By: Cujo.Venom
Have you ever just had one of those days? It seems like I end up having a lot of them. Here're a few that stuck in my mind, or bugged me so much at the time that I wrote them out.
Rated: Fiction T - English - Chapters: 3 - Words: 4,976 - Reviews: 1 - Updated: 3/11/2009 - Published: 3/4/2009 - id: 2643119
I pulled on my jacket and stepped out the door, pulling it closed behind me. I shivered in the cold winter air; I hadn't expected it to be this cold out. It had been nearly fifty degrees out yesterday; right now it felt about five degrees out. I flexed my fingers to make sure they were still there; I could hardly feel them.
My lungs ached with each breath, a white cloud puffing from my mouth every time I exhaled. I hated winter; it was too cold for my liking. My skin dried out, cracked, and bled. I'm not one of the girls that uses lotion or perfume every day and is constantly smearing more lip gloss onto her lips, either, so most of the time in winter my skin is pale and chalky.
I stuck my hands into my pockets and walked down the steps that led to my front door. Why I'd chosen a jacket instead of my winter coat I'll never know, but I didn't want to turn back around and go back inside. I was late enough already.
I'd gotten a text about ten minutes ago from someone in my school (I've no idea who) that the physical education teacher, Mr. Huffman, wanted me to come in early to take my trimester test. It was only about eleven twenty; I wasn't supposed to go in until two o' clock. I hadn't even been dressed when I'd gotten the text; I was sitting at the computer, talking to Megan, in my pajamas.
When getting ready I just exchanged my Cubs sleep pants for a pair of jeans and yanked one of my three Twilight jackets on over the tank top I slept in before running out the door. I didn't even turn off the computer or put in my contacts or put my hair into a ponytail like I usually did.
I walked the two or three blocks to school, the icy hail crunching under my feet the whole way. I only passed one person outside; it was too cold to do much of anything. We didn't have much snow, just a light covering of ice from the hail earlier this morning.
I opened the door to the high school, my nose red and running. I walked in, shoving my hair out of my face, and headed to the gym.
"Jordan!" I turned toward the person that called my name: Jessica Gross. "Hey!"
"Hey. Was it you that texted me?" I responded.
Jessica looked over her shoulder at the girl behind her. "No. I think it was Kendra."
"Oh. Well, I've got to go take the stupid P.E. tri test. See ya," I said, turning around and going into the gym. Jessica was one of those people that you weren't really sure if they were your friend or not. Rumors spread like a wildfire when she heard them; that was one reason I only talked to her in choir.
Not many people were in the gym; Kendra and a few others I didn't know. Huff was walking out as I entered. "Hey, great. The handout is on the table and so is the test," he said, only pausing for a moment before leaving.
"Okay…" I walked over in the direction he had pointed, barely able to make out the table on the other side of the room. It looked like a fuzzy lump because I didn't have my contacts in. When I got closer I realized Huff's and Nelson's, the other gym teacher, laptops were on the table. I grabbed the handout and flipped through it, just skimming over the rules of volleyball, wiffleball, and Frisbee football.
When I had finished reading through the rules, I put the handout back on the table and grabbed a test from the pile next to it and a pencil from the basket. I filled it out halfheartedly, not really caring if I did well or not. I had a hundred percent in this class; a bad grade wouldn't hurt that too much, and, after all, it was P.E. Nobody cared. By the time I had finished the bell that signified the end of the period had rang, so I just had to give my test to Huffman and I could leave. I set it on the table where he told me to and walked out the door and back into the Commons, which served as the lunchroom too. I looked around for a moment before seeing someone I knew.
"Jordan! You look so pretty today," Hailey said. She was a freshman; she lived on my street.
"I didn't do anything," I told her, shrugging. "Is Toast here? I need ride home."
"He's over there," she said, gesturing in the general direction of where he was.
"A little more specific, if you could. I don't have my contacts in."
She laughed. "He's sitting with Eggerling and Gerritt."
"Oh. Okay," I said, still not quite seeing him.
"Behind Gerritt's head."
