“If ever you need a friend, I’ll be there ‘til the end.” The card featured a childish animation of two stick people holding hands underneath a sunny blue sky, unidentifiable animals frolicking in the background. Norman smiled as he read the handwritten note underneath the message. Jen cared about him, and whether she would ever reciprocate his feelings for him or not, Norman was happy to have at least this sentiment. When he saw Anthony walk into the hallway, his smile shifted into a scowl. Norman threw the rest of his things into his personal space, slammed his locker shut, and shouldered Anthony aside as he marched to his next class.
All Norman could think about during his Biology class was the card Jen sent him. He accidentally tossed it into his locker in his hurry to avoid a confrontation with Anthony, and wished he still had it to examine between his notebook pages. Had he been paying attention, he would have heard his teacher’s personal anecdote about how biology landed him a date to the prom. During his class’s fetal pig dissection, Norman’s teacher got his partner to fetch something from the lab room next door. While she was gone, the teacher grabbed a slip of paper he had earlier written, and place it in the pig’s open chest cavity, resting gently between its lungs, and replaced the heart so that it sat neatly on top. When his partner returned, Norman asked if she wanted to do the honor of examining the atria. When she reached in to free the heart of its tendoned restraints, the piece of paper came out as well, stuck to the back of the heart. It read, “we’ve stopped this pig’s heart, and you’ve stopped mine. Will you go to the prom with me?” The girl, flattered and slightly nauseous, agreed on the spot.
Norman caught himself beginning to drool in his sleep-inducing daydream just in time to catch the end of his teacher’s nostalgic soliloquy, and wiped his mouth to avoid any suspicion. He caught sight of his neighbour Beatrice staring in disgust, but Norman decided to avoid eye contact, and play it dumb, hoping she wouldn’t tell the girl sitting on her other side. Beatrice was sitting next to Taylor Washington, who ruled the class with an iron fist. On the first day of freshman year, Taylor stormed the cafeteria with a crowd of followers, and annexed the senior section for her own. The tables, donated generously by the graduating class of 2002, sat as a special “reserved” section for graduating seniors along the outer wall of the cafeteria. The section offered the best view of the landscape outside the school, and was close to the food stations, while other classes had to fight to sit near the prime lunchtime real estate. After Taylor’s coup, administration responded with a strongly worded letter launched towards Taylor’s parents about respecting the wishes of the graduating class of 2002. Taylor and her parents took the issue to the school board, and threatened to sue if their freedom to sit wherever they wanted was withheld. The entire class of 2002 signed a petition saying only graduating seniors could use the tables, as they announced at the end of their year, yet two days before the petition was submitted to the board, the tables were mysteriously smashed, vandalized, and left in pieces outside the school. No evidence exists to link Taylor, or her friends, to the vandalism, but Taylor had already earned her reputation as one not to trifle with.
Norman shuddered as he saw Beatrice lean over, whisper something into Taylor’s ear, and giggle, but he kept his ignorance act up, praying that this wouldn’t end up publicized on the front of the school’s monthly newsletter. The last time Taylor used a similar tactic to slander someone – for no real purpose, mind you; Taylor just enjoyed ruining people’s social careers occasionally – the girl had to change schools, and go by a different first name to avoid further humiliation. For the remainder of the class, Norman sat on his hands to keep his mind off of the girls next to him. Biology became the most interesting subject in Norman’s life, and he felt found plant ecology to be more fascinating than he ever thought vascular systems could be.
The bell rang, and hundreds of students shuffled through narrow hallways. Norman knew he had a seven second window of time to see Jen walking past him en route to her next class, but in the commotion, only three of those seconds would give him a chance to say anything audible to her. So, as he rounded the corner to leave the western class wing, Norman stuck out his left foot, tripping the oncoming horde of foot traffic for at least fifteen feet back. Norman then weaved his way past the fresh congestion, and casually strolled forward to meet Jen as she rounded the corner from the northern class wing. Two steps, four steps, eight steps went by, and Norman didn’t see her. Jen had impeccable punctuality, and her daily routines could set clocks in time, but she was nowhere to be found that day. Worried, Norman quickened his pace. Obviously, she must have stayed behind in her last class to talk to her teacher. But that would mean Norman wouldn’t be able to laugh about the giant mess in the hall with Jen, and wonder naïvely what made people to self-absorbed that they couldn’t see where others were stepping. At a near sprint by the time he reached Jen’s math class, Norman’s heart sank when he saw it was empty. Either Jen was missing, or she hadn’t come to school that day. Now that he thought about it, Norman didn’t recall seeing Jen like he usually did as they both rushed to their morning classes. But the note in his locker meant that Jen must have come to school; Norman recognized it as her handwriting, and no one else understood their corny humor well enough to pick such a perfectly cheezy greeting card. Norman debated skipping his last class to go search for Jen, but then he remembered that his presentation was due today, and he wasn’t entirely prepared. He had the majority of the assignment done! He just left out the part where he presented counterevidence that he could then refute to support his claim that the American Populists were indeed the most controversial political party of the country’s history. Norman assumed he could wing it based off his pre-existing knowledge of the various political parties that preceded America’s good ol’ red and blue, but considering he had spent the past few hours lost in thought about a girl, gaps had emerged in his understanding of the American political system. Suddenly Whigs were Progressive Proletarians, and Libertarians sounded a lot like fascists.
