Symbiosis (Phan)

2: Just Dress Up As A Tortoise To Impress That Boy You Like

Dan was perhaps spectacularly good at generally fucking things up. So much so that he'd even list it as one of his many talents, if of course he ever got to a stage in life in which he was required to do so, but from where he stood right now, he had great difficulty in visualising or even accepting the reality of such a stage.

Adulthood, life outside of school, life outside of homework and classes and little balls of paper thrown at the back of his head seemed like some sort of weird dream, some sort of weird fairy story, like when everyone said that Marilyn Manson got his ribs removed so that he could suck his own dick - everyone had believed in it, but that didn't mean that it was true.

What Dan didn't believe to be true was of course the freedom of it, well the apparent freedom, and individuality you got with adulthood and your own life, but truth be told, he couldn't see that for him at all; he could only see school, and school: a teenager forever, as if the moment he turned eighteen the clock would be step back and he'd see himself starting primary school again.

Of course, he knew that it most likely wouldn't really happen as such - either of the two ways he reckoned it might, and that all that would come of his eighteenth birthday was the ability to buy alcohol and cigarettes - neither of which he really cared for, and of course, the ability to move out and fail spectacularly in caring for himself.

And he doubted that living alone would bring him more freedoms than that of walking around all day in his underwear, but then still, he'd have windows and neighbours, and a million other things to worry about, and he was even unlikely to have the time to stay in his underwear all day, or perhaps he would, and he didn't quite know which was worse. He'd fuck it all up anyway.

But back to the present day, sixteen year old Dan Howell found himself stood outside the art block at school, looking at his maths homework and indeed the bottle of water he'd spilled all over it.

He sighed aloud, quickly coming to accept the fact that there was little hope left in this world for the A5 sheet of algebra that he had slaved over for a grand total of twenty six minutes last night at approximately half past eleven.

He pulled the sheet out of his bag, dumping his bottle of water in the trash on the grounds he didn't trust it anymore, and cursed aloud before throwing his maths homework away with a disgruntled sigh.

With his mind racing with a million thoughts to the chorus of 'dear god, why me?', he made his way over to a bench just a few metres away from the trashcan where his homework and bottle of water now lay. He considered the logistics of holding a funeral for his maths homework as he surveyed his bag for anymore water damage, and found himself more than just a little relieved to find that nothing besides some letter they'd handed out seven months ago had gotten more than a little damp.

He grabbed the letter, screwing it up into a ball and aiming it towards the trash can, and of course missing spectacularly, and relishing in that fact, before feeling sorry for the planet and nature and getting up to pick it back up again and placing it properly into the bin.

And with the knowledge that he'd perhaps saved a bird or something from a paper induced death, he tried to smile as he pulled out his cellphone and texted his friend Chris in all caps, demanding that he came over here right now on pain of death.

Dan's friend Chris, was Chris Kendall, dubbed weirdest fucking kid in the school after he'd come to school dressed as a turtle on the last non-uniform day. And Chris hadn't just slapped some green painted cardboard shell on his back, he'd gone all out: Dan had helped him make the shell out of plaster of paris, and he'd even painted his skin to mimic that of a tortoise, again, with Dan's help, and he'd walked around all day casually munching lettuce - this, Dan hadn't helped with, and all because some kid called PJ in Chris' drama class had told him about how he'd done some charity thing to raise money for the endangered giant tortoises.