As I swayed with the movements of the bus, I noticed an odd odor coming from one of the people jammed packed on top of me. I couldn’t get away; it infiltrated my nostrils—a smell similar to spoiled milk perhaps. It almost made me forget what I was thinking about. Oh wait, it was Elias. Besides being concerned over him reading my comic, I wondered what life over at his house was like. I mean, he lived with my dad, which seemed totally bizarre to me. Did my dad put Elias and his mom through the same kind of crap he put my family through, and was his mom like my dad? Did Elias have a double scoop of suckage on his side of the street? I had a sudden large dose of sympathy for him. What he probably had to put up with on a day-to-day basis was just downright wrong. The thought of it kind of made me sad knowing that my dad was across the street possibly having a very negative impact on Elias’ life.
I pulled the dingy cord when the bus got near my stop and of course, the bus had to come to a screeching halt, almost swinging me around the pole I was holding and into this old woman’s lap. I got off the bus, crossed the side street, and walked past the labor-on-the-spot place, where a bunch of guys always stood waiting for some kind of one-day job to show up for them, then across the alley and down the block to my building on the left-hand side of the street. I sat down on the cracking cement steps and turned my focus to the building that Elias lived in that was kitty-corner from ours. It looked like a building that probably should have been condemned, even though I wasn’t one to talk. My mom, sister, and I did not live in what you would call a palace.
Elias’ building was kind of like our building, where at one time it was probably a house, but their building had no siding on it, nothing, just the insulation covering the outside walls. I think it was the insulation at least; I couldn’t be for certain. Then, there was like this makeshift front porch thingy made of plywood and painted black with a front door that opened right onto the sidewalk, and their property was lined with this rusty old chain-link fence that always had garbage entangled in it. I sat there perhaps hoping I would see Elias come home, but I didn’t see him. I figured maybe he went in through the back or had extracurricular activities after school or something.
Chapter Two
Gym was my first class of the day. I started my day out with torture. I seriously awoke every morning dreading the fact that I had to go to gym class. Athletics and I just didn’t mix. I was often quite late to gym, always secretly hoping all the games were already started, and I’d have to wait on the bench. On occasion that would happen, but not often enough for me. I also had a tendency to forget my gym uniform. I don’t know how that always happened, but somehow it did.
So, I stood there, in the middle of the gym floor, flaunting the horrible pastiness of my legs that shot out from under my green polyester shorts. We were playing what I dreaded most—volleyball. I always seemed to get hit in the face. I had the worst depth perception ever. It was chilly in the gym that day. I swear there was a breeze. I hugged my arms around my waist, twisting back and forth while standing in the back row on the volleyball court. There were three courts set up across the gym. Ours was closest to the entrance doors to the gym, near the hallway.
It was my turn to be rotated to the front. I normally whined about it to whoever was on my team, and they usually let me stay in the back, but the team I was on that day took gym class volleyball very seriously. I slowly walked to the front left position with my arms still around my waist. My team was the first to serve. I gulped as the ball started bouncing back and forth between the teams, threatening to get close to me.
Next to me was this rotund girl named Consuelo; she was squat down ready to attack with her ponytail flying wildly behind her. Next to her was this kid named Neil, who I felt was quite attractive, a real clean cut jock type, but the sad part was that he knew he was attractive. Then, there was a row of three behind me ready to score. I stood there cowering in the corner, just inside the imaginary out-of-bounds line. I looked forward at the bleachers with the row of short windows behind them. How I longed to be up there. I’m telling you, I really did dislike gym that much.
My teammates yelling at me snapped me back onto the floor. The ball was actually coming for me, almost directly at me! I punched at the air, and then somebody behind sprang into the air and whacked it over the net. That was a close one, but I wasn’t out of the woods yet. That volleyball really had it in for me. It came right back. The other team must have figured out that I was the weak link. With the ball soaring towards me, my palms started to sweat. It was so close, then BAM! I was lying on the gym floor. Consuelo dove right into me, sending me to the ground, yet scoring a point for the team.
I lay there for a second on my stomach. The gym floor smelled like dirt and rubber. Nobody ran to my aid. I slowly got up and trudged over to the bleachers. I was done for the day. I climbed up the bleachers to about the fourth row, sat down, and leaned back. The game went on without me. I was staring into space when I saw someone enter the gym. It was Elias Bickler. He walked around the edges of the floor and handed my teacher something. My gym teacher, who was about a hundred years old and wore shorts that were inappropriately too tight, nodded, and Elias shoved his hands in his jeans pockets and headed off.
He was almost at the door when I got up to follow him. I looked around, rubbed my elbow, and left. My teacher wasn’t paying attention. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, but I just headed out of the gym. I saw Elias walking down the hall, slowly moving along with his head bowed towards the ground. I followed behind him as he went past all the brown lockers; one occasionally missing a door with a garbage can or something stuck in the space. His jeans dragged on the ground behind him. Due to the abuse, they were all torn and frayed at the bottom.
“Hey,” I called, just loud enough so he could hear, but so the security guards wouldn’t. He stopped and turned around on his heels.
