Stardust

He's an Aurora

Stardust: He's an Aurora

Jake Gallagher

My hands twitched, but that wasn't new information. I'd been fidgeting for the past ten minutes. It felt like there was a tiny taser in my central nervous system that let out a jolt in thirty-second intervals. I even started to count the spasms. Nineteen. That's when a lump formed in my throat, and I felt like curling into the fetal position where I'd let my tear ducts gush like broken beaver dams.

My previous reservations about detention were so correct that I think I may be clairvoyant. I could actually feel my sanity slipping as I sat at a cramped desk surrounded by walls of institutional-white. The room smelled of the perfumes of high schoolers: marijuana, cigarettes, and sweat fresh from the resident basketballer's gym socks. At the front of the class, a beady-eyed, middle-aged woman glared over her horn-rimmed glasses. If she stared hard enough, I'm sure I'd turn to stone.

Spread across the vast sea of desks etched with obscene messages, there were four other educationally-deprived detainees sharing this stuffy room with me. Three seats ahead, a blonde chewed annoyingly on her bubblegum and itched at the large sweater forced upon her from the lost-and-found bin. Her own shirt, a mid-drift, was too short and low-cut for school policy. Way on the left side of the classroom closest to the door was the basketball player who called one of his teammates a "dick." He didn't even get a chance to shower and change out of his sweaty uniform before his coach hauled him to detention. Two seats to my right and closest to the window was a junior with long, greasy hair hanging limply beneath a beanie, and bloodshot eyes. He wreaked of marijuana. Lastly, a blacked-out goth chick with raccoon-esque eye makeup sat five seats to the left behind me. The stench of cigarettes lingered from her dark clothing because she was caught smoking in the bathroom.

I kind of hoped that, if I were to ever be caught in detention, it would be like The Breakfast Club. Unfortunately for me, everyone seemed intent on ignoring each other until the bell rang and we were free to leave.

I twitched again as I realize that my spotless reputation was now tarnished with a detention, though, I knew it would happen sooner or later. Ethan gave me a perpetual headache with his shenanigans, which drove me to shove him for putting a spider in our locker. Granted, it was a plastic spider, but it held enough resemblance to a real tarantula to have my arachnophobia cloud my better judgement. I screamed, and as soon as I heard him laughing behind me, I pushed him. He tripped over a trashcan, but he wasn't hurt; the maniac was still cackling as he laid in a mound of junk food wrappers and lunch leftovers. Nonetheless, a teacher saw the whole thing and forced me here. It's ironic considering that I'd never been legitimately violet, and the first time that I did have an "incident," my perfect record was ruined. It's blatant injustice!

The clock overhead incessantly ticked and every second seemed to be amplified by illusory speakers on either side of it. The longer I stared, there was a pang in my forehead. Soon, the numbers and clock hands began to melt and ooze black and white, making me feel like I was in the middle of some Surrealist painting by Salvador Dali... until I got smacked on the back of the neck by a spitball courtesy of the beanie-wearing stoner in the corner who, I believed, was here for bouncing a hacky sack off of a teacher's butt. He's lucky she wasn't pressing sexual harassment charges.

I groaned unbeknownst to myself and slammed my head on the desk. Honestly, I could have dropped dead just then, but none of these students would care. The blonde glanced at the clock every minute, wondering when she'd get to see her quarterback boyfriend. The basketball jock tapped his foot rhythmically, waiting to get his hands on his rival teammate and end up getting cut from the team. The stoner, evidently still on a high, rolled more bits of paper into future spitballs because he had nothing better to do with his miserable life than get high and divulge in childish things. The goth flipped an old lighter opened and closed because she was a closet pyromaniac and every thought she had consisted of burning the school down. As well, the teacher wouldn't care if I were to suddenly die. She was too busy glaring at the world, like a respiratory of hatred and envy of her former peers that had gone on to become lawyers and CEOs while she was a just a babysitter for juvenile delinquents in a town she had been stuck in for the entirety of her mundane life... None of these people were hard to read.