All Planned Out

Seven (Alex)

I never have grand expectations for anything exciting or memorable to happen during homeroom, so when I walked in today I was a little bit surprised to see Jenn Jacobs hovering over Stuart at the back of the room.

"So you're not going to help me out?" She said as I sat down.

"I'm still trying to figure out what exactly you want me to do." Stuart had his head down, and was scribbling in a notebook. "I don't really pay attention to what my parents do."

"My mom got ran into the ground so hard yesterday that she spent all night taking it out on me."

"She's the one that signed up for CrossFit."

Jenn's fist came down onto his desk hard enough to jolt him. "I thought you said you didn't pay any attention to that stuff."

Stuart sneered, then held up a finger to her. I watched as he went back to his notebook and erased whatever it was that she had just caused him to do. He looked legitimately angry, much like I had seen him the day before with Gina and Randy.

"I help with their accounting sometimes. I saw that she signed up for CrossFit. I only knew it was your mom because she mentioned you to my mom and then my mom mentioned it to me. That's all."

"She still needs to tone it down. Mom gets weird when she's been ran ragged. I think it's her brain echoing memories of before she was sober."

"I'll say something to my parents, but I don't know what they're going to do." He said, then went back to his notebook.

Jenn stood there for thirty seconds, looking down at him, before glancing around and catching my eye with a short of 'can you believe this guy' look on her face before walking away and going back to her own seat at the front of the room.

It was at this point that I finally noticed that Stuart was not in his usual chair but had moved one desk to the right. He was right next to me.

"So, uh, what was that all about?" I said when he had stopped scribbling and started tapping his pencil on the desk. This also seemed to jolt him. "Everything okay?"

"Oh, my parents do private personal training. Mostly just randos around the valley, but a couple of them have kids here." I guess his parents being gym rats might help explain his physique, not that I can let myself think about that again right now. "They work with some celebrities, too, but I don't do that accounting. I think they're afraid I'd get a little too, um, nosy if I knew who they worked with."

"I mean, they are celebs. If my parents worked with some I'd want to know, too."

Stuart shook his head a little and smiled. "It's not like that, exactly." He then tipped his notebook up to me. Writing covered most of the page. It took me longer than I would care to admit to realize I was looking at a handwritten film script. Being a stone's throw away from Hollywood meant that the school offered a film studies class, which most everyone took their junior year unless they were one of the theatre kids. We had watched a lot of movies, many times with copies of the script in front of us, to get a better idea of how they words were translated to the screen.

"You're writing a script?"

"Shhh." He said, putting a finger to his lips. "I don't want to talk about it. People might hear."

"She just watched you writing." I pointed up at Jenn.

He waved her off. "She probably thinks I was working on Physics notes or something. I'm just...um, like, I don't need people bugging me or asking me to read it or anything. I do this for me." He tapped again at the notebook. "This is my fourth one. The other ones are terrible."