That Friend From Childhood - 2.

 2. The Quirky Experiment.

Life has a funny way of screwing things up for you.
It was just one day of acting sick, just because I felt too lazy to go to high school for once.
I mean, could I really even be blamed for playing truant, given my current situation?
Marks - Top of the class.
Attitude - Indifferent.
Life - Boring as fuck.
So what was so wrong about staying home a day, just once ?
Unfortunately, some higher power does apparently exist, an Entity that shall be named as the I-SHALL-SCREW-THEE entity, and it decided to screw my life for two whole weeks just for one lousy day of skipping class.

'This is what I get for faking sick.' I said, grimacing softly into the phone to Johnson the following day.

"Sorry bro, that's the way the cookie crumbles." Johnson replied, and I could almost feel the evil grin on his face.

"You do realize this is your fault ? If you hadn't convinced me to stay home I wouldn't even be in this situation." And it was his fault.
"Dude, every teen has got to experience the thrill of skipping school !"
Why I'd even listened to him and went through with that, I shall never know.

"It's not the end of the world Sunny, I mean, you only have to deal with it for two weeks max, and I'm sure you guys can work out something... like a way you'll never actually have to be face to face."

"You do realize this is Bree we're talking about? The golden girl of high school, second
only to the Goddess of our hallways, Dana. And wasn't it you who told me that we are nothing compared to her-" I began before he cut me off hurriedly.

"First of all, who says that you're not good enough to hang out with that crowd?"

"You did?" I said in a deadpan voice.
Maybe he'd forgotten about it but he did say that I shouldn't have any hopes of being in that group.

"Oh, well that was during my dark phase. I'm a much nicer, more optimistic person now."
I tried not to snort.
When a guy like Johnson says something like this, you know its only because one of two things have probably occurred - either his mom had got him the anaconda he'd been asking for, or he'd just got laid.
I guessed it was the second, but I decided not to comment.

"So who are you with for the project?" I asked.

"Oh, don't remind me, it's the Skunk." He whined and I laughed, glad that I wasn't the only one stuck with an awful partner for this project.
"Yes, real mature bro, kick me when I'm down. Go ahead, laugh. Just wait, I'll get an A+ on this one by just showing up at her house every few days."

"Yeah, and soon her smell will take over your brain and you'll die before you can bask in the glory of your only good grade. What a shame. Or worse...You could absorb the stench and scare Juniper away for good!" He huffed angrily into the phone and said he had to be going.

So, I hung up the phone and flopped back on my bed, pondering my current predicament.
I, one of the most shut-in people in the world, was stuck with a girl like Bree for two weeks.
Two weeks. That was practically a lifetime.

First off, I began to list the known facts in this project of death in my mind.

Fact: There was no way to bridge the gap between her stunning popularity to my complete abhorrence of it. It just wasn't possible.
People who spend all their time and energy making each other miserable aren't just going
to set aside their differences and start over. We were just fifteen.
Surely the teachers couldn't expect us to be that mature.

Fact: Bree was the biggest slacker I'd ever met in my life, which meant it was all up to me to do this and do it well because if not, we'd both be murdered by the project teacher and put on the failure list, though she was already one-up on that.

Fact: The topic of experimentation was up to me to decide. Sure it was a group project, but you wouldn't take your dog into consideration while buying a car, would you?
Yes, that was the relation between me and Bree considering the topic of contribution to the project.
I don't think I have to be gender accurate on this one.

Fact: I had no idea what I wanted to do. I could never think outside of
the box and my closed in mind kept bringing me to the same conclusion.

I was screwed.

Hypothesis: If you force a shut-in and a popular person in any environment, then disaster will ensue.

It was then that my muse whispered a quirky and insane idea into my ear.
Now, the only hard part was deciding to actually follow the plan.
After mulling the thought through my head I decided there was no way in Heaven or Hell that I was not going to go through with it.

This was also why I was not surprised when I found myself face-to-face with Bree the next day.
Technically, she had approached me in the cafeteria, grinning ear-to-ear with a beefy guy at her side.

"Hey, Lee." she said, and I tried to block out the overpowering smell of perfume that had invaded the air. I coughed to hide my disgust and pretended to be indifferent. Johnson nudged me in the arm.

"Name's not Lee." I said, and caught a glimpse of Johnson grinning proudly beside me.