“Yes,” he said. It was kind of a yes may I help you type of yes, like he was working at the front desk in an office or somewhere and didn’t want to be bothered.
I didn’t know what I was going to say. I scratched the back of my neck. “Um,” I said, seeming like a total idiot.
He raised his eyebrows as if saying what?
I bit my lower lip and looked at him.
“I have to go,” he said, turning and heading for the attendance office.
I watched him go in. It seemed he worked there, and he was giving my teacher a note of some kind. Instead of study hall or something, some people worked in the attendance or security office. I headed for the locker rooms to change, thinking about how I blew it, but he was in my next period, so maybe I’d get a chance there. I wasn’t sure what I wanted a chance for, but eventually I’d figure it out.
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I sat in English class, my usual seat. We didn’t have assigned seats, but most people usually always sat in the same spot, creatures of habit we are. Right before the bell rang, Elias stepped through the classroom doorway. He shimmied down one of the aisles, stepping over backpacks and books, plopping himself into the same seat he sat in the day before. I leaned forward to talk to him, but he just kind of ignored me, seemed more interested in ripping off his nails with his teeth. Mrs. Gomez started her lecture. I leaned back and stared at Elias. Paired with the jeans he had on, he wore a green tee-shirt that had some sort of scouting logo or something on it. It was kind of tight, showing off the musculature of his arms. What do you call it when somebody is skinny, but yet has some muscle definition? Lean, is that it? Because that’s how Elias was built. He then kind of bent over his desk and pulled at a patch of hair at the top of his neck. During the period, it looked like he might have started falling asleep.
After class I followed him out and down the hall. I caught up and fell in step beside him. He looked over at me and kept walking. While walking next to him, I noticed that he wasn’t all that much taller than me, might have had a couple of inches on me if that. He definitely wouldn’t qualify as tall, not sure if he’d even qua
lify as average.
“Hey, I remember you,” I said. I couldn’t think of anything else.
He kept going.
“I’m sorry,” I said, thinking an apology would elicit some sort of response from him. He stopped walking in the middle of the hall, almost making the kids behind walk right into us. He crossed his arms and just looked at me.
“We were outta line that day.” Why’d I say that? I sounded like somebody’s mother.
He crinkled up his nose and continued walking. Kids shoved past us trying to get to class. “Fine,” he said, turning left down another hall, getting ahead of me. Well, he actually said pine, but I knew what he was getting at. Students started to separate us, and he got away, on to his next class. I went on to mine, Chemistry. I had the slightest idea what was going on in that class. I generally copied everything from the paper of this girl Lisa, who usually sat near me. I sat on a stool at the back lab table letting my mind wander. My encounters with Elias couldn’t have gone any worse. He probably thought I was a flake. I’m not sure exactly what I wanted from him. Did I really just want to apologize? Because I did apologize, or tried at least, but that didn’t seem to be all of it. Did I want to find out about his life? Did I want to be his friend? I really didn’t know the answers to those questions. Has he ever had to call the cops on my dad? I had to, quite a few times. It was generally because he came home drunk and was trying to get back in the house because my mom locked him out. Afterwards, he’d break through a window or something, and then a fight would ensue.
The bell then rang, interrupting my thoughts. I slowly got up and went on with the rest of my school day. When I got home, I logged onto my computer, my super old and slow computer. A relic I inherited from my sister, who got it from some co-worker of hers eons ago. The computer was crap, but it did come with a flatbed scanner. My sister made me do her laundry for months so I could inherit the computer and scanner as a package deal. As my computer ran through its painfully slow process of turning on, I dug through my backpack and pulled out my sketchbook and started cleaning up some of my drawings so I could color and ink them in. I finished the page with the fighting scene with Dranyan.
Now I guess is a good time to fill you in on what occupies most of my spare time—my comic. It is called The Society of Prodigious Superbness, and it follows a teen named Sasha Santiago who lives with her grandparents after the mysterious disappearance of her parents. After their parents disappeared, her brother, who’s actual name is Leonard, starts in with a crowd of kids who rob stores and such for fun. Leonard takes it a step further and then even further and turns into one of the city’s worst villainous crooks. That’s when he changed his name to Dranyan because it sounded much cooler than Leonard. Well, Sasha is distressed about her whole life situation and is about to jump off a bridge when a voice, she’s not sure whose, it might have been her own, tells her that she needs to unleash her superbness.
Sasha then starts in on a quest to find her inner superbness. After some time, she gains enough confidence to unleash her superbness and in doing so she unleashes her powers of superb. She has super superb speed, superb fighting skills, and incredible balance. With her new-found superbness she confronts her brother. They get in a huge brawl. This is when she comes to the realization that she can’t stop him on her own. That’s when she starts The Society of Prodigious Superbness. She goes and searches for kids whom she feels will be proper league companions. She shows them how to unleash their superbness, which is actually pretty simple. You just have to believe you’re superb and do superb things. The problem lies in where people will say they’re superb and deep down, they don’t really mean or feel it, and then they can’t unleash that power.
