Jesse

6: Complications

6: Complications

The next morning I got up. Took a shower. Put on my clothes. Quickly ate breakfast in silence with Harold eating his cereal as usual. Left. Began to walk outside, on the same sidewalk. Everything was the same. Yet, it was completely different.

Ian was waiting on me. He was leaning against his black truck, his arms folded, smiling smugly.

“Hey Jess,” he said.

I brightened. “Hey.”

I heard him opening his door, and I got in wordlessly. He started the engine, and turned on the radio. Today it was MGMT. Their first CD. Their best CD. I would have to get him to burn it for me, eventually. We talked little, mostly smiles, and a good vibe in the air.

When we pulled into the student parking lot, nobody stared. That relieved me a bit.

Then Anatomy. We sat in the same seats. I left, Ian right. Mr. Klein passed out study sheet, saying we were going to have a test on lab equipment and safety procedures, along with a basic review of the skeletal system next Friday. Today we would continue with focusing on the human skeleton; he had brought in a model skeleton, one of those that were suspended by a shiny, metal pole. Next week we would cover the equipment, and so on. Joy.

Eventually, I sat slumped against the lab station, propping my face up with a drowsy hand. I almost day dreaming, when I caught something out of the ordinary. I blinked. A girl was staring. She had dirty blonde hair, and deep blue eyes. She was a cheerleader. What was her name? Jana…Jessica…Jerica…No that wasn’t it; it was something with a J. But she wasn’t staring at me. But Ian.

That sort of staring, you knew better than any other kind. That kind of staring that even you sometimes caught yourself doing. That stare that had interested, curious written all over it. From the corner of my eye, I saw Ian staring back. What the fuck? Was he blushing? He was returning her stare, just as damn interested. To that popular bitch sitting a diagonally from us. My jaw locked, tightening. I felt something inside me just then begin to burn.

I shook my head, reassuring myself it was something I had eaten. Suddenly, her vision dropped from his eyes, and she was looking away again, but grinning this time. So was he. Before I kept my eyes stabbing into the white-board ahead, not listening to a damn thing the teacher was droning on about, I saw he was still smiling.

I didn’t speak to Ian at all after that. I knew what it was. I was fucking jealous, and that’s all it was. Nothing else. Don’t read into lines. There is nothing else to be read. Nothing. Just fucking nothing.

Got it? Good.

…

“What’s your problem?”

I cast a glowering look to Ian from across the lunch table, and just shrugged. “Really, nothin’. Just tired.”

He grimaced slightly, unconvinced, and I could taste the tension in the air. He looked down to his basket of fried chicken uncaringly; I guessed he gave up. It was the third time he asked that. And the third time I told him nothing was wrong. But there was something terribly wrong. I shouldn’t have been fucking acting the way I was right now.

“So…” he began, “I…should stop paying money for this crap.”

I faked, cracked a smile.

“I met…a girl. She seems nice.”

There it was. He finally said it. How could he could only have been here not even a week, and already be involved?—When I couldn’t manage to get a girlfriend, my entire life? Which I was reminded of, too fucking often with all of Harold’s sly remarks during dinner sometime. I ended up just ignoring him. It worked best that way.