Chapter 10 #2
He tumbled backward, colliding with Lucas behind him.
The domino effect rippled through the helpless line of students.
A cascade of bodies and trays crashed to the floor, creating a cacophony of clattering dishes and startled shouts.
The once orderly line morphed into a messy scene of tangled limbs and scattered lunches.
A lump of guilt formed in my throat as I looked down at the pile of bodies: Jamie sprawled across Lucas, who was half-crushed on top of Kayla.
All three of them were stacked like a human sandwich, and judging by the groan she let out, they were definitely going to need to check that poor girl for a concussion.
Jamie glanced back at me with a mix of hurt and embarrassment. As he pushed himself off the ground, a shadow suddenly loomed over us: Mr. Johnson, his expression as dry as a stale biscuit.
“What in the world is going on here?” Mr. Johnson demanded, his voice cutting through the chaos.
I had made it through half the day without receiving a threatening glare from a teacher. I believed I deserved some credit …
I tilted my head toward Jamie. “Nothing, sir; Jamie just slipped and collided with Lucas.”
There was a four-second pause where I could see the wheels turning in Mr. Johnson’s brain, likely contemplating whether he wanted to waste his time dealing with our teenage drama. “I think the two of you could benefit from some time at the counselor’s office. Why don’t you follow me there now?”
Jamie rolled his eyes at me as if somehow all of it was my fault. Okay, maybe fifty percent of it is, but I do not take credit for the full one hundred.
As we rounded the corner and headed towards the lunchroom doors, my rebellious backpack snagged the side of a passing table.
My heart sank as my backpack made an unpleasant ripping sound.
My mind was racing with disbelief. Why me?
Why today? I took a deep breath and slowly turned my head to assess the damage.
A chaotic dance of paper covered the floor tiles as my pencils bounced on their erasers across the cafeteria.
My notebooks sprawled open and slid in all directions, but that wasn’t the worst part: Jamie’s cursed water bottle fell to the floor.
The lid must not have been screwed on properly because the vodka inside soaked all my belongings, filling the air with the scent of impending doom.
Mr. Johnson’s lips parted, his eyebrows furrowed, and his chest heaved. Before he could utter a word, I swiftly raised my hand in the air, cutting him off mid-sentence.
“Principal’s office, yeah, I know.”
I didn’t say a single word during the walk down to the offices.
Jamie and I sat in two rusty metal chairs, waiting for the principal to expel us, no doubt.
Sometimes, there were simply no words. There were no letters that could equal the thoughts that rattled and ricocheted through my mind like a pinball machine.
And no sentences that could express the ache that burned in my chest after my best friend practically poured acid on my heart.
Instead of wasting worthless verbs and adjectives and screaming at Jamie for being an inconsiderate ass, I just sat there, silent and still.
I fused my eyes to the door, my pulse matching the ticking of the clock as the seconds passed with the speed of a snail on morphine.
Fumbling with the buttons of my calculator, I juggled all my belongings, clutched in my arms. There were forty teachers and faculty members in the area.
Yet, not a single one offered me a garbage bag to help manage the mess of my scattered belongings after the zipper on my backpack was broken by a loose nail on the cafeteria table.
Jamie attempted to help by gathering as many of my notebooks and textbooks as possible from the lunchroom floor, but they had turned into a soggy mess of alcohol-soaked cardboard and paper.
There was a faint sound of flipping pages that prompted me to flick my head towards Jamie. That journal stealer is reading my diary!
“Give that back to me!” My anger escaped in a sharp scream that quickly became a whisper as I noticed the receptionist’s hostile gaze fixated on us from behind her plastic IKEA desk.
Jamie wiggled his thick eyebrows at me with an evil little grin. “You should thank me for picking it up off the floor before a stranger found it and learned all your dirty little secrets.”
“First of all, I don’t write my secrets in there, and second, my journal wouldn’t have been on the floor if you hadn’t pissed me off!” I hissed.
Jamie continued flipping through the pages of my journal as if it were a treasure map to a lost fortune. “Oh, you absolutely have a few secrets in here …”
His eyes creased inward as they passed by sentences meant to be private. “You know, these little poem things you write aren’t half bad. Maybe you should become a writer after high school.”
I snatched my journal back from Jamie’s grasp. “They’re just dumb words on paper. Nothing I can do anything with.” I lowered my head to my lap and chewed on my lip.
A long, drawn-out breath exhaled from Jamie’s lungs as he drifted his eyes to the ceiling, “At least you have something you’re good at.”
“You’re fourteen, not fifty. You don’t have to figure that out yet.” I was still furious at Jamie, but I wasn’t going to let him talk that way, even if I wanted to hit him with a frying pan.
Jamie placed his head against the cold center block wall behind him. “Then why does it feel like everybody else has?”
“Because we’re friends with Lucas and Kayla and they’re superhuman freaks who make the rest of us normal folk look dumb in comparison.”
“I think we both know there’s nothing normal about you.”
I snorted out a chuckle. Jamie’s smile liquified my icy glare like a hot August day melting a popsicle.
“I knew I’d get a smile out of you.” He turned to face my flushed cheeks. The ends of his black hair rested over his eye as he stared at me with a half-apology and half-flirtation. “So, you don’t hate me?”
“No,” I confessed begrudgingly. “But I don’t understand what’s going on with you right now.” I shifted my body closer to his. “You don’t talk to me anymore.”
He shrugged me off. “I talk to you.”
“Not like you used to, not about important stuff.”
Jamie’s eyes left mine and moved to his palm, his fingers picking at his nails. He always avoided eye contact when he didn’t want to talk about something, like maybe if he couldn’t see me, then possibly I couldn’t see him.
“What happened with you today? You’ve always said hanging out with the Donahue brothers was like signing your prison sentence. And I mean, sure, we’ve snuck beer from your dad’s fridge before, but you broke into my parents’ liquor cabinet without even talking to me about it.”
Jamie still wouldn’t look at me. “I just really didn’t want to deal with today.”
“I know school’s not your thing—”
“Not my thing?” His hot breath scoffed. He pulled back, and he narrowed his black eyes like a Jaguar preparing to strike.
“You think I don’t like school because it’s ‘not my thing?’” His glare shot to mine.
“I can’t do the work, Alex! And it’s not about concentrating harder or studying more.
No matter what I do, I just don’t get it.
Words swirl around the page like a cyclone, numbers collide like two trucks on a highway, and nothing I do ever straightens them out! ”
“So, instead of asking for help, you thought it’d be better to get shitfaced?”
“I’d rather be the drunk kid than the dumb kid.”
I finally understood all the irrational stuff he had done over the summer, every fight he got into, every night he spent passing out on my floor, and every troubling rumor he’d been part of over the months.
Jamie wasn’t being reckless for the fun of it; he was building a persona, a mask that could hide what he thought were failures.
Jamie was never able to shake that first day of high school.
It followed him around like a somber shadow.
And as the rumor of Jamie’s day with the Donahues infected the school like a perilous plague, the tighter Jamie’s mask became.
From that day on, he spent half his time with us and half his time with them—split between two worlds.
If you wear a mask long enough, it becomes a part of your face.