I smiled at her and walked off in the direction she pointed, thanking her. As I got closer I could see them. Eggerling is the band director; I wasn't sure why Toast was sitting with him, but I didn't really care.
"Hey, Shawn, you want to be really amazingly cool and give me a ride home?" I asked. Toast isn't his real name; it's a nickname my friends and I gave him a while ago. I can't really remember how we started calling him Toast; he was Riley before that. In our "group"—well, clique—we've all got nicknames from Twilight or relating to that in some way. At least, it relates to Twilight in our minds. I'm Edward, Megan is Alice, Haley is Jasper, Shawn is Toast, Gerritt is occasionally Butter, Shandy Porter—another freshman—is Cheater, and, occasionally, Victoria.
If you've never read the Twilight Saga you won't have any idea of the significance of the last paragraph, but that doesn't really matter. In short, we've nicknamed ourselves after vampires. There are more people than I've mentioned in our group, but if I named them all I wouldn't have room to write about anything else.
"Sure Eddie," Toast said. "See ya, guys." He grabbed the paper bowl he'd gotten his lunch in and threw it into the trash, telling me to follow.
"Thanks," I said.
"If you find twenty dollars in my car, it's Lorrisa's." Lorrisa is his girlfriend; I don't like her much. She's too obnoxious; she laughs at the most morbid things. One day at lunch she was telling me how her mother was in the hospital and she laughed. I understand that that is how some people cope with stress and worry and such, but it bothers me.
We walked out into the parking lot and over to his car, which happened to be a mess. "Nice," I said as I climbed in.
"By the way," he said, "I'm a safe driver." He reached behind me and grabbed something from the back seat and threw it onto my lap. It was a red and black case that looked like it would hold a laptop. "Open that and you'll see just how safe of a driver I am. Just don't take anything out; it's a pain to get back in."
I sighed and opened the case; there was a wrench, a CPR mask thing in a red case, a flashlight, and other stuff that would be used in an emergency shoved into it. "Okay then." I zipped the case back up and tossed it back into the back seat.
You're probably wondering why he was trying to assure me that he was a "safe driver." I've got a pathological fear of cars; that is, an unreasonable one. I don't really know the exact reason why; part of it is because I was in a car accident when I was six or so, but I know a lot of people would just say, "So what? It was a car accident. Get over it." I wasn't even hurt; it just scared me. I was in the front seat and almost smacked my head on the dashboard. It was really scary. I don't really want to go into the whole psychological part of this; it's boring. It's just how I am. Deal with it. If you don't like it, stop reading this.
Anyway, we were almost to my house now. He was driving on Port Neal, the really stupid road without sidewalks that kids used to get home after school. "Huntington, right?"
"Yeah, right here." He turned onto my street. "Second house," I told him.
He pulled into my driveway and stopped the car. "Here ya go," he said.
I opened the door and he let off the brake, allowing the car to roll backwards. I pulled my leg back into the car and let the door fall shut. "Don't," I told him.
"You're really afraid of cars, aren't you?" He put the car in park.
"Uh, yeah," I said, sarcasm almost in my tone.
"I'm sorry," he said, laughing.
I got out of the car and closed the door. "Thanks," I called, heading into my house. I'd only been gone about half an hour or forty five minutes. I dropped my bag onto my bed and went back into the computer room to tell Megan I was back. When I sat down in the chair, my cat jumped up into my lap, purring as loud as her little lungs would let her.
Izzy normally isn't the type of cat that will let you hold and cuddle her, so when she does let me I take advantage of it. I scratched her ears and hugged her, laughing as she nearly fell over while leaning into my hand. I kissed her on the top of the head and she licked me on the nose, her rough tongue stinging a bit.
I laughed and pushed her back. "Hey you," I told her, "that hurts." I started typing to Megan and she laid down on my arm, making it so I couldn't reach the mouse. "Pain in the butt," I said, poking her with my free hand. She just purred.
I sat at the computer talking and posting on my website with Megan until my dad got home; he said Megan and Haley could come over before play tonight, so I texted Haley and told her.
