Because I am in a good mood...
2.
Beep, beep, beep, beep…
Man, is the alarm annoying today or what? It’s supposed to ring for five minutes or so but it never gets that far because in less than one, I find my way out of my covers that have conveniently tangled around me, find the floor with no trouble, and press the button to shut it off with my index finger without looking at it. Then I just look at it and think, “What a piece of s**t” just because it woke me up to my sad, sad life.
Since I’m up, I go find a cleaner shirt than the one I just slept in and hope that there are clean boxers in my drawer because unless I get covered in mud or soaked to the bone, that’s the only thing my mom cleans. I don’t think she can tell the difference in the piles around my room. Today, I find she did some laundry and most of my underwear is clean and in the drawer, including my briefs, which I only wear on formal occasions when boxers look ridiculous.
I don’t dare smell my socks because they’re probably the worst smelling clothes I own and they’re all black socks for a reason. White ones get dirty too fast. I grab my jeans that I laid at the edge of my bed last night, which were now on the floor, and put them on before walking across the hall to the bathroom.
I brush my poor, pathetic head of hair, put some deodorant on under my shirt, and call it good. Then I just head down the stairs to breakfast so I can get it over with and go to school.
Nobody greets me as I enter the dinning room. My plate sits there with the usual scrambled eggs and toast. I grab an orange and a glass of milk before I sit down. My dad continues to read the paper and my mom continues to be busy in the kitchen, doing who knows what.
A few minutes later, my dad puts the paper down and digs into his food like it was just put there. Every time I see his face, or mom’s for that matter, I am reminded of just about the oddest thing in my life. I look nothing like my parents.
My dad is about as dark as night with a huge nose, black hair, brown eyes and huge hands that need Mickey Mouse gloves to cover them. His voice is strong and firm.
My mom is the color of a peach with a nose as big as my dad’s, black hair, blue eyes and hands, again, the same size as my dad’s. Her voice is smooth and soft.
Now there’s me. I’m white as a ghost with an almost nonexistent nose; blonde hair that is so blonde, you can see my scalp as if I was wearing a veil; strictly black eyes; and womanly hands with long, slender fingers. My voice can’t stick to a pitch to save my life. I was told that was just puberty and I would grow out of it but I don’t see that happening.
Then it gets even weirder. My lip color doesn’t go across the whole length of my lips. My eyebrows are black even though the rest of my hair matches my head, so you can’t see it at all. If I looked any thinner, you could mistake me for a pole while my parents look like they grew up on a farm and could actually do some work, which is why no one trusts me with anything heavy. My parents can’t grow hair on their head to save their life (they both have short hair), while mine will grow out of control if I don’t watch it.
So I can safely say that I’m a poster child for anomalies and I don’t care what anyone else says, that’s how I see it and that’s how I’m going to look at it.
Back to breakfast, I’m not very good at peeling oranges so the juice gets all over my fingers before I get half the peeling off and I never get up enough nerve to tell my mom that I don’t really care for eggs anymore so that’s two food items I’m not looking forward to eating. Then I realize that the orange juice moved onto a new target, my toast. My mom always puts too much butter on it for me so I usually wipe it off before it all melts but now that orange juice is saturating that, I’m not looking forward to my toast.
I sigh, thinking how pathetic I am and I just set the half peeled orange on my plate, giving up on it. I take one good look at the glass of milk. Little is better than none I guess and I chug that down before leaving to go to school.
Instead of being a clean person and taking the time to wash my hands, I figure that no matter how much I wash them, the smell will remain for a few hours, and so I just wipe my hands on my jeans. I wipe my nose on the already filthy and contaminated sleeve of my sweatshirt. I don’t really want to remember how long ago I had bought it, for that was the last time it was guaranteed clean, but instead I thought of how many times I rubbed my snotty nose on it or how many times it touched my food. That sent a shiver up my spine.
So here I am, just walking to school like the death march is playing and school is the hell I’m supposed to spend eternity in, but I don’t make it to school.
