metaphors | garrance // laurroth

six

laurance

I discover quickly that settling is easy enough if you know how to wriggle your way into a certain mould. It's been a few weeks at my new school and it almost doesn't seem foreign anymore. The fact that I already seem to have a social stance is making things more than easier for me.

My friendship group is popular, I'd realised, but that's obvious since we have Garroth and people are nosy about him. It really surprised me to find out that Aphmau and Aaron are generally a well-known couple (there's already predictions of them winning prom king and queen at the end of the year), but none of us make an effort to be liked, we just are.

None of them go to class parties, either. I found that strange, since in my old school you had to go or you'd be left out of reminiscent conversations and you wouldn't easily be remembered. We're not elite, so to say, but we like to keep things intimate; a small gathering of people that can have just as much fun without underage drinking. I can admit that it's relaxing to not either throw up or watch your friend throw up, but it still confuses me how secluded and lazy we all are.

It comes with labels a lot, but every high school has that sort of thing. We're nice people, so people don't hate us, but I am already known as the gay guy of the group and I know from experience that being singled out like that is not fun.

Although nothing, Dante assured me, can be worse than being called 'Garroth's best friend with the weird hair', which Travis them argued back with 'guy with the old man hair'. For some reason, students do not like to refer to other people by their names. I was told that there aren't really any homophobes in this school, but if there were, Aphmau said she would beat them up for me. I know her well enough at this point not to underestimate her.

When she and KC walk with me to dance class, I finally feel fully accepted. KC got bangs cut in over the weekend (which looks amazing with her pink hair) and now we're discussing whether Aph should cut her hair short. I'm all for being impulsive, so I said she should go for it, but she told me she'd have to have a big enough mental breakdown to be able to do it. She is hysterical.

While KC and I turn to the changing rooms, she heads off to her Literature class. My rehearsals go as planned, and I get to sit in a run through of KC and the rest of her group's performance, and it's as perfect as anticipated. Once they watch my choreography for constructive criticism, she tells me we need to do a duet in the future, and I couldn't think of anything better. I need expertise from someone like her.

Math class is afterwards, which I have with Garroth. He tries to convince me that I smell after dance by pulling teasing faces and pinching his nose, and I think it's so dorky. It's not even flirty fake laughing when I giggle all lesson.

At lunch, Aphmau and Aaron bicker over the best Kool-Aid flavour and the rest of us laugh at them with an enviable lack of pity. We do not try to solve the dispute (although everyone knows the blue one is the best) and instead listen to what it's like to grow up in a house with two merciless brothers - an autobiography by Garroth Ro'meave. He leaves no detail to imagination when he recounts the story of one of them leaving the door unlocked and him walking in on their bare ass in the shower. Travis and I, lacking brothers, found it hilarious, but Dante just shuddered and wished nothing as awful would ever happen to him.

Of course, I told him his brother has a nice ass to get on his nerves. Having dated your friend's brother comes with endless perks.

After the petty argument is over and the red flavour is crowned (immorally) as the champion, Aphmau invites a friend to sit with us.

"You haven't met Katelyn yet, right?" She asks me, tapping away at her phone.

I shake my head. "Who's that?"