So, in my comic, I was at the point where Sasha had just recruited and trained the main chunk of the team, others would come, but at that time, there were Cecile and Emile, twins with superb telepathic and telekinetic abilities. Becky Gonzalez, a teen with superb strength and flexibility, and Thomas Tobias Thompson, a teen that is so smart he can get out of pretty much any situation. Say someone shot a bullet at him, he could calculate how fast it was moving and how many inches he’d have to step to the side to avoid it, and he could do this in just a fraction of a second. Cecile, Emile, Becky, and T Cubed or T3 (Thomas Tobias Thompson), did not know they even had these abilities until they unleashed their superbness. So yeah, that’s my comic (and I’m sure an over usage of the word superb).
Chapter Three
The next day after school Kate, Roberto, and our friend Nicki Veronkov, and I decided to go hang out at Belmont and Clark. Kate usually drove us everywhere, but never Belmont and Clark. She said it was too hard to find parking, which was true. I looked around the bus as it slowly scooted down Belmont, it was a total mess. There were newspaper ads all over the floor with dirty footprints stomped across them. There was an apple core shoved in the crack behind my seat with other assorted garbage, and of course, the bus smelled like urine. Kate sat next to me, and Roberto was in the set of seats in front of us with Nicki. He was turned around towards Kate and me complaining about his family. He was the only boy and had like five hundred sisters, so he always had plenty to complain about.
Nicki was kind of staring off into the distance. Back a couple of years ago, she was totally normal and then came the high school transformation. I saw it happen to many people. It’s like one day they’re perfectly normal and the next day they come in totally different. In Nicki’s case, when she was in Geometry class with me, she always wore these little plaid skirts with matching turtlenecks and carried around those folders with fuzzy kittens all over them. And then there she sat next to Roberto on the bus with her hair a medley of pink, orange, and turquoise, while wearing a green raincoat covered in little blue dolphins. I guess it’s all about finding yourself or something, and I wasn’t one to talk because freshman year I wore sweat pants and had a little boy haircut. I’ve had a lifetime of questionable hairdos though. Like my hair that year. I wanted a hair cut quite bad, but my mom wouldn’t pay for one, so she said she’d do it. It was supposed to be shoulder length, but she kept saying she had to straighten it out and then all of a sudden my hair was just grazing the bottom of my ears, and it still wasn’t straight in the back. Afterwards, I tried to fix my mother’s blunder, and my hair became a choppy mess. Then a bit later I tried to go peroxide blond because my hair is usually the color of blah, but I left the stuff in too long, so as I sat there on the bus, my hair was a pile of off-white, straw like, scraggly mess. I was quite fond of it though.
The bus came to our stop, and we all climbed off. Our first destination was the Bunkin Donuts. I was really starting to enjoy coffee. I never liked it before because when I was little, I would sometimes try my mom’s coffee, and I always thought it was nasty, but that’s because she didn’t put a lot of sugar in it. I didn’t know that, and then one day we stopped in Bunkin Donuts, and I thought I’d be crazy and try some of their coffee, and my life hadn’t been the same since. No, not really, that last part wasn’t exactly true, but they do put the perfect amount of cream and sugar in there.
We then went into this one store that sold vintage clothing (at least that’s what they called it, so they could charge more) and knickknacks like vinyl toys shaped like cats and kitschy items people buy to sit on their shelves. Kate and Nicki went and started flipping through the coats, and I wandered to a corner where they had old toys displayed in glass cases and some that weren’t really worth anything in plastic bins. Roberto followed me over. He started picking up various toys and began to make them kiss each other. While he was making toys get fresh with one another, I was actually looking for something—unloved action figures. You know, ones that people thought weren’t important anymore because they weren’t in the box or part of a popular series. I had a family of them in my top dresser drawer: a space station captain, a super hero missing his cape, a robot fighter, a galactic princess. So, I was looking to further extend my family.
After a bit, I found
a couple of figures that would quite nicely complement the ones I already had. I went to pay, which sometimes annoyed me at that store because you could tell the people who worked there thought they were so awesome because they had a job at that store. I walked towards the register, Roberto behind me. The cashier was leaning back on the counter reading a book. He sensed us approaching and laid his book down on the counter and turned towards us. I saw the cashier and just about stopped in my tracks. It was frickin Elias Bickler! He gave me a blank stare and gave Roberto a head nod in recognition since they kind of knew each other. I put my stuff on the counter. He started ringing it up without saying anything.
You know how sometimes when you decide to watch a TV show you’ve never really watched before, and you see an episode and then every time after that whenever you turn on that show it’s the same darn episode? That’s how this was. I had never seen Elias around until the other day and then all of a sudden he was just showing up everywhere. He stood there behind the counter wearing some beat-up jeans and a striped sweater looking particularly cute.
“You paying?” he asked.
“Oh yeah,” I mumbled, putting my coffee on the counter then digging in my wallet. Roberto left to go find Kate and Nicki. I paid, and Elias stuck my stuff in a little plastic bag, handing it to me. “Thanks,” I said quietly. Why did I act like a bumbling fool around this kid? Was it because I couldn’t stand somebody not liking me, or was it something else? My heart was telling me it was something else. Why wouldn’t he just talk to me? I needed to say something more than thanks, so I did. “Why won’t you talk to me?” I blurted out.
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