This Was A Bad Idea

Chapter 3 - Elliot

Lunch comes with agonizing slowness. We don't even have an actual cafeteria, we're confined to a small courtyard litterd with sun-bleached plastic tables. The school here, though a public school, seems like it's half the size of my old one. But that illusion immediately vanished in light of lunch. The entire student body is crunched into a small outdoor eating area for forty-five minutes, with the food-splattered ground and too-small benches. The tables are arranged by friend groups with certain combinations of kids claiming their respective tables. I notice subtle similarities though. A group of kids with heavy instrument cases leaning against the side of the table. One group with kids sporting dyed hair and band shirts, some of them with rainbow pins threaded into the straps of their backpacks. They seem like Elliot's crowd. A group of girls in cropped sweaters and high-waisted jeans. Mishmashes of friend groups, their words filling the glossy space above my head. I locate Elliot lingering near the main entrance to the courtyard, hands curled neatly into pockets. I follow the glint of his cherry colored hair, walking over to him.

"Hey," He starts
.
"Hi."

"Did you know that cockroaches can live without their heads for up to a week?" The fact catches me off guard, the suddenness of it spiking through me. I have to stifle a laugh at the risk of sounding like an asshole.

"Is that what you're learning in chemistry?"

"No. random thing I remembered from biology." He rubs the back of his head. "Shit, sorry. It's....this weird thing I do. I just spout random bits of information at the worst possible times." The look on his face is suddenly so forgein that a genuine laugh wrenches itself out of me.

"No, it's fine! I do the same thing sometimes." The words flow easily out of me like water. Something suddenly flickers across his face so subtle that I almost didn't catch it, a twitch of his eyes and miniscule turn of his head. He stares off at something in the distance that I try to subtly glance at, to no avail.

"Um. Are you okay?" I stammer after the pause has carried on for more than a few awkward seconds. His head snaps over to me.

"Yeah. Uh, I.....shit. I have to go do something."

"What?" The cold early-september air curls around my exposed ankles. I didn't wear long enough socks.

"I have to talk to some people." His words slit through me like slivers of glass. Either someone's called him over that's more important or he's looking for any excuse to get away from the awkward kid that doesn't know how to engage in conversation.

"Alright," I say, trying to keep my voice casual.

"Orion, I'm so sorry, I just-"

"No, it's fine!" I give him a smile that sends his shoulders lowering in obvious relief. It really is fine. If I'm dragging someone down, I'd rather they cut me free.

Elliot ambles away, heading towards none other than the group of dyed-hair and band shirt kids that I'd walked by only a few minutes earlier. My heart jackknifes in my chest. I should have known, I should have prepared for this. Should have known that it was too good to be true, someone seeing past the paper-thin masquerade, past the carefully choreographed words. I slip over to the side, lowering myself to a seated position on a patch of concrete next to one of the surrounding building's walls. I take my time getting out my brown paper-bag lunch, surveying the familiar sameness of the food that I'd packed for years. A peanut butter and jelly sandwich, some sort of fruit, a granola bar. My movements are slow, in tiny increments.

I try not to show how truly defeated I feel, how tossed aside. Like a paper coffee cup crumpled and tossed to the sidewalk, a stain on the ground that everyone just steps over. I try to take deep shuddering breaths as I work through my lunch. When I finish it too fast with time leftover. I pull out a book that I grabbed from the library a few days ago for these situations, barely even bothering to read the pages. It's boring, about some girl and her dog. The cover looked cool, but it's not that great of a read.