Get it?
Leaves? (Oh, haha. Oh very haha.)
High school. First bell. Walking down the middle hall. Past a billion lockers. Late for class. No excuse, except for the one I always have.
I raise my fist to bump with Jason Kerwin, also late, who doesn’t acknowledge me with his face, just as I don’t acknowledge him with mine. Only fists. We’ve known each other since we were five. He’s my best friend.
Jason is an exception to all rules of parental worry re: Hanging With Humans Other Than Parents, because he knows every possible drill of emergency protocol.
He’s allowed to accompany me places my parents don’t want to go. Or do want to go, but do not want to spend hours at. Aquariums, natural history museum bug collections and taxidermy dioramas, rare bookstores where we have to wear masks and gloves if we want to touch, back rooms full of strange butterflies, bone and life-size surgical model collections discovered on the internet.
Et cetera.
Jason never talks about death, unless it’s in the context of morbid cool things we might want to hunt the internet for. Aza Ray and the Great Failure of Her Physical Everything? Jason leaves that nasty alone.
Second bell, still in the hall, and I raise one casual relevant finger at Jenny Green. Pink streak in her hair, elbows sharper than daggers, tight jeans costing roughly the equivalent of a not un-nice used car. Jenny has pissed me off lately by being. I mean, not by basic being. Mean being. We have a silent war. She doesn’t deserve words at this point, though she called me some a couple of days ago, in a frenzy of not-allowed. Calling the sick girl names? Please. We all know it’s not okay.
I kind of, semi, have to respect her for the transgression. It’s a little bit badass, to do the thing no one else has ever dared do. Lately, there’s been this contagious idea that I resemble a hungry, murdery girl ghost from a Japanese horror movie, so Jenny came to school in blue lipstick and white powder. To mock me.
Jenny smiles and blows me a kiss full of poison. I catch it and blow it back through my today very indigo lips, thoroughly creeping her. I give her a little shudder gasp. If ghost girl is going to be my deal, I might as well use it to my advantage. She stares at me as though I’ve somehow played unfair, and takes off at a repulsed run for her class.
Insert meaningless pause at locker. Slow walk. Peer into classroom windows, through the wire mesh they put in there to discourage people like me from spying on people like them.
My little sister, Eli, senses me staring, and looks up from her already deep-in-lecture algebra. I rock out briefly in the hallway, free, fists up, at liberty like no one else is this time of morning. Sick-girl privilege. Eli rolls her eyes at me, and I walk on, coughing only a little bit, manageable.
Seven minutes late to English and it’s Mr. Grimm, eyebrow up. The Perpetually Tardy Mizz Aza Ray, his name for me, and yeah, his name is Grimm, really. Blind bat eyes, thick-frame glasses, skinny tie like a hipster, but that look’s not working for him.
Mr. Grimm’s muscle-bound, though he never rolls up his sleeves. He has the kind of arms that strain against fabric, which fact tells me he has no actual life, and just veers between being a teacher and drinking protein shakes.
He’d seem as though he belongs in the PE end of the building, except that when he opens his mouth he’s nerdtastic. I also think he has tattoos, which he’s tried to cover up in various ways. Pancake makeup. Long sleeves. Not too smart to get a skull/ship/naked girl (?) permanently marked on you. You have to button your cuffs all the time.
Mr. Grimm’s new this year. Youngish, if you can call thirty young. But the tattoo is interesting. I can’t tell exactly what it is because I’ve never seen the full extent of it.
It makes me want tattoos. I want one that’s worse than whatever his is.
He’s got a constant complaint going that I could work up to my potential if I’d only pay attention instead of burying my face in a book while he lectures. He can’t lament too successfully, considering that I am one of, oh, what, four people in this school who read.
And I know that’s trite. Yes, I’m a reader. Kill me. I could tell you I was raised in the library and the books were my only friends, but I didn’t do that, did I? Because I have mercy. I’m neither a genius nor a kid destined to become a wizard. I’m just me. I read stuff. Books are not my only friends, but we’re friendly. So there.
I don’t need to pay attention to Mr. Grimm’s lecture. I read it already, whatever it is, in this case, Ye Olde Man vs. Ye Olde Sea.
Obsessed guy. Big fish. Variety of epic fails. I have to wonder how many generations of sophomores have been oppressed by stories about this same damn thing.
Why? Which of us is or will one day be engaged in a death struggle with a big fish? What is the rationale?
I’ve read Moby-Dick, another version of Obsessed Dude, Big Fish, and taxonomies of sorrow and lost dreams.
I know, whale = not fish. Mammalian cetacean. Still, whales have always been the prototype for Big Fish Stories, which makes all kinds of sense given how wrong humanity always is about everything.
I even read the Moby-Dick chapters that no one reads. I could tell you anything you need to know about flensing. Trust me on this, though, you don’t want that information.
Ask me about Moby-Dick, Mr. Grimm. Go on. Do it.
He did do that once, about a month ago, thinking I was lying about reading it. I gave a filibuster-quality speech about suck and allegories and oceans and uncatchable dreams that I then merged into a discussion of pirate-themed movies, plank-walking, and female astronauts. Mr. Grimm was both impressed and aggravated. I got extra credit, which I don’t need, and then detention for interrupting, for which punishment, in truth, I respect him.