I meet Trevor and Alex on the way and as usual, they have something better planed than “boring” school and again, as usual, they take me with them. I usually go along with them I mean, they are the only people I have that I would consider calling friends. I know, I’m pathetic but what’s even more pathetic is, I don’t know which place I’d rather be. My only options were going to school where everyone seemed to either ignore me or hate me or I could go with the only people who seemed to be able to stand me on a pointless, pitiful excuse to miss school. You’d think someone with a 3.5 GPA would pick the more sensible option.
Trevor and Alex never tell me where we’re going until we get there for most of the time, when we get there, I regret coming. They just smile as I figure out where we’re going.
We are going to the corner store near Alex’s house until his old man leaves for his lazy bum job; then we’ll go into Alex’s house.
Another good thing about having a controlled population is that everyone has a job. They went as far as legalizing drug dealers. There are rules there of course but everyone has a job and everyone gets paid enough to live off of. My mom stays near home and cleans other people’s houses, my dad is an accountant, Trevor’s parents are both factory workers, and Alex’s dad, well, he’s a test subject for a drug company, which means he only takes pills and let them conduct tests on him. I’m not so sure what I want to do but I do know one thing, with Trevor’s and Alex’s grades, they’ll be lucky to get a fast food job.
We buy a few candy bars and finish them as Alex’s dad leaves for work. With Alex leading the way, we go through the front door and up to Alex’s room.
If I didn’t know Alex better, I would say that his room was literally a cave. The only window was covered with a black sheet even though no light came in through it. The walls were a dingy white and the carpet reminded me of sandpaper. There was a mattress lying in the corner with one blanket waded up next to the cushion Alex used as a pillow. There was a computer next to it but it was set up so you sat on the floor and worked it instead of sitting in a chair. Trevor’s room didn’t look much different except he had a light coming out of the ceiling most of the time instead of just depending on the computer screen.
Alex booted up the computer and we waited as he connected to the Internet. They started teasing me because I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and it didn’t hurt that they were seniors when I was a junior. I have no idea why they are doing it but I got a feeling in the pit of my stomach that I was going to find out.
“Check this out.” Alex says.
He pushes me to the screen. It’s my Email page.
“Go ahead and log on.”
I type in my Email, which is just a bunch of random numbers I picked and memorized, and type in my password as fast as I can so Alex and Trevor can’t memorize it. Once I log on, I see that I have mail and I go to my inbox before Alex asks. I feel them looking over my shoulder as the page loads. They go hysterical when they see the titles of the new mail and I try to see what could be so funny.
My new Emails were titled:
Vacation
From my aunt who’s on a work holiday
Genocide-Fight for the right…
From my neighbor who believes I would actually support this
Greetings
From Congrats_ding_dong_bells_ring@…(Don’t know who this is but I get mail like this all the time. I consider it spam.)
And
Fwr: Hiccups
From Trevor
I thought that maybe Trevor told Alex what was in his Email already and they were laughing at some hidden joke but when I went to open it, Trevor said:
“Not that one.”
Did they want to see my random mail like the Genocide stuff or the mail I got from a random person? Since I didn’t really understand what they wanted me to do, Alex moved my hand and the mouse to the Greetings Email. Maybe they knew the person.
Once it was clicked, I waited for it to load and heard Trevor and Alex setting themselves up for another good laugh. When it came up, it took me a second to realize what I was looking at.
It was a thank you for registering for marriage.
I let my mouth hang open as Alex and Trevor laughed like hyenas behind me. I didn’t care if I looked like a fish looking for a hook. This was serious and I didn’t even register myself, Alex and Trevor did.
Somehow they had gotten a hold of my social security card, which I thought I had lost, and were able to enter all of my information on to some dating website. My name was at the top, like a letter, and I knew that I couldn’t undo the damage.
Hatred filled me and a second later, I found my hands around Alex’s neck, pushing him to the ground and refusing to let him get up. Alex didn’t stop laughing until he couldn’t get any more air, then his eyes opened up in horror at what I was doing to him.
