After Death

Chapter Two

The weather was nice. The spring had really just begun to show itself, and it was obvious. That was all Colin Paulson could think about during Algebra III, and he looked longingly outside at the bright sun and loosely swinging trees.

“Mr. Paulson?”

Colin looked lazily back into the classroom, where the decrepit Mr. Locke was staring at him. 

“Would you mind answering?” Mr. Locke pressed, taking a step forward. His body functioned like it was partially broken, the result of three strokes in the last decade.

“Uh…” Colin hesitated and flicked his eyes to the chalkboard. The quadratic formula was drawn out, as well as a triangle with a few numbers. He looked back down to the worksheet on his desk and saw that he had written the answer in already. “X equals 42?” 

“Very good,” Mr. Locke sounded annoyed but remained looking emotionless. Colin was pretty sure this was also a result of the strokes. 

Colin rolled his eyes and locked back down to his desk. Just the idea of getting called on in class made him uncomfortable. The fewer of these people looking at him, the better. 

“Hey, hey!” said a hushed voice to his side. Colin looked over to see Buck in all of his soonish, crew cutted mediocrity. “Cut your hair, faggot.” Buck chuckled oafishly and then turned back to his small posse of nearly identical clowns. 

Cut your hair, faggot. That was just one of a bevy of catch phrases that Colin fielded on the regular, be it from some good at school or his overly conservative, granted without one of those words. There were others, of course, but they all had generally the same meaning. Stop wearing tight pants. Stop wearing black. You look like a punk. It didn’t matter who was saying it or how they were saying it, he had heard it before.

 That was exactly why Colin didn’t want the attention. He didn’t want to give anyone the opportunity to even think about him, because it wouldn’t end well for him. He was over it, though. There was a only a month left of high school and then he would never see anyone in this town again. He had given up thinking about exactly what he was going to do after school; all he wanted to be was away. While all these kids were pandering over who they were going to take to prom or who was going to be vice president of the honor society, Colin had bigger dreams to attend to. He was sick of hearing about Marilyn and The Paul Schaffer. What did stupid popularity even matter? And why would anyone want to go to prom in the first place?