard, starts in with a crowd of kids who rob stores and such for fun. Leonard takes it a step further and then even further and turns into one of the city’s worst villainous crooks. That’s when he changed his name to Dranyan because it sounded much cooler than Leonard. Well, Sasha is distressed about her whole life situation and is about to jump off a bridge when a voice, she’s not sure whose, it might have been her own, tells her that she needs to unleash her superbness.

Sasha then starts in on a quest to find her inner superbness. After some time, she gains enough confidence to unleash her superbness and in doing so she unleashes her powers of superb. She has super superb speed, superb fighting skills, and incredible balance. With her new-found superbness she confronts her brother. They get in a huge brawl. This is when she comes to the realization that she can’t stop him on her own. That’s when she starts
The Society of Prodigious Superbness
. She goes and searches for kids whom she feels will be proper league companions. She shows them how to unleash their superbness, which is actually pretty simple. You just have to believe you’re superb and do superb things. The problem lies in where people will say they’re superb and deep down, they don’t really mean or feel it, and then they can’t unleash that power.

So, in my comic, I was at the point where Sasha had just recruited and trained the main chunk of the team, others would come, but at that time, there were Cecile and Emile, twins with superb telepathic and telekinetic abilities. Becky Gonzalez, a teen with superb strength and flexibility, and Thomas Tobias Thompson, a teen that is so smart he can get out of pretty much any situation. Say someone shot a bullet at him, he could calculate how fast it was moving and how many inches he’d have to step to the side to avoid it, and he could do this in just a fraction of a second. Cecile, Emile, Becky, and T Cubed or T3 (Thomas Tobias Thompson), did not know they even had these abilities until they unleashed their superbness. So yeah, that’s my comic (and I’m sure an over usage of the word superb).

The next day after school Kate, Roberto, and our friend Nicki Veronkov, and I decided to go hang out at Belmont and Clark. Kate usually drove us everywhere, but never Belmont and Clark. She said it was too hard to find parking, which was true. I looked around the bus as it slowly scooted down Belmont, it was a total mess. There were newspaper ads all over the floor with dirty footprints stomped across them. There was an apple core shoved in the crack behind my seat with other assorted garbage, and of course, the bus smelled like urine. Kate sat next to me, and Roberto was in the set of seats in front of us with Nicki. He was turned around towards Kate and me complaining about his family. He was the only boy and had like five hundred sisters, so he always had plenty to complain about.

Nicki was kind of staring off into the distance. Back a couple of years ago, she was totally normal and then came the high school transformation. I saw it happen to many people. It’s like one day they’re perfectly normal and the next day they come in totally different. In Nicki’s case, when she was in Geometry class with me, she always wore these little plaid skirts with matching turtlenecks and carried around those folders with fuzzy kittens all over them. And then there she sat next to Roberto on the bus with her hair a medley of pink, orange, and turquoise, while wearing a green raincoat covered in little blue dolphins. I guess it’s all about finding yourself or something, and I wasn’t one to talk because freshman year I wore sweat pants and had a little boy haircut. I’ve had a lifetime of questionable hairdos though. Like my hair that year. I wanted a hair cut quite bad, but my mom wouldn’t pay for one, so she said she’d do it. It was supposed to be shoulder length, but she kept saying she had to straighten it out and then all of a sudden my hair was just grazing the bottom of my ears, and it still wasn’t straight in the back. Afterwards, I tried to fix my mother’s blunder, and my hair became a choppy mess. Then a bit later I tried to go peroxide blond because my hair is usually the color of blah, but I left the stuff in too long, so as I sat there on the bus, my hair was a pile of off-white, straw like, scraggly mess. I was quite fond of it though.

The bus came to our stop, and we all climbed off. Our first destination was the Bunkin Donuts. I was really starting to enjoy coffee. I never liked it before because when I was little, I would sometimes try my mom’s coffee, and I always thought it was nasty, but that’s because she didn’t put a lot of sugar in it. I didn’t know that, and then one day we stopped in Bunkin Donuts, and I thought I’d be crazy and try some of their coffee, and my life hadn’t been the same since. No, not really, that last part wasn’t exactly true, but they do put the perfect amount of cream and sugar in there.

We then went into this one store that sold vintage clothing (at least that’s what they called it, so they could charge more) and knickknacks like vinyl toys shaped like cats and kitschy items people buy to sit on their shelves. Kate and Nicki went and started flipping through the coats, and I wandered to a corner where they had old toys displayed in glass cases and some that weren’t really worth anything in plastic bins. Roberto followed me over. He started picking up various toys and began to make them kiss each other. While he was making toys get fresh with one another, I was actually looking for something—unloved action figures. You know, ones that people thought weren’t important anymore because they weren’t in the box or part of a popular series. I had a family of them in my top dresser drawer: a space station captain, a super hero missing his cape, a robot fighter, a galactic princess. So, I was looking to further extend my family.

