Through the Break in Her Hair

Chapter 6

It took a couple of weeks, maybe even closer to a full month, before the gang stopped harassing me. The whole time I sat there blank faced, ignoring their jeering taunts and stupid kissing noises. I looked right past them, stopped making eye contact. Eventually, it wore them down because it wasn't fun to tease a dead kid—that's what Ben called me two weeks in.

"What's wrong with you, man? You're like, dead or something." The bridge of his noise scrunched over the word "dead." Although, I couldn't figure out why, it wasn't like I was actually dead. "You don't crack jokes anymore, you don't smile, you hardly speak..."

I shrugged and stared off into the distance. "Nothing's wrong, Ben."

"Bullsh!" he started, sucking the end of the word back into his mouth as a teacher glanced up. Ben's cheeks heated and he ducked his head down, his forehead almost touching the table top. "That is total bull crap, Johnny."

So, he was smarter than the average doofus. Hm, could have fooled me. I bit my lip, stifling a laugh. "Seriously, dude, I'm fine."

His body shot backwards in his chair, his shoulders ramming into the hard plastic backrest, and he tipped the chair up on two of its spindly metal legs. If I was feeling even slightly revengeful, I would slip my foot under his chair and kick out the remaining two legs. But I wasn't.

Really, I just wasn't in the mood for a detention, or the phone call to my parents, or the explanation to my parents. They thought Ben and I were still on good terms. They thought wrong.

"J-man, you're my best friend, I know you," Ben emphasized.

Josh's face went slack, his jaw dropping open to reveal—you guessed it—a mouthful of food. "Hey!" he interjected. "I thought I was your best friend!"

Ben rolled his gaze over to Josh, glaring at him belittlingly. "As if," he said, then turned back to me. "Like I said, before I was interrupted, I know you well enough to see that something's off. You've got this dark cloud over your head."

Ben's mom was our town hippie. She's was waaay into that new agey stuff. Too concerned about people's energy and chakra mumbo-jumbo. Whenever I was forced into spending more than a couple minutes with the woman, I just nodded my head and kept a dewy eyed, hungry kind of look plastered to my face, like I understood what the frick she was talking about. I never did. So, it was no surprise to me that Ben was pulling the whole vibe-reading crap now. I knew it would happen one day or another.

"A dark cloud, really?" I huffed, laughing and shaking my head.

Hurt and shame flashed across Ben's face for an instant and were replaced by indignant persistence. "I mean it! I can feel the badness of your aura!"

I snorted, inhaling one of my fries, pre-mastication, and choked. Searing hot potato-stick shot through my mouth and pinged off my uvula—that's the little punching bag thing that hangs in the back of your throat. I gagged, and coughed the French fry back into my open palm.

"Badness?! What are you, in second grade? That's not even a real word!" I continued to laugh, hoarsely.

Ben glared at me. He only found amusement when we were making fun of other kids, never himself. He needed to learn how to take a joke. Then again, that was me, the pot, calling the kettle black. "You know what I mean," he said icily, setting the chair back down on the stained linoleum.

"I'm not sure that I do, Ben," I teased.

Ben gripped me by the back of my neck and swooped in, crashing my personal space bubble. "Listen, if this is about that Lindsey girl," he hissed in my ear, flecks of his spit splattering my ear lobe.