Dan finally wandered out of his room long enough to attend one of two classes he specifically excelled in, which coincidentally was the class I was terrible in. But pre-hibernation Dan actually taught me something so I could surprise Mrs. Keene like it was Christmas morning.
"Wie war dein tag heute?" She asked, a nervous smile crossing her face as she pointed to me, like she knew I was going to say "Flugbahn" as usual. But I found out it meant trajectory, thanks to Dan, and I realized I shouldn't say that anymore if I wanted any credit in the class. [How was your day today?]
"Sehr schön." I told her, and her face lit up.
[Very nice/beautiful]
Mrs. Keene pointed at Dan, who was smiling the biggest smile I'd seen in a while, his arms folded smugly over his chest. "You taught him?" She asked and he nodded proudly.
And she turned around to pull down the projector screen over the board and we high fived each other and for once I didn't feel like I was drowning in an ocean of ß's.
[Fun fact, ß is pronounced like 'ss']
__________
PJ burst into my bedroom carrying a huge speaker on his shoulder hooked up to his phone by a cable that was much too short to even be classified in the same family as a cable.
"Look what I found on the side of the road." He said, articulating each letter so carefully he sounded like he'd been practicing for that moment for hours to sound like a professional rapper.
"Does it work?" I knew it would, but I sincerely wanted him to say it didn't.
"Hell yeah it does!" PJ howled at the top of his lungs, much to my disappointment, and slapped a button on the side carelessly. Some insanely fast spunky beat blasted from the speakers, and I could've sworn my ear drums were about to either bleed or explode. Either would've been better than having to listen to that monstrosity. I almost got up and left but my polite side made a surprise appearance and decided to prevent me from leaving.
PJ had started making odd sounds with his puffed out chipmunk cheeks that I assumed to be beats like a rapper would make and as soon as he started mimicking record squeaks, I knew I should've gotten out while I had the chance.
"My name is PJ, and guess what today, I found this speaker set on the alleyway, and Phil is tall, and I'm pretty small, 'n he can't speak German at all:' He finished and stared at me expectantly while still bouncing up and down rhythmically to the beat, and I realized he wanted me to pick up where he left off and then I thought, I barely know how to even rhyme, but I tried anyways.
"That's a sick beat Peej, but you're about to go down like Ancient Greece, I feel like a tsunami that just hit the beach, and I guess you're the shore, 'cuz you just got floored."
PJ blinked slowly, his head tilted to the side like a confused puppy. And he slowly clapped after setting the speaker set down on the floor, still processing what I had said.
"That was fuckin' amazing:' He muttered under his breath and wandered out of the room, still in shock.
"I hate you both." Chris yelled weakly from the living room. I hadn't even known he was there, and if I had I never would've said anything. He'd probably hold this against me for the rest of my life.
And I walked out of my room for some social interaction to find Chris desperately trying to reconstruct his lung model with some decent progress. It looked better than it had the last time I saw it. He probably got an extension on the due date, considering he was an A student and probably a teacher's pet. And the whole "my dad's a brain surgeon and my mum's a first responder" thing must've had some play in it because that would mean he knew what he was doing and that he wasn't just slacking off.
"How're the lungs going?"
"They haven't collapsed in a record time of 18 minutes." He sighed proudly yet remained disappointed that the record was only 18 minutes. But he laughed anyways. And the flash of that stupid Polaroid camera sounded behind me, and sure enough there was Cat, who'd snuck in like a literal ninja to take a stupid picture.
She passed me the photo after it developed; it was simply my back to the camera while Chris was frozen in laughter, trying to hold up the right lung. In all honesty, out of context it sounded absolutely ridiculous. But I guess we all were ridiculous.
"I like that one," Chris said "I don't look like a demon like in the other ones."
"They're just real life screenshots of your true form." PJ snickered behind me and grabbed the picture, tossing it on the stack of photographs we kept carelessly on the countertop.
It occurred to me that we should really put them in a scrapbook or at least something nice, but Hobbycraft is real expensive and we're saving up to buy more lawn chairs and replace the love seat that fell apart last week. It almost lasted for a decent 7 months until PJ put his 20 billion pound chili cooker on it. Long story short, the chili stained the carpet, broke the love seat, awarded PJ's brilliant idea by giving him huge 1st degree burns on his lap and lower stomach (which ended up with us driving him to the ER while he struggled to pull off his pants), and also gave the janitors the worst cleaning experience of their lives. The only good part about the whole ordeal was we got to meet Chris' mum in the ER room, who'd also found the situation hilarious, and had to leave from laughing too hard.
"Nah, you guys just take horrendous pictures of me."
"Your face is horrendous." PJ said with the stupid joke smile he'd started using more often.
"You got me there," Chris laughed loudly and gasped in surprise when he slowly started to remove his hands from the lung model in front of him "holy shit guys I think I did it-"
And the left lung literally exploded.
All over the table, across the walls, splattered on Chris' face and dribbled on the floor. However, the right lung simply deflated like a defective balloon from the circus that was so cheap you could buy 50 for the price of one.
"Dude," Cat said, trying to suppress laughter along with everyone else, including Chris "I hope you took a picture of that before it exploded."
"I'm really glad I documented my backfired and very shortly lived success," He muttered and pointed to the camera balanced on my textbooks, which I hadn't seen before he pointed it out.
"That was like the Fourth of July, but with a human anatomy project." PJ howled excitedly, not even trying to hide his joy over the ruined mess.
And I metaphorically stepped back and watched the situation unfold; PJ was hunched over laughing his ass off, Chris was scooping the fake lung remains off his cheek and the bridge of his nose with a defeated smile, and Cat took another picture with the Polaroid camera. The only person missing was Dan. But he'd been looking more miserable than usual lately, and we made the decision to just part ways after we walked back to the dorm buildings. He had said goodbye and so did I and he'd hugged me quickly before retreating inside, the scent of those watermelon candies and cigarette smoke still stuck on my mind I hadn't heard from him since and maybe I was being paranoid because I'd just talked with him 2 hours ago, but I had the gut feeling something was wrong.
But I ignored it, joined back in to the present, and started to help clean the left lung off the wall.
YOU ARE READING
Paper Hearts (Phan)
Fanfic-NOT MINE- All credit goes to the original author, imaginary-numbers This is just a rewrite of the original story about a different ship so all I changed was (most of) the characters and the American to British stuff. I rewrote this for my best fri...
