Homeroom 23

Chapter Fourteen: Condiment Ziplock's

I was right about one thing—Homeroom 23 was more than invested in Samantha and Xaviers love life. I woke up relatively early to an empty dorm, (where Samantha was is still beyond me) and the only visible sign of a new day was a small note that was sticking out from under my door. I got up and walked towards it, and it wasn't until I was standing directly over it that I realized it was a note, kind of like the last one I had received. Infact; it was exactly like the last one I had received. Same handwriting, same blue ink, the paper even looked as if it had been ripped from the exact same page.

YOUR FAULT

I stared at the page blankly for a minute. What was my fault? There wasn't much elaboration, and it wasn't as if there were any clues on the back. I tried to yet again brush it off as just a weird, stupid prank that someone was pulling on me, but for some reason it was starting to freak me out. I stared at the note a little longer, but eventually got so scared I ran to my desk and shoved it in the same drawer under the same stacks of papers as the other note, hoping I would never have to look at it again.

Because of the ominous note I had received, I was half expecting to walk into the cafeteria to see absolute chaos; blood smeared all over the walls and dead babies lying abandoned on the floor. While the room definitely was chaotic, it was chaotic in its usual way (that being screaming teenagers lying abandoned on the floor.)

The tables were filled in the same way they usually were, with the 'popular' kids sitting at the two front tables and the only people I wanted to talk to isolated in the back. Daniel wasn't in the room yet, which was kind of embarrassingly the first thing I noticed walking into the room. The second thing I noticed was that Samantha, Victoria and Xavier were also absent from the room (by this point, I was starting to feel hung up on her whereabouts.)

"Hey, Melissa." Anthony greeted me as I sat down at the table. He was holding open a ziplock bag while Noah poured chocolate milk into it; what they were planning on doing with this contraption was beyond me.

"Hey guys," I said in return, though I wasn't really paying attention to them. My eyes were glued to the back of the room as I watched patiently for someone to give any signs of hearing about what had happened. For some reason, it seemed as if no one was acknowledging what they had just read, and instead were pretending like nothing had changed. I then began to doubt myself, maybe we hadn't been clear enough in the paper—hell, maybe we had forgotten to hand them out entirely—eventually I got tired of waiting around and decided it couldn't hurt to just ask.

"Noah, Anthony, did you guys read that news thing that was left under your doors?" I was trying to display only curiosity in my voice, and I hoped they didn't pick up on the fact seemingly restless for a response. Unsuspectingly, they both said in unanimous reply,

"Obviously, what do you think we're making this for?" Anthony sort-of gestured to the ziplock bag that was completely filled with mustard that he was attempting to close. For as little as that helped me to decipher the bag's use, I atleast now knew that me and Daniel had in fact passed out the stories.

"Do you think they're gonna say anything about it?" I asked, still keeping my eyes fixed on the front of the room.

"No idea," Noah shrugged, as he began opening a second ziplock bag and fishing in his pockets for ketchup packets. I was watching him out of sheer curiosity about a myriad of things—why they were preparing so many ziplock bags, why they were filling them with random substances, where he was getting these ketchup packets from—when Daniel walked up to the table and sat himself directly between Anthony and Noah.

"Dude, do you mind?" Noah asked, temporarily pausing his pocket search for condiment packets. "Me and Anthony are doing something important here." Daniel looked to me for help, or some kind of explanation, but I just shrugged.