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Chapter 3

Tyler Emery

I stalked out of Reynolds's office and stormed past Mrs. Wilkes, hearing her click-clack on her keyboard, as if nothing had happened. For her, nothing had. For me, it was an entirely different story. Principal Reynolds's words echoed through my head, like my screams when Mom, my older brother, Colin, and I had visited the Grand Canyon. It was right after my father left my mom, and she paid for the trip from their joint checking account. I screamed obscenities, swears, my hurt, and my pain into the canyon, and it echoed it time and time again back at me, filling me triple fold with the feelings I had been trying to release. I remember Mom crying and throwing her wedding ring into the gorge; I tried to hug her, but she just collapsed to her knees, overcome with what she was facing in the upcoming years. Colin was flirting with a girl from Idaho that had small eyes and knobby knees.

Now it wasn't my own words being reverberated back at me, but the words of a concerned, angry man. Enough is enough, Reynolds had said, as if the entire situation in the Biology 2 classroom had been my fault, as if I was to blame that he hired a zombie with a hatred for anything that smiled. Sticking up for your girlfriend who you will get rid of after a month and making a fool of yourself repeatedly is not the same thing as preventing bullying, he had retorted at me and that really hit home for me. High school relationships weren't supposed to last forever; we had all the time in the world to be grown up and find soul mates. Now was the time for us to have fun. Even with that in mind, it still hurt that he had so little faith in me. But by far, the worst and the one that was being screamed over and over again was: When will you care? I didn't know.

I left the office just as the bell signaling the end of fourth block and the end of the day erupted above me. Statesboro High only had four periods a day, so we got special time with each individual teacher. It also meant that I had to deal with Mrs. Locke for an hour and forty minutes each day. My phone vibrated in my pocket again and I finally pulled it out, not even bothering to think of excuses as to why I hadn't answered Alexis earlier. I had learned early on that Alexis loved texting, specifically texting her boyfriend. I would be sitting on my kitchen floor, watching my mom bake blueberry muffins after she woke up with a craving and woke me up so she wouldn't be alone, and telling her about my day at three in the morning, then get a text from Alexis with three hearts and four kissy faces. I had no idea how to respond so I just feigned sleep and texted her in the morning.

Now she wanted to meet at my truck in the student parking lot, urgently. I loped there nonchalantly, sweeping my blonde hair, which was not out of a bottle, out of my face and easily dodging around the freshmen that were scurrying about, talking about freshmen things. Sometimes I truly felt sorry for them: their excited eyes and upheld chins, so confident that they made it out of middle school alive, but so naïve to the real horror that comes with final exams and final grades. Not that I ever really cared about those. I didn't care about anything.

Alexis was already at my truck when I walked out of the building, the October sun glaring over the asphalt at the rotten children that would be the next generation to poison the Earth. Her mascara was smudged, her summer tan was fading, and her blouse was hanging off one shoulder to show a bra strap. I wanted to kiss her, right there in the student parking lot, a kiss that you read about in books and heard about in old movies, a kiss that would simultaneously shatter the world and create it anew. A kiss that would show that she wouldn't just be my girlfriend for a month. But Alexis wasn't the right girl for a kiss like that; I was pretty sure we both knew it.

Instead I pecked her lips and unlocked the passenger side door of my 1970 Ford F100. At one time, it was powder blue and shiny as a new penny, or so my mother says. It was the car of her childhood, the car her father drove around their farm. He would sit in the driver's seat, she in the passenger and a dog, chicken, or goat between them, and they would drive at a snail's pace around the farm to the sound of Johnny Cash singing about a ring of fire and his hurt. Mom got the truck after Gramps passed away, but she couldn't sit in the cab, still smelling like wheat, sunshine, and tobacco from Gramps's pipe, without crying, so that's how it came to me. Now it had rust around the wheel wells, and the tires were pretty bald, but it got me from here to there and everywhere in between.