Anthony was seated conveniently in the front row as Norman walked into the room as his cue cards quivered in his trembling fingers. The assignment was only worth a tenth of his final class grade, but the greater mark at stake here was the mark that would be placed on his social record for bombing a project the class considered to be the most stressful of the term. Three students had already been either hospitalized or sent to the school nurse after fainting or hyperventilating during their speech, and two others ran out of the room in tears as soon as they were finished. The teacher hadn’t even said anything in those five occasions; the class was full of such high-achieving students that they brought it upon themselves. Norman wasn’t near the top of his class, but doing poorly today would give Anthony the fuel he needed to present an A plus presentation two days later. The class started, and Norman furiously scribbled down notes on the back of his last card as his teacher announced the presentation order for the next three weeks. The class fell silent when Norman’s name was announced, and his feet dragged him to the front of the room as confidently as they could. Anthony sniggered to his friend Jacob, and the two sat poised, waiting for the question and answer portion of the presentation. Norman didn’t mind public speaking, or history, but giving peers the opportunity to tear each other apart was the cruelest thing a teacher could assign their students.
The speech went flawlessly in Norman’s mind, and the audience clapped appropriately as soon as the infelction in his voice signaled to their ears a finality in his speaking, waking them from their otherwise enjoyable 8-minute nap. Two hands roze lazily in the back as the teacher called for questions, but Norman paid them little notice. They were simple matters of clarification, but he continued to dread what he knew would be the beginning, eye, and end of the storm. When the teacher called for any final questions, Anthony remained still for a few seconds. Then, just before the audience was allowed to clap Norman to his seat, Anthony’s lips curled into a smile that would make the Grinch cower in fear, and raised his hand, fingers fully extended. Before his name was called, he began a two-minute long rant on why everything Norman had just presented was entirely unfounded, historically unsound, and failed to take into account the much more persuasive and pervasive Libertarian Party, a party that appealed to a much better demographic as the Populists drew mainly from farmers – a dying breed of American citizen. When he felt satisfied in his academic sabotage, Anthony then tacked his question on at the end of his rant: “What would you say makes an individual Populist more willing to convert their neighbours to their same political thought?” Norman stood aghast at the question, unsure of where to start, when his teacher announced that there wasn’t enough time left in the allotted presentation time to cover it. Norman held in a giant sigh of relief, and took his seat far behind Anthony. He knew that the standoff would be resolved another time, but for the moment, Norman was off the hook. And free to sleep for the remaining 45 minutes.
The bell woke Norman up at the end of the school day, and he collected his things to get out as quickly as possible. His first move was to get to his afternoon carpool; if he missed that, he would have to walk home, and Norman needed to talk to Beatrice, who conveniently carpooled with the same set of friends. He nearly bowled over a group of sophomores on his way to the car, but made it in time to avoid being stuck with the middle back seat. Beatrice clambered in, beads of sweat forming around her hairline, and apologized for not getting there sooner. The ride was unusually quiet that day, and Norman suspected that the driver and his girlfriend were fighting again. When he dropped her off, she didn’t walk around to kiss him goodbye outside his window, and they drove off before she had even got inside. Beatrice and Norman were dropped off on the intersecting corner of their streets, but before they parted ways, Norman asked if she had said anything to Taylor about the drool earlier. Beatrice laughed and said that while she hadn’t already, she was sure to now. Norman cursed, and walked away before he could say anything else unintelligent. He checked his own phone for any messages, and stared at his empty inbox for the next minute and a half, until he reached his front door. He set his things down when he got inside, and decided he would text Jen. It wasn’t a phone call, but it still got a message out. He had spent hours talking to her on the phone that weekend, but for some reason, this seemed most appropriate. He avoided too much text language, and ended it with a smiley face emoticon. He then turned off his phone, terrified of whatever response may have come, and took a nap.
Word count: 2,013
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