When they got to my house, I was playing Chuzzle on the computer. It's probably one of the cheesiest games on the planet; you match up little multicolored fluff balls to get them to explode and you collect their eyes to move on to the next level. If you click on one long and fast enough, it sneezes and loses all of its fluff. We amused ourselves with Chuzzle for about half an hour before heading back to the school for play practice.
We didn't do much for the first half hour or so; the people that had to sing in the choir scene were practicing "Blessed Be the Tie that Binds" and Haley, Megan, and I were just sitting on "our" corner of the stage.
"This feels like musical practice," Megan said. "This is what we did. People that needed to know the songs went up around the piano and sang and the rest of us just sat around."
Haley and I laughed and nodded. We sat in silence, watching Kristi, the director, do various things. Eventually Kristi pulled out four baseball caps; a light blue one, a red one, a pink one, and a lime green one. I wandered over and asked what they were for.
"The baseball players," Lex told me. Lex was the assistant director and had the part of one of the three baseball players in the play; she played one of the dead people, too.
Lex went backstage to put the baseball cap on the prop table or something and Alicia, one of the many freshman in the play, said, "Lex called the red one. Which one do you want?"
"The blue one," I said. Kristi handed me the blue cap and I stuck it on my head to make sure it fit. It was a bit tight, so I adjusted it as I walked back to the stage. I went up the black wooden stairs and headed backstage to find Lex. When I couldn't find her I went back onto the main part of the stage. "Hey Toast, where's Lex?" He shrugged. He had the green baseball cap on his head crooked; I almost yanked it straight but then Lex materialized from backstage.
"Hey Quinn, you want these in the fridge?" she called to Kristi. The fridge was Kristi's secret hiding place; she put paintbrushes and paint and flashlights and other props in it. The fridge isn't some new, fancy piece of hardware. It's old; really old. Like, from the seventies or eighties old.
"Yeah," Kristi said. Lex nodded and took the caps from Toast and me, then Alicia tossed her the pink cap. As Lex headed back to where we kept the fridge and the extra paint, Kristi called everyone to the stage.
"We're doing act three today," she said. "I was hoping we'd be able to be off-book, but a lot of people said they don't have their lines memorized, so we're just going to do act three instead of act one. We'll do that on Saturday."
Various forms agreement came from each person: "Okay Quinn." "Sure." "Got it." Some people just nodded.
We went on with play practice, doing pretty well. The other Megan in the play—not Alice—wasn't there, so I couldn't do my part exactly right because I'm supposed to talk to her. She's another one of those people I just don't like. She seems to think that just because she's older than me she can do anything she wants to, and that she can criticize everyone and everything. The last play we did, Dracula, was the first play she'd been in, as far as I know. That was only in October. Our Town, our current production, is her second. This is my third play with Quinn; same for Haley. Alice—Megan Vipond—has done at least four, just with Quinn. Before that she acted at the Community Theater.
Alice has been acting since she was eight or nine; she's really into it. She's got a killer fake British accent, too; if you didn't know she was American, you'd think she was actually British. She wants to go into acting for a career, but she's said—on more than one occasion—that that field is hard to get into. She's right; honestly, what are your chances of becoming a hot-shot actress without spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for schools and publicity and such? Slim to none. But I bet she could do it if she set her mind to it; she's just amazing like that.
When play was over Haley gave me a ride home. Haley is the only one out of the three of us that has a car; we're all sixteen, but I don't have my license yet. I still need eight or so hours of driving time before I can get it. Alice doesn't even have her permit. Haley's car is red; like, actually red, not the stupid, metallic red that looks retarded. She's got fairy seat covers—Alice and I put them on when it was about five degrees outside and snowing. Without knowing how to put them on. It was pretty fun. Her keys have a Shadow the Hedgehog keychain on them; the poor thing has cat teeth marks all over his head, too. Poor Shadow; Haley's had him for about four years, or so I was told.
Alice and Jasper—Haley—didn't stay long because I had to go to Omaha the next day. (Which I wasn't too excited about.)
A/N: Okay, this is me being bored and narrating my life. It was just one of those days…
Review if you liked it. ^^; I can do more. I'm pretty good at ranting.