Lairy girls and boys in bands

1. A certain romance

"Have I done something to trigger the funny looks and the sniggers?
Are they there at all, or is it just paranoia?"

March 2004

Ms. Craft's 13th grade English class, 8:10

The class had started ten minutes ago. The teacher was at a student's desk, trying to talk sense into them about skipping half of the classes so far this term. Matt was chewing on an apple even though no food was allowed in the classroom. He was sitting on his desk with his feet on his chair, obviously also not allowed, facing his childhood friend Alex. Matt was going on about some party that they're possibly invited to, for st. Patrick's day. Alex was only half interested. He was bored.

"It shouldn't be an issue, because Eva fancies Jamie," Matt explained.

"Fuck knows why," Alex filled in and earned an agreeing chuckle from Matt. Their friend Jamie wasn't there and neither were their friends Andy or Nick, since the three of them had flunked the English class last year and had to retake it while the two of them had moved up. They'd probably have to go to summer school after the rest of the class graduated that spring. None of them cared that much about school, but not because they were too cool for it. Well, it's not like they wanted to be seen as geeks, but they mostly couldn't find a reason for being there. Stocksbridge Secondary wasn't a nice place. It was packed with people, about half of them putting effort into their grades, there wasn't enough room in the cafeteria and the place was disgusting. Gum under every desk, nasty writings on every bathroom stall and all of the usual markings of a place that lacks life, happiness and hope. It was, in Alex's eyes, the place where dreams came to die.

Nobody there was going anywhere anyways. It wasn't like an American high school movie where everyone fell in love and partied their hearts out before going to Harvard. There wasn't any romance around there, only semi attractive teens with acne, humping each other in the locker room bathrooms because no one was ever home alone. If they were, it meant that a party was being thrown, and people just showed up. The same people, every time. They didn't know any kids from other schools, at least not the click Alex knocked about with. They had known each other since they were small and stuck together when they became teenagers.

Alex didn't hate his life. He had friends and he was pretty respected. He wasn't popular, but the people who knew who he was did it for a good reason, not because they bullied him. Since he knew what kids said about each other behind their backs he was grateful for that, and he tried his hardest to not stand out in the crowd, since he was also quite shy. He didn't have a girlfriend. He knew that he liked girls but he hadn't met anyone at this school that he had liked. He sometimes flirted a bit with some bird or another who liked that he was a little quiet and once in a while he got a snog at someone's couch.

Alex didn't think he had a bright future, at least not an academic one. He came to school to knock about and so his dad wouldn't kill him, but it wasn't like his education was very important to him. It was once, but that part of his spirit was killed by his parents and his teachers at a young age. He had liked school as a kid, he liked drawing, writing stories and the music classes but his teachers said that he wasn't a good student. He didn't understand the math and he couldn't figure out physics or memorize French. It wasn't interesting.

Alex wanted to create things, let his art speak for itself, he didn't want to learn what every single teen in the world was learning just to have the same life as his parents and their parents before them. None of that appealed to him. He thought that he might wanna get married and have kids one day, but even that didn't seem like a lot of fun. Alex's mum and dad had a life that worked just fine. They stood safely with their feet on the ground, settled down in other words. Lord knows what they were up to when they were kids, but now they had routines. They went to work, they went home. On the weekends they sometimes went out to eat, or ate dinner at another couples house but that didn't interest Alex one bit.