THE EIGHTH TIME

Chapter 2

Useless

               For the rest of the class, I tried to not look behind me, to not look at the sexy new girl even though it was a hopeless attempt considering the fact that if she really was an alien she would probably be able to read my thoughts kind of like J’onn J’onzz.

               Man, I hope she wasn’t like the Martian Manhunter… what if she was the Martian Manhunter who had shape shift into a hot girl? Yah no… that didn’t really float my boat… Now I wouldn’t mind if she was D’kay D’razz! I don’t know the whole losing her mind thing and carving the Martian symbols of love and hate onto her body was kind of hot. Well definitely hot. I liked the sacrifice aspect of it. Boy, I had issues…

               Oh! I knew! Bette Noir! Yes, the new hot girl was totally Bette Noir, a hideous genetically engineered clone that projected the illusion of being a beautiful woman! Okay no definitely another kind of alien please, that was just getting disturbing…

               No more reading comic books for a while maybe, I was beginning to sound like some geeky kid and I was suppose to keep the “no status” status.

               If I had a status I had a purpose and if I had a purpose killing myself would be useless now, wouldn’t it?

            When the bell finally rang and everyone got up like they had spring attached to their butts, that’s when I realized Mrs. No-More-Boobies hadn’t asked for the alien chick to go up in front and introduce herself since she was a new student. Did they only do that if she had arrived when the year was already on-going?

            Whatever the answer was, because of that I still didn’t know her name, or what her voice sounded like and why should that bother me really?

            It was my pecker speaking, obviously.

            It occurred to me that thinking with my pecker kind of made me sound like a fan girl… how odd?

            Hi my name is Keegan Bundy and my issues just keep adding up and adding up.

            I didn’t bother to go back to my locker, mostly because I didn’t want to see the damages the gum sculpture had made to my binders. Sure they were old, it was their third year working for me as my notes-keeping-biatches, but I didn’t want to know just yet I would have to buy some…

            I had bio for my second hour. Pax wasn’t in it with me so I walked to the room on my own. It didn’t take me too long, this was a small school, only one story high, in the shape of a squared U. I lived in a small city after all, some small unimportant city between Albany and Plattsburg, close to the endless Adirondack’s Mountains, so no need to have a huge school.

              It wasn’t a complete no-man’s land horror movie in the making, a place where there was more bovines then humans, or some hick town where you had fifty percent chance to end up with a distant cousin, but still it wasn’t a big town like per say Syracuse or Albany.

               Just a basic, normal sized town, with a basic boring normal sized High School.

               I was pretty much one of the first one to arrive in the class and while it was cool because I could get a good spot it wasn’t good because I was all alone. If I stayed alone for too long I kind of stood out like a lost zebra in the middle of the savannah and people would just know that I wanted to kill myself like the lion knows the zebra is scared crap-less. 

               Hi my name is Keegan Bundy and I sound completely ridiculous.

               I tried to make drum beats on the lab counter in front of me—in the middle of the class, not the front because that was for the AP students but not the back because it was for the bad-boys—but I was rhythmatically challenged so it sounded more like someone hitting his hands on the table because he had spasms.

               Maybe I could open all the acid bottles and drink them. But then someone would come in and save me and the doctors would have to remove my oesophagus and connect my intestine to replace it and then I’d need to do weird sort of massage in lieu of the weirdly named muscle that made your food go down your throat—I had seen a guy it had happened to; tried to kill himself drinking battery acid but the paramedics arrived and he begged to stay alive. So they did that thing to him, and I didn’t want that to happen to him. Because humans had a strong sense of self preservation and I was worried that if something similar happened to me I’d beg for my life like that poor block.

               By the time I was done playing uncoordinated drummer on my table, the class slowly filled up.

               And what was my surprise when I saw the hot blonde alien chick walk in the class. Part of me wanted to chant “sit beside me”.

               She didn’t sit beside me, but out of some new found luck she did sit at the counter next to mine and technically we only had an empty row between us.

               It was in moment like these I’d wish to be a girl so I could giggle and jump up and down, and ya no, really not something I wanted to do. I had the sudden urge to feel my pants to check if Weewee was still in place because I sounded like he had decided to take a vacation and the beach balls with him.

               Hi my name is Keegan Bundy and I really wouldn’t mind if an atomic bomb dropped on my head right now.

               Anyway, technically there was no need to check because looking at the hot girl made it pretty much clear that I did have man-junk down there. I felt slightly better.

               And for the second time today, I became completely unaware of what the teacher was going on about and all I could really concentrate on was the girl few feet away from me. I could almost smell her.

               My incommensurable joy reached a never achieve peek when she dropped her pen right in the row and I bent and picked it, gave it to her and our finger touched.

             Houston we make contact.

            This was how it felt like to walk on clouds?

            For two seconds, the time our fingers touched, I felt somehow hopeful and not miserable, but the second I let go of the pen and back away that was it. And I realized how completely, utterly, entirely, totally ridiculous I was being.

            This whole thing made me think about Oscar Wilde’s The Nightingale and the Rose and of the only quote I remembered from it : “What a silly thing Love is,” said the Student as he walked away. “It is not half as useful as Logic, for it does not prove anything, and it is always telling one of things that are not going to happen, and making one believe things that are not true. In fact, it is quite unpractical, and, as in this age to be practical is everything, I shall go back to Philosophy and study Metaphysics.”

               And even if I did plan on dying I wasn’t going to go down like the stupid Nightingale that had given her love and song and life so the Student could get a red rose for the daughter of the Professor and go to the dance with her but when she rejected him just threw the rose on the ground.

