Four bad boys, Ayden, Hayden, Brayden, and Okayden, try to form a school club to learn how to fight their bad boy instincts, or succumb to cliches trying.
*******
When Ayden's six-pack ap...
This is bullshit, and I blame you for this. You came in, fucking up my experiment, and now I have to show the school to Plot McGee over here. I don't even know where most of the stuff is.
"Alright, here's the water fountain," I say, pointing at the rusted, tetanus/herpes-riddled thing that I thought everyone decided was a stupid idea after the plague. "And that's the bathroom. Maybe you can go check it out instead of staring at me in the face without blinking."
Her eyes flutter, which is kinda freaky-dickie if you ask me. It's like... waving. Her breasts also boobily in a breasty and inquisitive manner as she invades my personal space, just like when the C.I.A backed invasion in the Bay of Pigs. And just like the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces, I have to repel her by the sheer force of a slight push.
"Social distancing," I say.
The girl blushes, taking her eyes o me, telling me I screwed up.
You see, being a bad boy alone with a Totally-Average Girl is a Catch-22 kind of deal. If I'm mean to her, she will take it as me being in a bad boy shell that she wants to break. If I'm nice, she would take it as me caring about her, which I don't. If I'm ambivalent, I might as well put ketchup on me and toss me to the state fair cuz she's gonna eat me up.
The only way out is to finish our interaction as soon as possible, which is why I fucked up by pushing her away. Now I look like a target.
"I'm sorry!" says Leila-Sue. "I just reckon you look just like a guy I saw in my dreams yesterday."
"I have a common face. Now, here's the cafeteria-"
"Is there a basement?" she asks, interrupting me, rudely.
"I only know where four things are," I say. "The water fountain, the bathroom, the cafeteria, and the gym, which are all contained in the same hallway. This. Here."
The girl takes out a pen from behind her ear and begins to nibble at the eraser. Like, who does that? That's just a waste of a good pencil. Now she will have to use a huge and cumbersome eraser that's more likely to get lost or broken than used all the way. The Giving Tree didn't die for this.
"There's gotta be one. My momma told me so," she whispers.
Now, you know that delay your mind has when you listen to something, but you don't quite get it right away, so you say "what?", but you understand it immediately after you say it? That's what I'm having right now. And that simple, almost innocuous "what" is all she needs to put her feet at the door and try to burst down my defenses. Curse my brain fart.
"Oh, nothing. That's just me being all silly," she says.
Relief. She didn't take the bait.
"But now that you ask—"
Oh, shit.
"—well, it seems silly, but can I trust you?"
This is it, Ayden. You've rehearsed this all your life. Take a deep breath, grab her by the shoulder, and say the words that you know will take you out of any trouble.
"I have a micropenis," I say in my best big-boy voice.
The girl blushes even harder, nibbling her eraser off. She's now nibbling at the metal bit. Surely, she wouldn't trust a weirdo like me, right?
The girl grabs me by my broad, strong shoulders, and gives me a huge smile, not unlike the sun, meaning that I can't stare at it directly, and it pisses me off when it shines like that. It also makes me hot and bothered for some reason.
"Thank you for trusting me with your secret," she says in that sweet, lemony drawl of hers. "Now that you trust me, I can trust you with mine"
Abort, abort, abort, abort. It backfired! My micropenis has failed to make an impression!
"Y'see, it all started a month ago," she begins.
"I don't care," I say. Yes, I know I said that playing hard would make me an even more delicious snack, but now I have to play my odds. I can't be a friend of some weirdo. I already have two waiting for me in the classroom.
"I returned from school, just like any other day. I'm just your average girl, ya know?"
"I literally couldn't care less," I state.
"I like your honesty, Ayden," she says, biting off the metal thing off her pencil and chewing it like bubble gum, "but lemme finish. I thought my life was super ordinary, with ordinary parents, an ordinary picket fence, and an ordinary dog. But that day, when I reached home, everyone was dead!"
"I once had a turtle," I interject. "It died. Sad. But I got over it. You can get over your parents as well."
"There was blood everywhere," she continues.
"Humans are made of blood. It is only natural."
"But my mom was still breathing!"
"Then not everyone was dead," I point out. "You are an unreliable narrator at most, and I will like to continue the tour. Look, a vending machine. Let's see what it has."
As I walk towards the vending machine, the girl grabs my arm. Me, being a beefcake, pulls her around easily enough. Luckily enough, the vending machine is not far from where we are standing. Unlucky enough, it is a LaCroix vending machine.
"You don't understand," she says. "My mom used the last of her breath to tell me they were murdered by a secret cult of ancient alchemists hell-bent on creating a philosopher stone. My parents were part of this secret society created to stop them, and were just about to stop them. They knew where they were hiding, and thus, they were killed."
"That was a hell of a long last breath," I say. "But look, shit happens. You just gotta move on, eh? See, I'll buy you a LaCroix. Keep your mind off things." Or whatever works to stop her from telling me her life story. I smell a prophecy.
"Thing is, there's a prophecy," she says.
I would take a moment to look at you in a coy manner, but this is a book, not a movie. Yet.
"She told me that I was born with a mark, a mark that will help me find the secret entrance to their hideout. A hideout, she told me, was in the basement of this very school. And it all has to do with this mark!"
She rolls her sleeve to reveal something awful. Something so dreadful that it shakes me to my very core.
What she reveals is a perfectly clear LaCroix can, recreated entirely out of moles and freckles.
Just to seal the deal, I hear a harrowing scream coming from somewhere behind the LaCroix vending machine.
I just played myself, didn't I?
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