Latter Days

Chapter 5

Chapter 5

          I pulled into the student parking lot at Hemlock about five minutes before the warning bell was  set to ring. I had spent a reasonable amount of time in the McDonalds parking lot thinking to myself about what my feelings were toward Jack, and I decided that twenty minutes in a beat up Mustang outside the children's play area of a fast food joint was not a sufficient atmosphere to make a well-rounded decision. I had my next two periods with him, so I would have to toughen up some time in the next five minutes. I knew I was being stupid. Jack was brand new here. He was allowed to make new friends. Hell, if he hadn't caught me trying to break into his church, we never would have become friends. He would have run into me this morning, asking for directions to the office,  I would have given them to him, and we would have been done talking, probably forever. 

          I then realized with a sigh, that we still would have been Anatomy lab partners, and none of that would have made a difference. I think the reason why I wanted Jack to myself was because I was the first person he met in St. Petersburg. The first non-Mormon, that is. He had been home-schooled for most of his life, and didn't really ever get close to any non-members, so I felt that we had some sort of weird bond, me being the first one he really got to know. Cindy, however, had worked her charm and swooped in when he was vulnerable. I wasn't there with him during third period to protect him from the dangers of Hemlock. Like Cindy.  I was stuck in stupid Calculus. 

          I shook my head and got out of the car. Now I was just being dramatic. I wasn't there to protect him? He's a grown-ass man! Boy. Boy-man. Whatever. Sure, he was super naive and talked to everyone in the world like they were best friends, but that was just who he was. That's how he was raised. Anyone could see he was good looking, but I honestly don't think he could. I felt like he just assumed that everyone in the world was just like him, and they all wanted to be friends simply because they liked his personality. He didn't realize that not everyone was as genuinely good as him. 

         Because I knew for a fact, that Cindy Sundstrom was not in it for friendship. She had set her trap on the hot new kid on the first day of school, and Jack had fallen right into it, thinking Cindy was just advertising free friendship. 

          When I got to the room our study hall was held in, Jack was already there. He was sitting toward the front--of course--and was talking to a blonde girl who was facing away from me. It didn't take two seconds for me to realize the blonde was Cindy, and they seemed to already be extremely close. I scowled at the back of her head and took a seat in the back left corner. Soon after the bell rang, Nate came in and sat down next to me. To be honest, I had completely forgotten about Nate in the few hours I had been here at school. 

          "Tucker! How's in goin' on this fine first day?" Nate whisper-yelled at me as the teacher was going through the year's syllabus. Nate had never been a quiet one, and a few people glanced up at us as they heard him. Including Jack, I noticed.

          I turned my head back toward Nate. "I'm fine. Classes suck, as usual, but hey, at least you're here now!" I tried my best to sound happy to see him. I had recently been wanting to, in a way, break off the friendship I had with Nate. Sure, he was funny, and fun to be around, but I knew that if I had any plans on getting into college and trying to make something of myself, I had to let him loose. Nate was a bad influence. He and I both knew that. The only problem was, I was probably a worse one. 

          "Ah, they always do," he reminded me. "It's a bummer we couldn't sit together in Anatomy this morning. What's with the alphabetized seating charts? Are we five years old? Anyway, I saw that you got stuck with Jesus-boy from a few weeks back, what's up with him?" I winced when he used my nickname for Jack. I subtly looked up toward where Jack was sitting to see if he heard. It didn't seem like he had, as he was listening intently to the same old syllabus we had heard the three periods before this one. I knew that the name was something that I had made up, but it seemed a lot worse coming from Nate's mouth.