So bored I think I might be dead. Jason wrote the imaginary status update in his head as Ms. Rowen droned on about the properties of iron. He thought about sneaking his phone from his pocket and posting it to Facebook, but Ms. Rowen had hawkish eyes and no patience for rule breakers. Brodcasting the monotony of chemistry to all 248 of his friends wasn't woth the risk of getting the phone confiscated for the week.
Two hundred forty-eight friends. Two hundred forty-nine if you included the request from his aunt Sally that he'd been ignoring. The list was like a tour through his utterly pathetic middle and high school career. There was Rachel Keller, the curly-haired saxophone player he had slow danced with at Jacob Cooper's bar mitzvah. Sadly, that was pretty much the most action he'd had in the past four years. Alex McCoy, a bespectacled kid he'd bunked with at summer camp, flooded his newsfeed with creepy photos of forgs and other unwitting specimens. Sometimes someone like Suzy Garz popped up, through the charimistic captain of the field hockey team hadn't exchanged actual words with Jason since the fourth grade. Not inspirational quotes she was posting were from '90s edition of Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul. Either there or the back of a cereal box at Whole Foods.
Jason's eyes wandered around the room. To his surprise, his best friend Rakesh's face was frozen in rapt concentration. It took Jason a minute to realize it was a phone cradled carefully in his hands that had captured his attention. Rakesh could afford to get his iPhone confiscated ----- he kept a spare one in his locker for just such an occasion. One of the perks of being among the popular students at Roosevelt High was that girls (and boys and maintenance staff and teachers) were happy to help Rakesh out on the rare occassion he coudn't charm his way out of a punishment. He had 892 friends last Jason had checked. His wide smile and princely cheekbones populated almost as many as photos. Jason knew because he was featured in many of them, but he'd untagged any where you could see light reflecting of his glasses or his hair looked floppy. Which was pretty much all of them.
Jason forced himself to concentrate on Ms. Rowen as she explained the process of oxidization. He couldn't afford to get anything less than a B on the approaching midterm. One of the few advantages to leading the world's quietest social life was that his mother allowed him to do pretty much whatever he pleased so long as he made good grades, but if she had even the slightest inkling he was lying to her, it was only a matter of time before she'd take his car ---- or worse, his laptop ---- away. He hasn't intentionally deceiving her. He'd sit down at his computer intending to focus on schoolwork, but when Lacey was online everything has a tendency to fade into the background.
Lacey. His stomach flipped just thinking about her. She had changed everything with two words. "Hey" and "Jason" were things he heard almost every day, but they weren't usually feauterd next to a profile picture of a gray-eyed girl with beachy blonde hair. And Lacey was so much more than that, too. Since the first time she'd messaged him six weeks ago, they'd barely gone a day without e-mailing or chatting online, and each time he heard from her he could barely believe his good luck. Like him, she was a nut for indie rock, sending song lyrics or links to old Pitchfork posts on bands he thought only he knew about. She was even learning to play the guitar, something Jason spent a lot of time wishing he could do. He'd gotten as far as the cheapest Fenders at Strings, the guitar store in the city, before the tiny tattooed clerk with huge round eyes that made her look like an anime character scared him off by picking up a Gibson and banging out a punk rock riff he didn't recognize, probably because she'd written it herself. Lacey didn't seem like the type to frighten easily, and she had a warmth that was conspicuously absent from the ferocious girls who hung around Strings. She was funny ------ comparing her spacey english teacherbto Ms. Frizzle and calling her friends by rapper nicknames like J Money and Funky Dash. Best of all, she seemed to genuinely like Jason.
