The Angel Goldfish Theory

angel goldfish: 08

CHAPTER EIGHT

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I told Indie about what I did with the mayonnaise and the ketchup, and she understood why I thought I found it funny. I was relieved that she didn’t find it weird at all.

“Have you ever thought of doing that?” I asked her. “Like, doing something because it would be funny?”

“No,” she said. She was rotating her ring around her finger. She leaned her head back on the bridge railing and looked at me. “Though if we were friends that time and you asked me to do it with you, I would.”

“Oh.” That seemed like her. Then I wondered. “Why?”

“I don’t know, maybe because I haven’t done something like that before, and it’s fun experiencing shit for the first time,” she said, a beam flashing across her face before she sighed. “I also like the experience of doing something without thinking about what could happen next. If we thought that all the time, I think we wouldn’t experience life in its maximum, one-hundred percent fullest.”

I nodded furiously. “Yeah, exactly.” She understood me very well it was crazy.

“And . . . if it wouldn’t kill anyone, then what’s there to stop me?”

I smiled. “Being suspended from the cafeteria?”

Indie laughed. I loved her gummy smile a lot. “Well . . . was that fun?”

“I remember eating sandwiches on the back of the school for the rest of the month, and I’d made friends with a cat named Marmalade, so . . . yeah, maybe, it was fun.” It really was. The cafeteria wasn’t that nice anyway. It smelled like sweat and hotdogs and depressed teenagers, plus, it was noisy.

“Marmalade . . . the orange cat with the short tail?” I nodded. “Isn’t that the cat that died last week?”

“What?”

I didn’t know that. When I stopped seeing Marmalade I just thought he was adopted by some other student, but I never thought he would die. I had this weird delusion that pets don’t die, and when Mom used to say, “if Buffy dies . . .” I’d give her a look that asked what are you talking about?

Indie Vega was so nice to me that day, and she even told me a lot about Marmalade, including making a funeral just for her. We sat there on the bridge for an hour and talked about a lot of things including a dead cat, and within those sixty minutes, she understood me a lot more than other people that knew me longer did.

I was thinking that Indie would have liked me if she were in the journalism club. She wouldn’t have looked at me like Brooklyn did, and she wouldn’t have told me she doesn’t like me in front of my face.
Maybe I cared what Brooklyn thought of me, and it’s probably because I read several essays she wrote and I’d thought they were amazing, so when I saw her going home a week after I joined the journalism club, I approached her.

“Hey, Brooklyn.”

We never really talked after our small quarrel that day, so we just basically ignored each other. As I settled myself into the club more comfortably each day (I was even starting to eat lunch with Cary, Kale, Dara, and Holly), the more I felt her move farther away, as though she was the new one. I felt bad even though I wasn’t the one who started the tension between us, so I just took it upon myself to fix whatever it was that needed to be fixed.

Brooklyn wasn’t cooperating though.

“Brooklyn,” I called again. I wasn’t with my bike that Friday, so I was half walking and running after her. The afternoon sunlight was strong and bright and it was windy so my hair was a mess, and I remember thinking how unfair it was that Brooklyn’s hair still looked perfect.