"Yeah, sorry, anyway, you got the project done yet or what?" she asked, and her bodyguard slunk away, bored of her inattentiveness.
I sink back into my chair as she plopped down in one beside me, creating a disturbance in our finely
balanced jigsaw system.
This was blowing our group out of the water and I could tell by their stunned and angry faces that half were about to die of a heart attack and the other half were ready to rip this chick's hair out.

"Hey, you." She said again, drawing me back to earth.

"Oh sorry, what?" I ask, noticing the others growing dazed and very uncomfortable by the moment.

Then I realized that she was encroaching on their territory.
Part of me wanted to tell her she had no right to bother us, just because I knew that's what she would have said to me had the roles been reversed.
But the other part of me wanted to see how far my idea would go.

"Oh, the project, yeah, sorry. I've got a few ideas." I replied, and feigned an expression as if I was feeling extremely irritated. Johnson nudged me again.

"Well, you see," I trudged on, through the valley of scorn and indifference.

"We're supposed to be researching about human minds, especially the way they think. So, I thought we could see how they react when something completely out of the ordinary happens. See if it shakes them a bit, you know?"

"What kind of thing are you talking about here?" she asked, looking a bit more interested.
Well, to me, in a way she asked for it. So I gave it to her.
I wondered as to what she'd thought I had meant, since I knew it was definitely not what I'd said, because her jaw about hit the floor when I told her.

"What?" She almost shouted, looking disturbed, confused, and slightly smug all at the same time.

"You heard me. I think we should pretend to date, see how people react when the golden boy is with the loser chick." I said, with a strange confidence crackling in my veins that I hadn't felt since grade school.

"Nothing big, you don't have to sleep with me or anything."
She choked quickly with wide eyes and my face tightened, desperately trying to hold back laughter.

"We don't have to do it. I just think it'd get a high score."

She ran a hand through her hair and her features looked troubled.
I knew she wanted to have nothing to do with me, but she also needed that grade.
Johnson was the assistant in the staff room, and he had cracked open Bree's files and found out that she was on academic probation for her D- in Social Studies.
This grade accounted for forty percent of the entire subject this semester. She needed this and she knew it.

"What do we have to do?" she asked in a tired voice, finally giving in.

"Well, we'll just have to act like boyfriend and girlfriend. Hold hands in the halls; go on a few dates where people can see us, stuff like that." I said with a shrug, trying to hide my mirth.
The more I thought about this, the funnier it sounded.

For her, it probably didn't sound appealing at all, it probably sounded more like torture.
So why was I doing this? Well I was simply bored, what else can I say.

"Fine, but once I get my A, which I better get, we're done and we tell
everyone the truth." She extended a slim hand, and I placed mine in hers and shook it lazily.

"Deal." I muttered and snatched my hand out of hers. Then I turned away, back to
my lunch, back to the wide eyes of my friends.

"What are you doing?" she suddenly whispered in my ear, causing goosebumps to rise
over my arms.

"Um, eating?" I answered, wondering what she was talking about.

"Come on then boyfriend, you're eating with me." She grabbed my arm and steered me away from my table and out into the courtyard. I shot a glance at Johnson, but he just shrugged sympathetically and
looked down. The guy had no idea I had planned all this.

Bree plopped down on the short brick wall around the tree and pulled me down next to her, practically on top of her. She slung her arm over my shoulder and pulled me even closer.
"Act natural." She whispered into my ear, and I shivered involuntarily and nodded.
This was certainly new.

I relaxed back into the tree as much as I could make myself and she put her hand on my knee nervously.
I didn't let her miss the satisfied grin that spread on my face.
She probably thought I loved every minute of this. She had no fucking clue.

"I'm only doing this for the grade." She hissed and I hummed in disbelief.

"Sure." I said lightly and was about to pull away and head off to my group again when her arm tightened around me.  I followed her gaze to a group of her crowd walking closer to us, peering straight at me curiously.

Let the games begin.

She laughed at the group and I resisted the urge to smack her head.
"Relax," she whispered to me and then directed her attention to her friends. 
"Hey guys, meet Lee, my boyfriend."

She got my name wrong again. She would be made to suffer soon for that.

That Friend from Childhood.

1. Meeting, Parting and Voila!

It wasn't something that I remember starting, I just remember it being there. I've got memories where it's not there, and then memories where it is. There's not a certain moment in which it started I don't think. It was probably just my random seven-year-old mind, you know?

All the other children were doing the same mundane things, so I guess I wanted
in on something...different. I don't know why I picked her. She wasn't anything special. I don't even remember talking to her ever before. We were only seven.