            I was suicidal but I had a minimum of pride. And things like love were useless.

               When it was lunch time, and I had pushed away all thoughts of the alien chick, if thinking about not thinking about her counted as not thinking about her, I tried to dig through my school bag for some loose change. I hadn’t asked my mom for lunch money and the fridge was still empty, mom needed to get grocery. I hadn’t felt like waking her up this morning to beg for money. Money wasn’t a fun subject.

               With dad gone and mom working as a low paid social worker, with bills to pay, house to pay, we weren’t financially in a very good situation.

               So I ended up with a very platonic lunch which consisted of a soup and juice box. I kind of felt sorry for myself there. But I tried to not let it show when I headed to where Pax, Glenn and Derek were.

               In our cafeteria, places were kind of chosen at the beginning of the year and an unspoken rule made you ruler of that table until next year.

               I was sure Paxton had tried to find a way to get out of class sooner so he wouldn’t have to get the table close to the bathroom. Luckily we hadn’t. We were around the middle of the place. Middle was always a safe place.

               When I heard Glenn say “Fox has one of those new reality shows at eight, "Fast animals, slow children" as I sat at the table I knew the Family Guy’s all you can eat quote buffet had started.

              “So what’s up?” Derek asked, while I stared at my lunch with sadness.

              “Well we’re back to school, it sucks, we need to decide our future this year, which is frightening and I’m really worried as to what the put in their soup,” I made a face as I let the content of my spoon fall back in the bowl. 

            “School can be taken care of” Derek said in a flat voice.

              There it was… I swallowed loudly, no one talked…

             “So, how were your summers?” Paxton asked, cutting the silence.

            Glenn stopped stuffing his face in… whatever it was he was eating and grinned. “I got a piercing over there. I'm not going to tell you where but I will give you a hint—it wasn’t on my nose or my ear and it was one of my balls.”

            “Very refreshing,” Paxton rolled his eyes.

            Paxton was definitely the one trying to keep cohesion in the group I realized.

            I stirred my soup while we all ate seemingly in silence. Technically there was no point in talking while eating but this was still depressing.

            I stirred my soup and reckoned the fact that stabbing myself in the eye with my spoon might be an option. And the mental image of me running around the cafeteria with a spoon sticking out of my eye was kind of amusing.

            Hi my name is Keegan Bundy and I’m considering death by spoon stabbing.

            “So anything worthy of being mentioned happened lately” I asked, in between a joke about Mrs. Orson’s boobs, and Paxton statement that he planned on buying the TI-84 soon.

              “Well did you hear about that guy who died last week?” Derek offered, biting in a brownie.

              He had a dessert.

              Hi my name is Keegan Bundy and being hungry really doesn’t work for me.

              Suicide by starvation was definitely out of the list.

              “Who?” I asked, trying to avert my eyes from the food eaten in front of me.

              “Some outdoor maniac. He was running around Green Pines Park and you know that cliff by the observatory that kids always get caught smoking at? Well he ran over there and they think he started to feel dizzy, maybe from dehydration, and he fell and well died.” Paxton explained.

              It was good that it was him explaining because Derek would have made it sound like something really cool. And it was funny in a way, his skill to do that, I didn't need any scaring today.

              “You sure he didn’t jump off,” I asked, because if I had been the one there I’m pretty sure I would have been jumping.

              “Well it’s a theory of course… Anyway, they said in the newspaper that they should be putting an higher fence around that spot because mathematically it’s impossible for you to survive the fall… if you fall you die. Whether you jumped or tripped,” Paxton kept on explaining.

              Hmm. Interesting. Mathematically impossible to survive. I knew that spot, I knew where it was. It wasn’t too far from my house actually. I could walk there.

              Was this it?

              “Do you guys think the new girl might be a dude?” Derek suddenly asked, pushing my suicide plan aside.

              The hot new alien chick.

              “I contemplated shape shifting alien but not platonic human dude no,” I answered him and drank some of my stupid juice.

              Gender-change operation, now that was kind of creepy…

            “Cause I mean I didn’t see her face she’s walking around with her hood on and she’s all black looking”

            Say what?

              I frowned. “Huh? Who are you talking about?”

              “New girl” Derek frowned too “Who are you talking about?”

              “New girl, big boobs, blonde hair, hot legs.”

              “In our homeroom, she’s smoking,” Paxton sighed.

              “She’ll get cancer then,” Glenn smirked.

              We all rolled our eyes.

              “Who were you talking about,” I asked Derek. Did the alien hot chick project another persona at Derek? Because she knew that’s what he’d like looking at because he was a serial killer in the making?

              “Creepy maybe wanna-be emo girl, well honestly can’t really tell… maybe she’s hot. Dibbs on her if she’s hot. She’s in my second period. She was humming all through the class. I think she might be crazy too,” he trailed, pointing at something behind me with his chin and shoved a big mouthful of food in his mouth effectively stopping his side of the conversation.

              I turned around to see what he meant and saw a girl alone, sitting at the doom Beside-the-toilets table. From where I stood it looked like she was… carving something in the table with a knife. Woah, seriously? Creepy. I narrowed my eyes to have a better look. Okay maybe she was just twirling the knife on the table.

              Still definitely creepy.

              So I just shrugged and turned back to stare at the sad food in front of me.

              My soup got cold as I thought about the hot alien chick and about how useless it was to think about her, how useless everything really was if in the end I just threw myself off a cliff.

              The idea suddenly seemed very tangible and reachable.