Unlucky

by Sean Donner

friends; all of the accusations; all of the fireworks outside his house; all of the peanut butter on his car’s door handles; all of the green paint on his windshield and punched Sean in the face.

  “Owie!” Sean screamed like a four years old girl as he fell to the ground, curling up in the fetal position and occasionally kicking Reid’s legs.

  Immediately a crowd of pathetic on lookers appeared around the brawling boys. Some yelling, “Get up Sean!” Others “Knock him out, Reid!” This one kid screamed, “I’m just trying to get to class, can you move so I can get through?” But what was heard by everyone else was the crowds steady chanting, “FIGHT, FIGHT, FIGHT!” But as quickly as it had formed, the crowd was dispersed.

  No one can have a good long fight anymore. Ever since people decided that they were too civilized for such behavior and started breaking up fights you can never be sure who really would have won. You have to get a few good punches in right away nowadays, because fights are only allowed to last about ten seconds. That’s just not enough time. So people are left with an unfinished fight, whose victory anyone can make claim to.

  This particular fight was broken up by Mr. Dahline, who heard the painful yelps and screams and the chanting of the pathetic on lookers, and broke his way through the crowd and between the two testosterone filled bodies trying to prove something with their violent behavior. Grabbing the two boys by the back of their shirts, he yelled in his best scary assistant principle voice, “I want to know why you two are going at it, and I want to know now!” That’s how he always spoke when trying to inflict fear into the hearts of many.

  With very little hesitation Reid answered, “Sean has been accusing me of stealing his stupid Britney Spears poster all week now, and I can’t…”

  Flabbergasted, Sean interrupted, “Stupid? Di… did you just refer to my poster as stupid?”

  Sean wasn’t the only person here who was taken back by the thought that someone would think a Britney Spears poster was stupid. Mr. Dahline let go of Sean’s shirt and said, “Yeah, this is a Britney Spears poster, right? The singer?”

  “That’s the one” Sean said proudly.

  “That’s what I thought. You can’t call something like that stupid.” Turning to Sean, he said, “I’ll forget this whole thing ever happened if you can convince me that you had good reason to believe Reid stole your poster."

  “Well,” Sean cleared his throat, “he stole my Christina Aguilera poster when I had that up, and then my biggest reason is that he’s at my locker all the time; more than anyone at school, and like ‘they’ always say…”

  Mr. Dahline’s eyes lit up like two police flashlights shining in your face at night and said, “The criminal always returns to the scene of the crime!”

  “You’ve got to be damn kidding me!” Reid exclaimed. He was royally pissed off hearing those words escaping the assistant principle’s lips.

  “Watch your language, young man.” Mr. Dahline didn’t appreciate swears.

  No one spoke for, what seemed to Sean to be forever. He never really liked awkward silences and decided to break the silence saying, “Hey Mr. Dahline, Do you know who ‘they’ are? I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately and I haven’t come up with anything, and no one else seems to know either.”

  “No.” Mr. Dahline said quickly. “What makes you think I’d know something like that?”

  This seemed fishy to Sean and he felt as though Mr. Dahline was hiding something from him, but he didn’t let on. “Alright” he said, “I didn’t expect you to have an answer anyway. Was my reason for suspecting Reid good enough?”

  Mr. Dahline seemed sick of this conversation and only said, “Sean, go to the nurse, your nose has been bleeding this whole time.”

  Sean brought his right pointer finger up to the space between his nose and lip. Seeing the blood on his finger, blood from his body, he nearly fainted and screamed, “Ahhhhhhhhhhhh!” and ran to the nurse’s office, which luckily, was just across the hall.

  “Go to class, Reid.” Mr. Dahline commanded.

  The halls were empty by this time leaving Reid alone with his thoughts. He didn’t think he lost the fight, but he had to admit to himself that Sean really did hurt his legs a lot. He wasn’t sure if he could make it to Spanish class because of the throbbing pain like the bite of a rattlesnake eating away at his shins.

  Meanwhile, Sean sat in the nurse’s office holding a wad of tissues to his nose. He had only had a bloody nose a few times in his life, so he was pretty sure he was going to die. The only thing that kept him going was the thought that in some places in the world saying “bloody nose” might get you into trouble. He started laughing.

