Writing Scraps

Appendix. No Fate | Chapter 1.2 | Aborted Draft

Appendix. No Fate
Fox-Trot-9

Chapter 1: First Impressions
1.2: The Meaning of Chance

Before everything happened, I was a part of an unnamed club at Bonanza High School. It was an eight-man club of regular card-sharks, with three or four stragglers sitting at the table once in a while. I was fortunate to be one of the regulars, and so they always reserved a seat for me. Daniel and I were the only skinnies in the group, the rest in varying stages of obesity. Holden was the middle man between these extremes, slowly edging towards the slimmer side as he lost more weight. But besides Holden, Daniel and I, the rest seemed to be gaining weight.

During my tenure with this club, we were the high school equivalent of the local low-rollers that went into the small casinos off the Strip on Friday night to pass the time gambling. Only we played five days a week in the cafeteria at First Lunch, we never gambled-it was against Bonanza's school policy-, and we played more games than just poker. We played an eclectic assortment of games. Straight Poker, Seven-Card Stud, One-Eyed Jacks, Texas Hold-'Em, Deuces Wild and even Jokers Wild filled the club's poker repertoire; the only poker we didn't play was Strip Poker. But besides the poker genre, we played Blackjack, Go Fish, War, Speed, Hawaiian Speed and Bullshit; and if we were up to something more stimulating to the receptive neurons, we'd play Rummy, Egyptian Ratscrew, or Crazy Eights.

But besides playing cards, we used to play Slap Hands, otherwise called Red Hands because we'd put all our might into smacking each other's hands into submission. It was a sadistic game. I remember seeing Vince cursing his head off after I delivered a deadly chop once; it was priceless, let me tell you. But by the end of our sophomore year last year, the school monitors stopped us. So we resorted to a more genteel sport.

Only, it wasn't genteel at all. More often then not, we acted like rowdy, bastard cow-hands getting drunk at a gambling table. But that was all right. The school cafeteria at First Lunch was naturally loud and drowned out most of the swear words we threw at each other, and in the last week before Spring Break, the cafeteria was louder than usual.

That Monday, the last traces of winter had receded with the rising of the sun over a hazy sky, a sure sign that the cold front was peeling away. More and more of the kids were peeling off their winter coats, and by the end of this week, we would all have shed off what's left of winter in time to enjoy Spring Break, a torturous five days away.

At the table, I waited my turn, looking at the pile of discarded cards in the middle of the table, then at the shrinking deck beside it. We were playing Crazy Eights with two decks, and the pile had grown exponentially.

Then I looked at the faces of my compatriots-from left to right, Holden on my left, then Chris, Anthony, Brian,Daniel, andVince on my right. Out of us eight, Matt was the only one missing in action. He had come across a really bad case of the stomach flu on Sunday and was out of it today and maybe tomorrow. The rest sat and waited for Vince to lay down his card.

And waited. And waited.

"Dude, what the are you waiting for?" Holden broke out. "Either put down a card or pick from the deck and help me screw over this fucker right next to me," and he punctuated it with a finger shoved in my direction. I smiled at that; he was getting pissed, and that's exactly what I wanted. Hell, that's what we all wanted, but Holden didn't know that.

"Okay, okaaay, you don't have to threaten me!" But Vince still fiddled around with the cards in his hands, trying to pick which ones to set down. He looked over at the pile in the middle of the table, scratched his fat finger on his fat cheek and couldn't decide whether to put down on Daniel's three of clubs or pick up off the deck.