Trevor couldn’t pull my hands off of him, even if he had a crowbar. Instead, he got a good grip around my waist and threw me to the farthest corner of the room, my hands coming off of Alex’s neck as soon as I was airborne.
Boom, the wall echoed as I hit it. Dust came off of the ceiling and settled upon me. I didn’t shut my eyes and I felt a little panicked when I blacked out. When my vision returned, Trevor was helping Alex up as he felt around his neck where my hands were. I could see the outline of my fingers as the skin started to turn purple.
I should have known that I couldn’t take on either of them when they were both together but I was filled with such hatred that I wanted to squeeze the life out of the both of them and that must have given me the strength to start with Alex, who was closer, and ignore Trevor for a second.
“What is your problem?” Alex choked.
“What is your problem? What the hell did you think you were doing?” I stood up.
Trevor spoke up as Alex started to cough. “It’s just a joke.”
“A joke? This is not a joke! This, this is serious! If you wanted a joke you should have put ice down my shirt during lunch or bought one of those lame books with jokes in it so we could laugh at all the stupid stuff other people thought was funny! This is not funny!”
“Dude-”
“Stop! You don’t realize how serious this is! This isn’t a joke you can go “he he, haw haw”. You’re playing with my life, my life! You can’t undo this and I’m going to have to pay for your mistake by being drafted into marrying someone I don’t even know for who knows how long! And the sad thing is, you’ll never know what it’s like to be shoved into this kind of problem. You made it so I have rules to abide by like a slave because it wasn’t my choice to begin with!”
Alex stopped coughing and gave me a stern look, like I was wrong. “You said yourself that you had no idea what to do with you’re life.”
“Yes, but I didn’t want to end up like my parents!”
That’s how I looked upon marriage, a lonely existence for a child. My house was always dead quiet and filled with regret. It was heavy like a blanket and always stuck to me, even when I hadn’t been home for hours. I had never laughed, smiled, cried, or gotten angry because I had never learned how. I never wanted to get married because in my eyes, it was a place that was between happiness and sorrow, worse than hell and I had never told anyone my feelings because I knew they would never understand.
I guess I feared the idea of being sucked into that environment for the rest of my life and it terrified me to no end.
“Sorry, it was my idea. Alex thought it was a good idea as well so we took your wallet and took all your information from the cards inside and put everything back before you noticed it was missing.” He held up my social security that he pulled out of his pocket. “But we forgot this. Sorry.”
I snatched the card from his hand as he extended it to me. “Sorry isn’t going to fix this.”
There was a silence, absent of all noise except for the ring of electricity from the computer. Trevor and Alex stared at me and I stared at the floor. The carpet still looked horrible.
“Stephen-”
I suddenly was consumed with the urge to hate again and it took form within me, giving me the strength to do something I had never done before, to anyone. I barked out orders Trevor and Alex.
“GO!”
They stood, confused. It was Alex’s house, not mine. I pointed to the door, my social security card still gripped in my hand. My eyes must have been furious.
“Go to school, NOW! Get moving!”
I don’t think I could have screamed any louder. They scrambled to get their backpacks and hightailed it out of there. I heard the front door to the house swinging open and staying open as they bolted to school. They would make it before the end of second period.
I found myself breathing hard, almost panting, over the words. I had told them what to do, not the other way around. I was overcome by fear and power at the same time.
I finally stopped staring at the door where I last saw Trevor and Alex and slowly put my card back into my wallet. I went over to the computer and logged out of my mail and shut it down so Alex wouldn’t get caught his dad when he came home. The computer on would be a dead giveaway.
Before leaving the room, I looked to where Trevor had flung me. There was a huge crack running up to the ceiling from where I hit. So it was as fragile as it was cheap.
I hesitated before closing the door, wondering if it would draw attention but I knew it would be less suspicious than just staring at the crack. I don’t know why I even cared anymore about Alex’s well being, he certainly didn’t do me any favors.
Still, I felt myself protecting him as I shut the front door behind me and headed off to school like I was before, to the soundless death march.
KikuMizu Community Member 
|
|
Community Member