After a bit, I found a couple of figures that would quite nicely complement the ones I already had. I went to pay, which sometimes annoyed me at that store because you could tell the people who worked there thought they were so awesome because they had a job at that store. I walked towards the register, Roberto behind me. The cashier was leaning back on the counter reading a book. He sensed us approaching and laid his book down on the counter and turned towards us. I saw the cashier and just about stopped in my tracks. It was frickin Elias Bickler! He gave me a blank stare and gave Roberto a head nod in recognition since they kind of knew each other. I put my stuff on the counter. He started ringing it up without saying anything.

You know how sometimes when you decide to watch a TV show you’ve never really watched before, and you see an episode and then every time after that whenever you turn on that show it’s the same darn episode? That’s how this was. I had never seen Elias around until the other day and then all of a sudden he was just showing up everywhere. He stood there behind the counter wearing some beat-up jeans and a striped sweater looking particularly cute.

“You paying?” he asked.

“Oh yeah,” I mumbled, putting my coffee on the counter then digging in my wallet. Roberto left to go find Kate and Nicki. I paid, and Elias stuck my stuff in a little plastic bag, handing it to me. “Thanks,” I said quietly. Why did I act like a bumbling fool around this kid? Was it because I couldn’t stand somebody not liking me, or was it something else? My heart was telling me it was something else. Why wouldn’t he just talk to me? I needed to say something more than thanks, so I did. “Why won’t you talk to me?” I blurted out.

He crinkled up his nose. I don’t think he had a response. Perhaps he didn’t even know why he wouldn’t talk to me. He sighed and shrugged. What kind of an answer was that? I needed more than just a shrug.

“No, really?” I asked. “Are you mad at me from that one night with the car going backwards down the street? I said I was sorry. My sister has a ginormous mouth.”

“I dunno,” he said, seeming very exasperated, dropping his shoulders.

“Is it because of the name we have for your mom? Cuz Janie came up with that.” I was so trying to save my ass. “Can you try to see it from our perspective?” I kind of wished I had stopped talking.

“Can you see it from mine?”

“Yes,” I pleaded. “That’s why I feel so bad.”

“Fair enough,” he said flatly.

“We’re leaving,” I heard Kate shout from the door.

“Hi Elias,” Nicki said from next to Kate. Seriously, Nicki knew him too, how out of the loop was I?

He gave her a salute, looked at me, and right before we left he said, “I read your webcomic.”

My mouth just dropped open, and before I could even come up with a response, Kate grabbed my wrist and pulled me out the door.

“You two were talking. Ya like him?” Nicki asked, as we walked down the sidewalk.

I sipped my coffee and stepped to the side to let a woman pushing a stroller by. I didn’t answer at first and then slowly I said, “Maybe.” Because somehow I think I was growing fond of him even though he had never said not much more than six words to me. However, I felt so bad. Oh my God, how was I going to face him tomorrow at school? And I was pretty certain he was not going to like me back because would you like somebody who made an evil villain based on your mother?

“I’m surprised he was actually talking to you,” Nicki said.

“Why, did he say something about me? Does he not like me?”

“No,” Nicki said with a smile. “He just usually never talks.”

“Oh, well okay then.” Now I wondered if it was a good or a bad thing that he chose to talk to me.

*************************

That night I lay in bed staring at the ceiling. I think I drank too much coffee because I couldn’t fall asleep. My sister was tossing around in her bed. It looked like she might have been having a dream about being a fish the way she was flopping about. My sister Janie—who only spoke to me on occasion as of late, and with what was usually always just some snide comment. She was mad at the world for her life that she did not quite enjoy, and I was clumped in the same world that she was enraged at, resulting in little communication between the two of us. I glanced around our darkened room to the dresser between our beds; our beds that consisted only of the box spring and mattress, one on each wall, with walking space between the two that was the width of the dresser. Our closet was overflowing with junk: clothes, shoes, books, winter weather gear. You name it and it was there. You could not close the door because of the large mound of junk oozing out. All the stuff that oozed out of the closet infected the whole floor. There wasn’t an empty spot to step. I usually just leapt onto my bed from the doorway.

I heard my mom come in through the front door; she must have had to stay late at work. I loved my mom, but I swear life with my dad did something to her. Sometimes I had to wonder about her.

Not too long ago she wanted my sister and I to do something like take out the trash. I told her I had to work on my homework because I really did, and Janie said pretty much the same thing. Well, she started shouting and screaming at us and grabbed a kitchen knife. I swear I almost pooped my pants being it was a sharp knife, but luckily, she turned towards the counter, probably knowing a cake was there, and started going crazy, stabbing at this cake. She stabbed at it until it was just a pile of crumbs. When she was done, she dropped the knife into the cake pan and ran into the bathroom crying and stayed in there for like an hour. Janie and I just looked at each other. What are you supposed to do after an incident like that? All I knew was—I was very thankful that cake was there.