The Innocents

Chapter Eight

At this point, I'm still keeping track of what day it was.

It was Thursday at approximately one thirty p.m. I should be at my Intro to Political Science class in a classroom of three hundred students sighing and shuffling in their seats through, in my opinion, one of the most boring classes ever. My last one thirty p.m on a Thursday back when things were normal, I was dog earring a hardcover copy of Lord of the Flies and answering a question that the professor had called upon me for. Professor Fitzgerald was droning about think tanks. It put in an image of a giant fish tank with a person inside, hooked up to various wires coming from his head. Kind of like an EEG with hundreds of tiny electrodes measuring brain activity and reading people's minds.

Real think tanks are nothing like that, by the way.

Now, in this Twilight Zone of One Thirties on a Thursday, I was dragging my feet to a meeting with Mrs. K in my orange jumpsuit and a sour ball in my stomach because breakfast just wasn't sitting right. I was trailed by two guards who didn't speak and smelled like tobacco and cheap cologne and I thought to myself, this has to be some sort of nightmare.

I guess I should tell you that Mrs. Krenshaw wasn't my first Therasaurus. I had seen one therapist in my life. I was fifteen years old. My dad had thought that it was a good idea since I developed a habit of sleeping through Sociology class. It was last period and boring as all Hell. You would too.

Mr. Marshall, my redheaded teacher, thought I was depressed. We had a freshman commit suicide that year and the entire faculty were on high alert. It's funny how nobody cares when the kid is alive, but once his name makes the front page of the local paper, all heads are raised and blame is thrown like mud. I think I can set myself into one of those groups. I never cared to know the kid, but after he had died, I became obsessed with knowing everything about his life. His death, more-so, is what consumed me and I started to look at everyone as if they were going to die tomorrow. Perhaps that is what the teachers saw, as well.

So, I took up teaching myself to play the guitar and pretend that I was some deep person who will never be understood because that was the only way I got by in life. Little did I know that I wasn't the first person to adopt such a way of coping. Mental hospitals were full of such people and those people also were the names of your favorite books and formed bands and died far before their time. I guess it's best that I didn't learn the guitar or write a book for that matter.

Anyhow, this Therasaurus was a gum chewing young woman by the name of Mrs. Kearney Chaucer. She had the biggest diamond ring I had ever seen and she smelled like expensive perfume. You know, the kind they spray on you in department stores. The kind with big breasted celebrities endorsing them. There was this plaque above the doorway when you went to leave that said: Jesus is the only way. I always thought, no he's not. There's a back door right there.

She started off asking about the kid who committed suicide, which lead me to believe that she was getting a lot of worried parents shuffling their kids before their brains were scraped off the concrete. I guess that was how the kid died. He climbed to the roof of the Sears downtown and just jumped.

"Do you have any feelings toward what happened?" she asked me. She was twirling a piece of her blue-black hair around one finger while the other held a stylus pen that she kept clicking against her blinding white teeth. She balanced her monitor on her knee.

"You all don't really care, you know," I answered. "Everyone will forget about it in a few months."

"You think they will or do you think they just find it easier to deal with it?"