How to Save Your School From Soul Stealing Demons

CHAPTER THREE

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 2ND
12:02 PM
VANTERBEST HIGH CAFETERIA

Lunch at Vanterbest only makes the high school hierarchy more clear.

The round tables in the center of the room are filled with the best-looking students (including Hemani) who are either eating salad, sushi, or other food that obviously isn't from the cafeteria staff, engaged in a gross moment of PDA (thankfully Hemani is not a member of that category), or huddled together like they're having the most riveting conversation of all time. 

To be honest, even Darwin, as much of a mixing-pot of popularity as it was, had tables like those. That was where Miguel sat.

The surrounding rows of rectangular picnic-like tables are probably where I should sit. They're occupied by the kids you wouldn't really take a second glance at. The so-called extras of life. Average clothes, average looks, average lives. It's the category I'd consider myself to be in, so I'm not ragging on them or anything. It's just the way high school is.

I don't sit there, though. Instead, I head to the outer ring of round tables, shoved towards the back of the room. It's interesting—you see these people, the same way you see the Hollywood-looking kids, but it's for an entirely different reason. The wrong reason. You see them because of their bad haircuts, or their terrible posture as they hunch over their hand-held video games. Your eyes are drawn to the zits, or the dark makeup and all-black clothing, or the fact that in a sea of hundreds of teenagers, someone somehow manages to sit all by themselves.

Oops—that last one is Watts. 

He's alone at a table with four chairs, one of which quickly gets snatched away by a girl in a varsity jacket and dragged to the center of the room. Her table is the sun, and Watts's table is Uranus.

I haul ass over to Uranus anyways, because even if I do want to sit with Hemani, I know better than to fly too close to the sun. The sun is obviously not the type of place that welcomes a no-name, first-day kid. Besides, Watts seems cool enough, save for the high-waters, and I don't typically screen test my friends for their ability to pick out the right pants size. In fact, Miguel's pants were always sagging around his ass, so maybe this is a good sign. Maybe the best people wear ill-fitting pants.

I resist the urge to check if Hemani's pants fit correctly. 

Watts looks up from his notebook as I set my tray down, which is stacked on top of my beaten-up sketchbook. He grins, sliding his pencil into his shirt pocket. "How's your first day treating you?"

I sit down, grimacing as I examine the burnt, overstuffed grilled cheese I picked up from the lunch line. As if I needed more appetite issues. "It was fine up until I saw the cafeteria food."

He laughs, patting the thermos in front of him. "Yeah, I haven't bought a lunch from here since my first day." He reaches into his backpack, then pulls out a small blue bag of chips and tosses it onto my tray. "Here. Consider it a welcoming gift."

My stomach growls at the sight of the junk food and I grab the bag, pushing my tray to the side. "Thanks."

"Did you do that?" His eyebrows raise over his thick glasses as he points to the book in front of me. Now that my tray is gone, the cover is exposed, showing the pop-art style scene I painted on it last year.

"Oh, yeah." I shrug as I bite into a chip. "A while ago. I've gotten a lot better, so I've been thinking about painting over it."

He looks at me as if I just wolfed down the nasty grilled cheese that's still sitting too close for comfort. "Paint it over?! You—Wh—Can I see your new stuff?" he asks, pushing his lunch aside.