Sophomore year sprung itself on me just as I had really begun to love life. Jimmy was still in a dark place, but we had actually become tight over the summer, and I prided myself in being able to say that I was one of his closest (if not only) friends. Because of this, I couldn't help but notice that Jimmy had gotten shockingly skinny over the summer, and I hated myself for not noticing that he never ate when everyone else did. He stopped accepting my food, but he would always take the apples, and soon they were the only thing I would bring to school.
With the new year came new outcasts that joined our table. Soon we were taking up a whole row of the plastic tables, still in the corner of the cafeteria away from most of the rest of the school. Jimmy was a junior now, and he had grown almost six inches over the summer. I had grown a bit, but nowhere near Jimmy's height, and as long as he was alive I would look up to him. I guess I still do, but not literally anymore. The thought chills me to the bone.
Jimmy commanded everyone's attention, and the younger kids soon learned the unspoken Friday rule. He repeated a lot of the advice that he had given us freshmen the year before, but we listened just as attentively because we knew how valuable it was.
That year was the year of getting in trouble. At least two or three of us were in detention every day after school, and practically the whole group would wait around for them to get out. It became a bit of a ritual to sit around at the front of the school and applaud the kid coming out of detention afterwards. More often than not, it was Jimmy. He got pegged for everything from breaking the dress code ("apparently you have to wear shoes and a shirt to school," he told us after he got out one day, without either) to carrying around his boom box in the halls, blaring Pantera (the best day of my life). Since I was walking around with Jimmy that day, I was written up too, and I proudly attended detention with him.
Detention was the biggest joke of school. It was meant to be punishment for misbehavior, but the teacher who was forced to stay after school didn't care to enforce the kids, and everyone just did their own thing. We spent the Pantera day sitting on opposite ends of the classroom, throwing a ball of paper back and forth and yell-singing one of the older Green Day songs that we had listened to so much that everyone knew the words. Walking Contradiction was one of the group's favorites, and it was constantly being played in cars and on the boom box.
