Framed

Four - Boys and Bathrooms

When the administration and audience cleared out, Alexis looked like she was about to detonate then and there. She kindly offered me a ten second head start, and since I wasn’t willing to take any more chances, I practically sprinted back into the common room. When I got there, everyone seemed to be in the same positions they had been in when I left. Just imagining myself there with them day by day made me feel pretty depressed. None of them had a life, and they probably never spoke to each other because they didn’t have anything to talk about. I was already accumulating a serious hatred towards the place; I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to fit in and become one of them, but I figured I had no choice. I sat down as far away as possible from Alexis’ couch.

The silence was unnaturally loud this time, and I was convinced the majority of them were discreetly staring at me.

“What do you guys do here?” I asked nobody in particular, trying to ignore the fact that I was still tightly squeezing my bleeding nose.

Dallen looked at me from the sofa a yard behind me. He had been texting someone on his cellphone. “Well...,” he said. I turned to face him, but he never finished.

“Your point is...?” I said, raising my eyebrows and trying not to smile.

“It’s obvious,” Dallen smirked. He waited a couple seconds for me to voice what he meant, but I didn’t, so he said, “Figures... I could tell you weren’t that smart when I saw you for the first time.”

“Why don’t you just stop wasting your nasty breath?” I suggested. I expected the guy to stop wasting his nasty breath, but I was wrong.

“We don’t do anything here,” Dallen said. “Our schedules? Breakfast, classes, lunch, classes, homework, dinner, homework, then bed or whatever. We also try to get wasted whenever we can.”

“Fun,” I murmured.

“Yeah, well,” Dallen said. “Oh, and for the record, I can waste my nasty breath as much as I like. It’s my breath.”

“Touché,” I said, rolling my eyes. “You’re Dallen, right?”

“You can call me Levi,” he said with a shrug. Levi Dallen. It was a nice name.

There was another silence.

“Did you come here last year?” I asked. “I mean, because I heard they have like, seventh graders here too.”

“Yeah.”

“What’d you do?”

“What did I do to come here?” Levi clarified. He shrugged. “You?”

“Well, I guess it was a long chain of events,” I answered. “The courts already said I should go here, but my parents never really took action until I set off a cannon during a football game and got expelled from my old school.”

Levi laughed. “Wow, I guess I’d really like to hear about the long chain of events sometime.”

“Well, that sometime is gonna have to wait until another day,” I said frankly. “I have to, um, use the facilities. Where are they, anyway?” It had suddenly hit me that I hadn’t even been near a bathroom all day, and I had gone through an entire bottle of Smartwater during the trip.

Levi snickered somewhat childishly. “Number one or number two?”

“I’ll cut you,” I threatened emptily.

“The girls’ one here is one toilet and usually occupied so unless you wanna go to the guys’, it’s gonna be out there. I’m sure you’ll find it... eventually.”

“Thanks, I love mysteries,” I sighed. I got up and slouched out of the room, colliding with Cameron the very moment I shut the door.

“Whoa, hey there,” Cameron said, backing up.