It wasn't life changing, the way I felt about her. It was more of a thing to laugh about. I liked her company, and I just wanted to chase her around the playground and have her chase me back. I wanted to trade things from our lunches with her, and she probably wanted me to stick up
for her if any bullies ever bothered her. She was too thin, not that I was better, but I wasn't timid.
I wanted her to pick me to be the helper when she was passing out her birthday toffees.
I wanted her to stick out her tongue at all the other kids and save a smile, just for me.
I'd of course, do the same for her.
Nothing big. Everything small.

I remember once, we were playing throw-ball in the school grounds.
I was captured and she was throwing balls like a madman trying to get me out. I kept thinking
that if she threw me a ball and I caught it, we'd be friends forever.
Exciting right? Very kiddish as well.
And so, she was grabbing every ball in sight doing dance moves across the dirt to avoid being hit. I thought she was being very graceful, until she twisted her ankle and cried.
This other girl threw me the ball and I accidentally caught it. Then she laughed in my friend's sad
little face. I chucked the ball extremely hard in that sniggering girl's face, and saw blood.
Hell followed me home that day, but I was content at night as I tucked into my bed.
That small smile was worth every hardship that I had endured.

We sort of bonded quite naturally after that. We read our first chapter books, learned to ride our bikes without training wheels, and figured out that the worst word in the world rhymes with 'duck'. I entered third grade with my mind as sharp as a tack even though I sucked at maths.
I thought I was the smartest kid ever when I learned how to divide sixty by fifteen.
It's four by the way.

By 9, my life was full of small epiphanies, and I had no need for other kids.
Plus, the others were gross. All they did was make farting noises with their armpits and get all uppity at recess.
She though, fell in love with her other friend's older brother and spent the whole summer at their house trying to get his attention. But then her friend said she was a loser, and she didn't go back for at least a month. Maybe she decided she didn't want a boy at all.

Until fifth grade. Fifth grade was the year of the Weasel. Of course, you understand it had nothing to do with him being a animal, and everything to do with his physical appearance.
The Weasel was in my class and he gave her half a rose and told her she was pretty.
So naturally, she became his girlfriend. She often wrote about him in her diary, saying that
he was in fact, the love of her life, but she showed it just to me, not to him.
Love was a funny thing, I thought to myself then.
They got married in October at the school picnic.
Of course, I frowned upon it, but of course, I couldn't do a damn thing as well.
I can't remember what the Weasel called it.
Anyway, he gave her a candy necklace and promised her he'd buy her a puppy.
I guess he was a very persuasive boy.

She said yes, and they were married for exactly three days. He told her he liked someone else after those three days of paradise, and he said he wanted the candy necklace back. She told him she ate it and I promptly took it from her bag and threw it in the loo.
Later I got in huge trouble when the bowl overflowed.

Sixth grade I promised myself I'd be a changed guy.
With sixth grade came body odour, and hair in funny places, and the notion that people will laugh at you for hours if you say anything wrong.
So, I was pretty silent that year and a lot of my talkative moments were
spent with her, the only person I gave a damn about.

We held hands once, walking home from the library. Mine were sticky from
a candy bar, and I didn't know what to do with my fingers.
It was sort of weird, as her hand was hot and she walked really slowly.
So I began to sort of count the time it took for her to take a step.
I couldn't talk and count at the same time so I ended up tripping a few times.
It wasn't the quirkiest experience of my life, but it came close.
None of the other kids in my class had held a girl's hand, so I was the head dog for about a week and a half.
Until a Miss Prissy Heels in our class kissed some guy.

My two years in junior high were the most awkward years of my life.
I was growing too tall for all my pants, faster than the speed of light.
Life was a series of questions no one seemed to want to answer for me. I was lost. I was confused. And I had a huge appetite for sweet things now. That was creepy.

Then, this boy I had named Frogface  asked her to the school dance.
He was in the cool kids group. Naturally she turned to me for advice.
I was no expert, but I said yes because I knew it would probably feel nice if someone had asked me. He bought her a dress and kissed her on the cheek. He was nice to her, and she liked him. She told me she could talk to him and not be nervous, that she could just be herself.
Plus, his parents had given him a car for his sixteenth birthday, though of course they had a driver to drive him to places as he was still under-aged.
We unanimously decided getting rides with him sure beat rides in the rickety school bus.

He was her first kiss. I was pretty late on that one myself. We were fifteen. We were sitting in my room, working on homework and he kept clearing his throat like he was nervous.
"Froggie, are you alright?" she asked finally, probably afraid that he was dying of an asthma attack or something.