  “What’s funny?” asked the nurse who Sean had never seen before. She was cute, why had he never seen her?

  “Aw, I’ve got this bloody nose!” Sean said in his best English accent.

  The nurse laughed; she laughed hard. Sean was proud that he was so funny.

  “Let’s see how your “bloody nose” is doing.”

  She was terrible at the English accent, but it was still funny. Sean pulled the tissues away from his face. “Looks good.”

  “Am I healed?” Sean asked.

  “You sure are. No more fights now, deal?”

  “Deal.” Sean stood up and headed towards the door to go to class. He stopped and said, “Can I get a note to my class?”

  “I’m usually not supposed to do this, but you were a pleasure to have in my office, so I will.”

  “Oh thank you, you’re so nice.” He watched as the nurse wrote him a note.

  Tearing it from her book of blank notes she said, “Here you go Mr. Donner.”

  “I don’t want to be a nuisance, but I was supposed to walk this girl to class and I didn’t because of this “bloody nose”, can you write me a note for her, too?”

  “I’ll do it, but I don’t think she’s going to accept it as a suitable excuse.”

  “I know,” Sean answered, “but you can’t blame a guy for trying, can you?”

  “No, I suppose you can’t.”

  She wrote him a note for missing a ‘walk to class’ date, tore it out of the book and handed it to him saying, “Go get her, Tiger.”

  Sean smiled, said his thank you’s and goodbye’s and left the office. He stopped at the bathroom to make sure he looked somewhat presentable and didn’t have blood all over his face. He looked normal. It seemed that the nurse had done a capital job of cleaning him up. He made sure he had everything he needed for class. Notebook? Check. Pen? Check. Note for the teacher? Check. Note for Ashley? Double check! Sean looked at the note the nurse had written for Ashley. It said, “Sean is a great guy. You’d be a fool to let him get away.” Sean smiled and walked to class.

  “Sean, you’re very late.” Mrs. Joster said as he walked through the door.

  “I have a note this time.” Sean answered handing her the note.

  “Okay, take a seat.”

  Sean walked to his computer next to Ashley and sat down. She didn’t look at him or acknowledge his presence. “Hey sorry I didn’t make it to your locker. I had to go to the nurse’s office.”

  Ashley said nothing.

  “I had a bloody nose” Sean said in his best English accent.

  Ashley didn’t react.

  “Anyway, the nurse gave me this note for you.” Sean slid the note over to Ashley.

  She didn’t look at it right away. Sean stopped looking at her and looked towards the front of the classroom, but kept his eyes on Ashley. As soon as she thought he wasn’t looking, Ashley glanced at the note and read it. Acting as though she hadn’t read it, she looked back at the front of the class.

  It was uncomfortable, but there was nothing more Sean knew how to do to defuse the situation, so there he sat, learning about selecting a section of a picture on Photoshop. Sean already knew how to do all of the things they were learning about, and started surfing the internet for pictures of cute kittens.

  He found one that was perfect and gave
it a sign that said, “Forgive me please” and emailed it to Ashley whose e-mail was open on her computer.

  She opened the message and said, “You had a bloody nose because you got in a fight with Reid over a retarded poster; a big piece of paper. I heard about it before the fight was even over. Grow up!”

  There was nothing he could say in rebuttal. He knew she was right. “Girls mature faster than guys” he thought but would never say, mostly because he knew it was a terrible excuse. He sat quietly not wanting to exasperate the situation.

  Class seemed longer than any class had ever seemed. In the last five minutes of class, Mrs. Joster was done and gave the class free time. When this sort of thing happened, Ashley would always turn to Sean and start talking about something, she liked to talk, but this time she got up and walked across the room to her friend, Nicole.

  “Oh no, she’s talking to a girl.” Sean thought aloud.

  Nicole glared at Sean.

  “And they’re talking about me. Sean, your suspicions were absolutely correct.”

  “Who are you talking to?” the kid who sat behind him asked. Sean couldn’t remember his name for sure, although he was pretty sure that it was