Timeless

Chapter Two

Chapter Two

            Bells just all-over suck. Whether it’s a doorbell, car bell, school bell, church bell...they all just symbolize a foreboding approaching. Someone’s on the other side of that door, someone’s in that car, some lesson is about to be taught, someone is about to worship something very dear and precious to them. They’re all just little noises and reminders of what’s about to happen.

            For this reason, I strongly hate alarm bells.

            Okay, it’s not—maybe you didn’t get that—NOT my fault that my clock started blasting “Sexy and I Know It” at 6:30 in the morning. I just had my alarm set to channel 97.3 and I woke up to “I got a passion in my pants and I ain’t afraid to show it, show it, show it...I’m sexy and I know it” blaring in reedy resonance throughout my room without any sort of premeditated arrangement or knowledge, got it?

            I don’t turn my alarm off, just let it buzz and play all it wants until Starburst knocks loudly on my door, playfully telling me to get my “lazy, middle schooler ass out of bed” and eat. I groan.

            6:49.

            I don’t know when my school starts exactly, but I think it’s somewhere around 7:15ish. And I’m not a girl, so I can be ready and decent in six minutes. Which means...um...I don’t have to get up until 7:04 given that it takes about five minutes to get to school. I open my eyes just a little slowly, agonizingly.

            6:52.

            Ugh. Wish me luck.

            Lots of luck.

            I’m gonna need it.  

***

            The first day of middle school was surprisingly boring. There were only seventh graders at school today so we didn’t feel overwhelmed with the eighth graders being here. It’ll be worse with the eighth graders there though; I can feel it. Like waiting for a storm you know will destroy your home.

            Most of the teachers just went over the basic necessary notes for middle school like the schedule, the expectations, the way the stalls in the bathroom are most certainly not to be written on, stuff like that. I would’ve paid better attention, except this big kid kept flicking pieces of paper on the back of my head during first, third and sixth period. I don’t think he meant to do it; when I turned about to say something, he looked just as bored as I was with a dazed expression and a vacant attitude. The pieces of paper were from this old notebook he was holding. It looked like it had millions of doodles and notes that had been written by someone much more educated. I think it was from a sibling who went here last year.

            The hallways were crowded. And busy. And the scent of fifty different types of perfume assaulted my nostrils throughout the whole day. What is it with girls and smelling good? I guess it’s a plus when a boy is kissing a girl; the last thing a boy would want is for his girl to smell like a toilet filled with chlorine, but is it really necessary for girls to drown themselves in that fragrance-hell stuff? I mean, if you think about the literary side of that, that’s suicide by sweet scents. I just don’t get it. I’d rather drown in piss before ever laying a finger on something like perfume.

            And there was tons of kissing and hugging going on. Sure, there’d been dating drama in elementary school, but those were mostly concerning crushes and girls arguing over who was prettiest to impress some boy. But this...this was starting to look like those clichéd movies about high school like Easy A or Freaky Friday where the main protagonist was always being pushed up against a locker and smooched right then and there every passing period and everything is suddenly always revolving around the topic of sex. I never ran into anything inappropriate, like touching-with-the-hands-wise, but I’ve had plenty of opportunities running into couples having tongue time. I don’t know whether to feel completely repulsed or fascinated. I’ve never kissed a girl myself, and I’m pretty sure that if I had any friends they would be decently appropriate, so it’s not like I’d be hanging with that sort of influential crowd. Maybe they’d even be a little disgusted by it. But should we be? I don’t know, middle school is confusing. It’s always the social part of it too. None of my classes or teachers or the learning in general has this kind of drama or questions at the center of it. Except science, because who the hell understands the learning behind reproduction. People coming out of people. Like a dirty magic show. If you got that reference, I applaud you.

            I like a fair amount of my teachers. My English teacher, Ms. Right, loves the color black. She told us this the first day so we didn’t accuse her of being Goth or depressed. She literally said that, which I found slightly direct and weird, but who am I to judge a teacher? Teachers are an individual all their own. She hates birds.

            My algebra teacher is straightforward too. Yes, I am in algebra. I guess this could put me under the category of nerdy. Which, really I wasn’t compared to actual nerds. I didn’t dress in stripped dress shirts with ties and dress pants and I didn’t have glasses like nearly every nerd is stereotyped to have. (That’s quite a false stereotypical thing by the way, about ¾ of my seventh grade algebra class dress and look as normal as the rest of the school.)

            Anyway, my algebra teacher is like a book you randomly find in the attic. Anyone can read her, but sometimes you have to mix up the lines and read around the twisted sentences to receive the full impact of what she’s saying. In other words: the exact opposite of my English teacher.

            I don’t like my social studies teacher very much. She’s loud and obnoxious and hard on everyone. A human tornado, always sweeping kids up and locking them away somewhere dark and cold and lifeless. Social studies is one of those derisive subjects that you don’t really know all the way through. In elementary and middle school, “social studies” is just the crappy version of saying history; I think the teachers just want to try to make the topic sound more teenage-friendly since “socializing” is about 87% of our whole existence. However, much like the quietus aura of algebra, social studies’ benevolence level can be determined and altered by the people surrounding you in that class. I got lucky, and sat with a group of wonderfully benignant individuals.

            My science teacher is probably my favorite, which is quite shocking to say because aside from the stupid world of social studies, science is my least favorite subject. I dreaded it every single day last year. But that was most likely because I hated my teacher. My science teacher this year, Ms. Maddison, is like...a Barbie doll.  I think you could stab her in her sleep and she’ll still be smiling. She’s like a high Barbie doll. Yeah, she’s bubbly, always smiling and repetitive. Maybe she’s a serial killer.

            I don’t think I ever signed up for computers, but apparently I did and I got the class. Ms. Goldheart was an average teacher I guess. Nothing special stood out about her. I don’t like the people in my class though. It’s like caging a bunch of penguins on crack or something. They’re louder than the usual hurricane, and overall just strange. During my first day, I sat down next to this pencil-thin girl with honey pigtails and braces. She asked if she could sniff my shirt.

            “I want to be a scientist when I get older and scientists are always trying to discover new things,” she had explained when I quickly pulled my arm away. I prayed for whoever her boss was in the future. We would be learning proper typing and just doing lots of digital projects and learning about computers and how they work. Maybe someday I’ll type up my story of middle school because I doubt anyone will want to read a story entirely on old notebook paper. I don’t think they could. The paper will rip, the lead will smear over time, so really I would have to type this, and it would surely go by a lot quicker if I knew how to type properly.

            My last class of the day is yearbook class. Here’s the thing: aside from the editors, (eighth graders that took yearbook last year as seventh graders and decided to come back and do it again this year; our “bosses”) I am the only boy in the class. This is probably more awkward than it is frustrating. It would be like being the only girl in a gym class. (Which is something that my sister was when she was in middle school, but she’s practically a boy herself so it luckily wasn’t awkward for her at all. Guys make better friends for her than girls...although, she doesn’t really have that many friends.) I don’t get anything girls talk about, as usual. They’re usually always laughing at something stupid or giggling about some inside joke. A few girls said hi to me, but then turned away when another group of girls said something about an eighth grade boy or a boy band or anything with the word ‘boy’ in it. Boy cereal, maybe. They’d probably even be willing to talk about that. I guess it’s better than perfume.

            This year is going to hold some interesting stuff I think. Maybe. I’m honestly just gonna have to wait and find out.