101 Ways to Skin a Hoodie

Chapter 2

I slam awake at my desk. The one at school, that is. I guess I was having a dream about falling. I sheepishly raise my head from my crossed arms and glance around to see if anyone noticed.

They had. All of my classmates had heard me, I had banged my leg against the desk's leg after all, and they were giggling among themselves.

"Em-hem!"

Uh oh. I turn around in my desk and see my teacher standing over me. Although, he seems more bemused than upset A smile starts forming around the corner of his mouth and then he starts giggling with the other students.

The giggling turns into chuckling and the chucking turning turns into laughing and the laughing turns into guffawing. The guffawing grows louder and louder and the students jaws tear along the corners, unhinging to let out even more boisterous laughter. I start to rise out of my seat but a claw grabs my shoulder, and I shakily turn to look at my teacher again, his pupils now growing to envelop his irises, then his sclera, until his whole eyes are a foggy black.

"Come now, you're not dismissed yet. Sit down, we still have a lot of class left." His jaw unhinges, a meter-long tongue unfurling onto my shoulder. I can't inhale, and my gag reflex triggers. I stand there, frozen in place, trying to breath. Until finally...

My eyes snap open, completely devoid of moisture as I had twisted about in my sleep so that my face was bearing the brunt of the wind again. My heart is slamming into my ribcage, but I whirl back around to my normal position and gulp some air down, regaining my composure.

Fully observant again, I peek back over my shoulder to see if there are going to be any sudden changes in my flight (falling with style) pattern any time soon. The darkness isn't changing shape at all so I assume that I'm safe for now. I'm feeling rather peckish at the moment, but when I unzip my pocket I reach for my phone first to check the time.

9:28. So I got about four hours of sleep. That's actually not so bad, and it explains why I'm hungry, the last meal I ate was lunch after all. I return my phone to my pocket and take out one of the granola bars. Thanks to my habit of running I get the kind of granola bars that have extra nutrients in them, such as protein and the like. They're also fairly large, and I count my blessings again as I carefully unwrap the delicacy.

Talk about a silver lining.

Eating in free fall is actually somewhat of an arduous task. When I take a bite I make sure that my lips are closed around the granola bar before removing it from my mouth, because otherwise it feels as though the bite I just took is going to fly out of said orifice if I start chewing before then.

After eating roughly half of the granola bar in this manner I fold the wrapping paper back over it and gingerly return it to my pocket. Now it's back to the drawing board to figure out what to do. After consuming one quarter of my food supply, it's really hammered home just how few resources I have. Why couldn't I have brought a water bottle too? Why did I plan on getting a drink at the movie theatre?

It's no use dwelling on things past however, so I gaze around me on the plane perpendicular to my falling direction.

Just more vast darkness. Ugh. I lick my dry lips in contemplation.

Wait.

I suddenly regret having that dry half-bar as a makeshift dinner, as I already feel a little scratching at my throat. I can ignore it for now though, and to keep finding a silver lining I guess the sustenance is good for keeping my wits about me.

However a silver lining doesn't change the facts. I'm going to need to try to see this thing through, and fast. The best case scenario is that if I fall far enough some omnipotent deity will grant me a wish or something and explain this strange realm in a long exposition dump, but even if all that awaits me at the end of this journey is head to cement, I certainly prefer that to slowly dehydrating into insanity.

Note that I said 'far enough' as opposed to 'long enough'. This is because I can change the speed at which I fall, but if this deity of ideals is waiting for me to fall for 24 hours or something, well, there's nothing I can do to change that. So I take the logical course of action.

Making sure that my kangaroo pouch is firmly zipped, I pull my hood over my eyes and tighten the drawstring. I then maneuver myself- which I've gotten fairly good at- in a way so that my body becomes a bullet travelling face-first in my falling direction.

Immediately I feel myself start to accelerate a bit more, but after a few seconds it balances out to a constant velocity again. Oh well. I wasn't expecting a huge increase in speed, however as the minutes compound travelling like this will certainly increase the distance compared to if I stayed on my back.

I fall in this manner for quite some time, as its the only thing that I really can do to potentially improve my situation, and I don't feel tired again so soon after resting. Naturally my mind wanders to questions about this situation that I'm in.

Thinking about it logically, there has to be some end to the void, as there is a gravity source that's pulling me downward, which implies a mass at the bottom that's large enough to put me into freefall. That's speaking logically however, so that might not be the best reasoning, as there are logical contradictions riddling this place. For example, how am I able to see my hands and other objects that are right in front of me in this dark space if there's no light source? And it's not a matter of my eyes simply having been adjusted to the dark, as there's no strain on them when I go to look at my phone.

And then there's the prime fallacy of this place being why did it suddenly appear as I stepped out of my bedroom? Although that brings me back to the root question of this situation and there's no point thinking in circles.

I let out a sigh.

I've been breathing with my nose mostly as any attempt to inhale through my mouth gets halted for the most part, as most of the oxygen is sucked straight out of my mouth by the wind. At least I can still exhale perfectly fine, and it's still satisfying to do so.

I wonder if my friends and family are missing me by now? It's not that unusual for me to be out late with friends, but again, its unexpected for me to not at least text them first.

I decide to turn back around to check my phone again. The clock says 11:02. Have I really been nosediving for 2 hours? I guess it's good that it doesn't feel like a time consuming activity, but it's also scary thinking about how there's no real sense of time in this place. When it really comes down to it time is one of those constants in life that you can always count on for marching on even when other stuff in life comes to a grinding halt.

But let's not wax poetic.

I still don't feel particularly tired, so I guess I'll just return to my nosedive position until I naturally fall asleep again. Hopefully the problem will be resolved by the time I wake, or at least I just won't wake.