Of Cabbage-heads and Prodigies

Future's Tense

Two words: Senior Prom.

Three words: Senior Prom Dress!

Five words: Senior Prom King and Queen.

Jenny sighed dreamily thinking of the lights she only dreamed of, the dates she'd only pretended to have, the seniority that was the privilege of the final year of high school, and the fact that Don Prima had not even decided on who he was taking yet.

He had sure matured for senior year! Maybe? Not that there weren't a couple other people she had in reserve. She was not taking any chances with the single most important day of the whole four years of high school and the number one thing that made junior prom a forgotten drag. Even her mom had been more than happy to support her in this! She understood the Senior Prom, and was almost as giddy about it as Jenny was... Even if that was really more embarrassing than not in a way too.

SMACK! Went the hand on the teacher's desk hard and sudden enough to wake every student from stupor.

"Now! This is the last semester of the year. Of your lives!" said the teacher surlier than overcooked sirloin— not that Jenny knew anything about food other than what Brad said about it and the fact that the teacher's colorless face was so rigid that it actually looked like a cold overcooked slab of meat. "There are no second chances in life once you pass these doors on the last day. If you want to make it out there in this world you can't play games anymore. You're adults now so you better keep that in mind. You have to work towards a realistic goal for your futures or forever hold your peace... or pieces of your broken lives when you've realized that you've wasted your life pretending you were still high-schoolers."

A student raised a hand.

"What?" snapped the teacher.

"Isn't being an adult against the law until you're twenty-one?"

Some of the other students snickered. Jenny too smiled.

The teacher's face did turn a color now, a funny reddish pale color that was too surly to be pink, but it faded again as he closed his eyes. He smiled himself and that was never a good sign.

"Tell me that again when you're twenty-nine and had enough being fired from all your jobs with that attitude, Mick."

A couple students snickered even at that. It was hard to tell whether at the teacher or at Mick, but even as the students grew more sober or at least more glazed as they pretended to look and listen at the ranting lecture of the old scholar, Jenny found herself suddenly thinking about something she never had before. Well, she had thought about it, but not with such a sudden abyss at the other end.

She was not just headed for a heavenly finish line at the end of high school but an empty unknown, a misty eternity more fathomless than the vacuums of the most lost corners of the universe. She had no scholarships or apprenticeships. She could not even grow old like even Mick would whether he ended up as a fifty-year-old grocery store stocker on parole with a bad case of diabetes. After high school, what did that make a teenage robot?

#

"So..." said Jenny trying to make it as normal as possible. "Have you decided what you're going to do after high school, Brad?"

"Uh... well, generals, I guess!" Brad shrugged widely and grinned wider to hide the unexpected surprise at the question and the embarrassment of the fact that he had not thought of it.

To cover up the more, he shoved his hands into his pockets smugly in that candid way he did that made smugness sweet at least in an awkward kind of way. He threw a hand out to Sheldon slinking into the vicinity with his usual toothy smile and slouch that made Brad look dashing.