Timeless

Chapter Four

Chapter Four

            I must’ve looked weird the next day at school standing on my tiptoes, nose up in the air and a strained look on my face as I looked around for London during recess. Damn, why was she so short? I gave up after a while. I didn’t even know if she had the same lunch as I did. I had fourth lunch at 10:58. Why not just make it at 11:00? Middle school is a strange place with strange staff members. If she had one of the early lunches then I could really only talk to her during computers. She was gone all the rest of the periods.

***

            Sitting in algebra class I’ll have you know is an agonizingly painful, distressing, inscrutable activity to have to endure as a young thirteen-year-old. For one, being thirteen typically indicates that you’re either in seventh or eighth grade, unless you were held back or you’re one of those started-school-at-a-younger-age kids, in which case you might be twelve. But I was thirteen in this scenario, so we’ll just stick with that given age, which means that this class would be beyond my typical grade level stuff. If that’s not annoying enough to deal with, then maybe the people surrounding me would be a good enough reason to want to desert this class.

            There are these shitty little douchebags that I’m not even entirely sure are supposed to be in this class! One of them sits right behind me. I don’t know his name, but I sure as hell can name all the girls he’s supposedly “gone all the way with” given that he talks about it nonstop. I try to ignore the clench of my fists and the feeling of a hammer in my head when I hear the little cockroach mention London’s name.

            “Yeah, that London girl—no, I don’t know why she was named after a city in Spain.”

            Great Britain. Dipshit.

            “—But yeah it was, like, you know, all cool and stuff. And I mean, you give it all you got, and, I mean, you, like, yeah she was awesome, bro.”

            Someone next to him—Brandy I think—laughs stupidly. “Dude, the hell you think is wrong with her?”

            “I don’t know, bro, she’s all kinds of messed up.”

            The anger inside me slowly dies down and all that’s left is an egregious headache.

            I’m used to hearing this actually, everyone talked about London I found out.

            As you can probably guess I’m not the only one who wants to die in this class; this kind of odious feeling is extremely contagious, so of course the whole class usually feels the need to kill themselves, and when everyone in a class of ultra-smart-just-becoming-teenagers with a conspicuously low attention span feels this way, things tend to be annihilated in a small ball of fire concerning an individual’s psychological management. And let me tell you, everybody has a different level of tolerance for such torture, and when you get a bunch of teens and preteens jammed in a room full of numbers and letters, (since we’re talking about damn algebra here) it’s like Ireland has released an arsenal of nuclear bombs on Niagara Falls.

            So, as we’re all sitting there, ready to implode from the lack of fun and sense, I’m trying not to eavesdrop on Brandy’s and what’s-his-face’s conversation, probably about something just damn pathetic as they claim to be these major players, and it’s horrifically complicated since Brandy is probably the most contagious out of all of us, and before I know it, he’s got our whole loquacious seventh grade algebra class shouting and out of their seats and flicking mechanical pencils and rubber bands at each other like it’s World War III, completely ignoring the ugly equation on the board waiting to be solved.