unreadable // south park - firkle x ike

7 - Ike

     At lunch, I decide to see if Firkle will talk to me. By the time I walk into the cafeteria, he's already sitting down in his usual spot (the left corner table- across from the lunch line). He doesn't have a tray of food, or even a packed lunch with him- he just seems to be writing something in a fancy-looking notebook without a label on it.

     After going through the lunch line and walking over to the table, I sit next to him, and he doesn't even glance at me. Not that I necessarily expected him to. "Hey, Firkle," I greet, setting my tray down. I know he knows I know what he's doing, but he has this special way of pretending like he doesn't.

     A few minutes pass, and he simply continues to write in that little black book of his. "What are you writing about?" I ask, and this feeling that I'm talking to some sort of inanimate object- like a mannequin. "If your friend was a mannequin and you didn't know until the day they confessed?"

     Nothing. No response.

     I open my milk carton--strawberry, undoubtedly the best kind--and take a swig. Firkle flips the page in his notebook, slowly and carefully creasing the corner of the page down. He shut the notebook, placing it in front of him, precisely making his pencil (probably) exactly parallel to the spine of the book. Inspecting it, looks completely concentrated. "That's oddly specific," He suddenly says, his gaze not once breaking from the gap between his pencil and notebook. "Is there something you'd like to tell me?"

     I can't help but laugh. He always tells these jokes without cracking a smile, or changing his expression at all, for that matter. Sometimes I question if they're actually jokes, though. "I was sort of thinking that you actually had something to tell me," I say, grinning--half because he decided to actually talk to me, and half because of (what I'm pretty sure was) his joke.

     Firkle looks over at me. Finally. "Ah, yes. I've been meaning to tell you, I'm a mannequin." He brushes a few strands of his charcoal hair out of his face. "Who can breathe, and walk,   and bleeds red, has all five senses..."

     He glances at his chipped nail polish, picking another small bit of it off before looking back over at me. "Must I go on?"

     "Nope," I simply answer, taking a bite of the frankly cheap cheeseburger before chewing and swallowing. "But that sounds like something a mannequin would say..." I laugh, nudging him with my elbow.

     "Oh, shut up," He tells me. Anyone else would think he was being serious, but I know Firkle. He's just being himself.

     "Hey, why don't you have lunch?" I ask after a good thirty seconds of hearing nothing but the other kids around us.

     He lazily shrugs. "Not hungry."

     "That's insane."

     "What?"

     "How you're not hungry. I'm obviously, not, like- telling you that you have to eat, but.." I shake my head. "It's just beyond me."

     "It's obviously not beyond me, though," He nonchalantly replies.

     I nod. "Good point."

//

524 words

i prematurely uploaded the last chapter, but the more i look at it, the more i begin to like how short and simplistic it is.

tell me in the comments what you expect of this story. nothing big, just...things you hope it will amount to. i've begun to feel like i'm not doing enough pacing and it comes off as dragging out chapters.