"Fine." He said, and I leaned forward to grab a pencil, unconcerned.
All of a sudden, he grabbed her hand and squeezed his eyes shut, puckering up and leaning forward.
I didn't know what to do.
Was I supposed to sit there, or was I supposed to interfere now ?
And did she really want to kiss him?
He finished the deal by pressing his lips to hers for a split second and then pulling back.
She wiped her lips and looked around. She looked dazed.

I didn't have time to gauge if I liked this incident or not because it was over too fast.
I thought I should like it. My friend had just experienced her first kiss with a guy after all.
Wasn't I supposed to be supportive?
Was something wrong with me because I didn't like the fact she had kissed another guy?
I ended up convincing myself I did in fact like it. Deep down, I knew she deserved better.
Not me. Just someone better.

The summer after eighth grade, we moved. And I hated my parents for two weeks straight as we packed up everything I loved and left.
I said goodbye to my friend. We hugged, we cried, we promised to email and call each other, and we forgot to get each other's numbers and email addresses.
And then, once my whole life was in neat brown boxes and loaded up into the back of a truck, we drove forty minutes, stopped, got out, and moved in.

I lay on my mattress for a whole day with the light off and the mismatched sheets over my head, refusing to get up and unpack until we moved back, it wasn't too late after all. But alas, it was rather lonely shut up in an empty room.
I forgave my parents eventually. After all, I didn't have anyone else with me now.

There were two days of calm before the storm, and on the third day, I started high school.
Alone and skeptical, armed with my time-table and an important looking piece of paper, I waved goodbye to my parents and got on the bus.
All the high school aged kids were sprawled across the back few seats and I decided I was going to sit there, but then I plopped down in the front seat, remembering I had no friends here.

I found a friend that very first day, and I was satisfied with life for a few days.
That's when I saw her again. The girl from grade school.
The girl who thought I was cool.
The girl I broke another girl's nose for. The girl who was now strangely popular.

Then, I passed her in the hall one day and she nodded at me.
"It's Lee, right?" she asked. I nodded absently. Too bad that wasn't my name.
It didn't really hurt, her forgetting me so easily, but it stung.
I realized then that this was what one got for letting someone get too close.

Karma really wasn't on my side that day, because my only friend decided that he'd do me a favor and set her straight.
"No you bimbo, his name's Sunny. Jeez."
She scowled at him, looked at me like I was from another planet, and then walked away.
"What are you on anyway?" he then asked, turning to me.
"First of all, your name's not Lee, and second, why the hell are you talking to her of all people."
He scoffed and steered me in the opposite direction.

"She is here on the social scale." he said, raising her hand in the air.
"And we are here," he said, squatting down and slapping his foot on the tile floor.
"To people like her, we are the dirt beneath their pretty little toes, only here to make them feel important. Get used to it."

I really enjoyed the supportiveness of this guy, my new friend here.
To me, Johnson was the quirkiest guy on the face of the earth.
He had short spiky hair and really bad acne on his forehead.
But I had learned way back never to judge.

I found that I fit in with Johnson and his group.
We were all loners who didn't want to be alone.
Like the extra puzzle pieces that you throw in the box because you forgot which puzzle they belong to. It felt nice though, being part of something.

Johnson had a college girlfriend named Juniper, and she thought he was 'the rub' as she so eloquently put it. She was tall and slim, and giggled like an idiot when he kissed her on the cheek, which he did, often.

Johnson spent most Friday nights at Juniper's house, for her parents were usually overseas, and he came home early in the morning.
I'd usually stay the night on Fridays camped out on his couch in his house, flipping through the channels, and covering for him when his parents came down.
I wonder if they thought it was strange that their son spent most of his life in the bathroom. I could never think of anything else to say, so it was always "Loo break."

First semester soon ended and I wasn't surprised that I had all A's.
What else had I to do with my time anyway?
It's not like people were fighting for my attention. It was just Johnson, and me and our little group of extra puzzle pieces.
After that, life got interesting.
Okay, that's a lie.
My life stayed the same. Then second term ended, and holidays were over before I had a chance to breathe.

That was until I was picked as Bree's Social Studies project partner.
Bree, as in one of the high profile group, second in command to the Queen of the Freshmen.
Now who's this Queen of the Freshmen, one would ask.
Well, it was Dana, the grade school girl, the one who called me Lee, the one who was now popular and extremely good looking, the once timid girl from my childhood.
I asked God that night why he would put me in such a situation.
Needless to say, I never got an answer.
It was that night that I also decided Atheism was the proper route to go.