The Van Pact

22: Valerie

 I kept hoping Carla's baton would take out a ceiling light.

We were outside the band room. It was the first Friday in October, about five-a-clock in the evening. That night was a home game. It didn't make any sense that Lang still required us to arrive at school hours before kickoff. We're good little sausages though, so we showed up for attendance, then walked down the street to the Hard Wok Café to get takeout. Now we sat on the hallway floor, our boxes of fried rice and lo mein resting on napkins and Stevie's chemistry textbook (she wanted a 'thicker germ barrier' than a napkin could provide, the absolute loon).

Steve and Jesse were working on our anatomy homework. I was supposed to be doing the same, but I didn't feel like it. I've already got all the major bones memorized (I have extensive medical experience, remember?), and I have enough approximate knowledge of the minor bones that a quick review of them before our test Tuesday will suffice for my purposes. It's high school anatomy, not organic chemistry at John Hopkins. I am not gonna do homework on a Friday for it. So instead, I watched Carla practice her steps for that night's half time show. Jenny Phan, head-majorette and also the most neurotic person I know (she beats Stevie, can you believe it?), broke her ankle yesterday while on a date with nose-picking, mouth breather Darren Philips (that is all I know, I don't know anything else. Your guess is as good as mine). She's been benched for the recovery period, and Lang assigned Carla as her replacement. Carla was both very excited about this opportunity and terrified. She told me so as she practiced. Each time she tossed her baton in the air, it got closer and closer to the overhead light. I pretended to listen to her long list of performance anxieties, but really I was trying to will the baton through the glass by telekinesis.

"Did you get that, Val?" Jesse tapped me on the shoulder.

"Sure," I lied. I didn't get anything. Jesse raised a skeptical eyebrow at me. He could tell I was bullshitting. He had really come into his own a group member. It hadn't even been a week since the 75th Annual Pennsylvania Beekeepers Associations Gala, but it seemed like we had been friends for months.

"It's the scapula," Stevie snapped off the lid of her orange-scented highlighter, "I remember Mr. Webb pointing it out on Grim Bones."

Jesse opened up his textbook and paged to the chapter on the skeletal system.

"Oh yeah, I confused it with the sacrum," he clapped the book closed, and cocked his head to the side. "I kind of hate Grim Bones."

"Meee toooooo," Stevie marked up something on her worksheet, "and Mr. Webb in general. Why does he think it's cool to say 'yass'? It's never cool to say 'yass.' 'Yass' is the linguistic opposite of cool."

I loved listening to them talk. They weren't even 'romantic' yet, but Stevie seemed so happy. In fact, in the past week, I'd catch her smiling off into space more than she ever made that 'Irish face' she hates so much. It gave me hope that things would turn out okay for her. She'll still be probably be forty and working at a Target Pharmacy (DEAR LORD), but at least she'll have had a fulfilling personal life. I won't have to be there to bail her out of her midlife crisis. Not that I wouldn't be willing to, if the time should come. But who knows how or where I'll be then? Life is weird.

"I was thinking about this when Webb was playing with Grim Bones today," Stevie added. "I wish somebody would just get rid of him."

"Like, murder?" Carla missed her baton. It landed inches from my feet.

"Noooo," Stevie looked up from her binder. "Grim Bones. I wish somebody would get rid of Grim Bones."

"Like steal him?" Carla bent down, but kept her eyes on Stevie. She fumbled her blind hands over a spot on the floor about five inches left of where her baton lay.