Heroes

Chapter One

“HEY!!! ADEL!!! WAIT FOR ME, YOU MORON!!!”

I turned to see my friend Tara running down the hall as if all hell was chasing her. She was dressed in the usual, light blue jeans, purple shirt, and her soft-as-wool-but-wasn’t-wool purple jacket with Sperry’s adorning her feet. I swear, she was like a cartoon character. I shook my head at her. What an idiot, running down the hall like that. Coach Tod is totally going to catch you and give you detention, I thought.

She caught up to me, panting like she’d just run a marathon. Sure, a marathon of a thirty-foot hallway. She leaned down and propped her hands on her knees.

I snickered. “You don’t realize how lucky you were that Coach Tod is in the bathroom right now, or else you’d be totally screwed.”

She looked up at me and grinned. “So? If I just kept running, he’d never catch up to me, now would he? Big Kentucky Man would have a hard time catching up to me.”

“Oh, really?” A thick Southern-accented voice said from behind her. She froze and I was trying to hold back my laughter as I looked up at Coach Tod.

"Hi, Coach. Er...I'm just gonna go," I pointed with my thumb and began walking away with dramatically-large steps.

Our teacher smirked at me. "Good. Now, if you could do me a favor, could you inform your next period teacher that Tara here is going to be a little late? Tell them she’s with me.”

I saluted him with two fingers. “Can do. Guess I’ll see you later, Tara. Have a nice day, Coach!” I said, walking away and heading to fifth period: Language/Literature. I saw Tara mouth “I hate you,” to me before I turned around, but I just winked at her and mouthed an apology.

I opened the door to my classroom and walked inside, doing somewhat of a balancing act with my stuff, trying to get it to my desk. Babs was already there, the only other kid in the class; everyone else would show up within the next five or so minutes.

I set my stuff down on my desk and went to the back of the room to Ms. Way sat, seemingly grading papers. She tilted her head up to look at me when I got up to her desk.

“Um, Ms. Way, Coach Tod told me to tell you that Tara is going to be a bit late. She’s with him, but he wanted to let you know.”

Ms. Way smiled. “Running down the hall again? I swear, when is that girl going to learn to walk?”

I laughed. “You guess is as good as mine.” She smiled at me again before I headed to my seat. Babs was there in an instant; her pink-and-green nails glittering on my desk. “So what happened?” she asked. “Did she get in trouble? Detention? Suspension?” By now she was bouncing. “Oh, God, what happened?”

I looked up at her and frowned. “Did you not just hear that whole conversation? Tara was running in the hall and Coach Tod caught her. She probably has detention now.”

Babs frowned. “Well that sucks. It’s probably through Friday, too…dangit, we were all gonna go to the movies, but I guess she can’t go…and we can’t go without her…well this just sucks.”

“Yeah.” People had started to file into the room: people I liked, people I hated, and people that seriously had a habit of pissing me off. But alas. You can't like everyone.

“You know,” I said, looking pointedly at Babs’ desk. “You should probably go to your seat before the bell rings and you get detention along with her.”

She grimaced and looked at the clock on the wall. Her eyes widened and she quickly fled to her seat: there were only thirty seconds before the bell rang. I just snickered. Her stupidity sometimes was amazing, not to say that I wasn’t pretty stupid myself. But it was still kinda funny to watch her squirm.