Smile On His Lips and Cuts On His Hips (Jalex)

Sixteen - Everyone Is Important

“Have you heard about that new movie?” Josh asked as we walked around the back of the gym, completely disregarding DiGironimo’s order to run to the workout room. He always beat all the students there and only gave the four of us semi-disappointed looks when we walked into the room five minutes after everyone else, laughing about whatever mindless bad joke that had recently been passed and half-jogging in a wimpy effort to appear like we actually put in an effort in that class. Come on, who actually tries in PE?

“There are a lot of movies, Josh, you’re gonna have to be a bit more specific than that,” I replied, the shorter boy next to me rolling his eyes. I knew I was an asshole sometimes, but really couldn’t find it in me to care it. As rude as it was to think, some people were just so stupid sometimes, and I did not retain the ability to let that slip by without some snarky remark.

“The one with zombies! The title has something to do with bodies…” Josh trailed off, seemingly realizing he was relaying the shittiest description of a film ever. Nonetheless, it had a tear of something flitting through my mind, failing fingers trying to grasp at the thought, since that sounded incredibly familiar. Maybe I’d seen an ad for it?

“Warm Bodies?” Alex piped up, smiling on the other side of me. We were about to round the corner to the workout room, the rest of our classmates having disappeared through the dull green doors minutes before. Our teacher had already glanced around outside, assuming all his students were accounted for before ducking back inside. Arriving places in a timely manner wasn’t important, the way I saw it.

“Oh yeah, didn’t that just come out? It looks funny.” Kellin added, fingering through his hair. He was basically the only person that Alex and I – we had quickly discovered that we were similarly unmotivated, shitty runners, and kept each other company during our twelve minute miles – beat when doing runs, because he would rather keep his hair looking good than pass gym. I was the same, really, but a bit of wind usually only added to the I-just-woke-up-and-rolled-out-of-bed-the-morning-after-I-had-sex look that I tried so hard to perfect every morning, while it seemed to make him look like Frankenstein’s monster’s wife.

“I saw a commercial for that with a lot of zombies and grunting,” Alex laughed, sliding through the door we’d finally reached. I ended up walking through last, thumbs hooking under the band of my gym sweats to link through my belt loops and pull my jeans up. I’d taken to rolling up the bottoms of my pants wearing my PE sweats over them; it made changing both faster and easier, as well as preventing the slim possibility of my boxers revealing something while I tried to switch my pants. I did not need that happening again.

“Way to make it sound like zombie porn,” I joked, taking in our teacher’s command to do eight hundred meters on the rowing machines. My long limbs made bullshitting my way through workout room activities construct decent results. Rowing was the only PE exercise in which I managed to not finish last.

Josh chuckled at my remark, leaning forward to select the correct options on the menu of the rower at the end of the aisle he’d swung onto, replying, “We should go see it.”

And despite the fact that I figured that was a casually thrown out joke and not suggestion of a serious outing, I was wrong, because four minutes and five hundred meters later, Alex was leaning towards me and asking if I was free at noon on Sunday. I said that I would be busy sleeping, relenting about two seconds later when Alex gave me this look that said I was giant idiot, with a smile playing on the edges of his lips, bangs hanging in front of his eyes with that front blond chunk tangling through the caramel strands, his sparkling honey eyes part laughing at me and asking me to go and ok, wow, no way I could say no to that. Not that I actually had anything better to do on Sunday. Which is exactly what I relayed to him.