A mix of emotions.

"Are you a cannibal?" I overhear from somewhere behind me.

The girls from my first period class (there are a shocking total of three of us) are talking about something--an ex-boyfriend? his financial status? yard gnomes?--as we walk toward our next classes. We pass two girls in identical magenta jackets walking together and I wonder whether this was intended (it probably was, not that it matters, but these are the kinds of things I occupy myself with). The first of the girls I walk with is deposited at the entrance to another hallway where her maybe-maybe-not boyfriend (or else ex-boyfriend) waits for her. There is a harrowing tale I could tell here, but my main concern of late has been the fact that they spend a lot of time canoodling in front of my locker.

My locker is, in my unqualified opinion, a haven for shameless public displays of affection far across the land.

In advisory a girl sits between two boys as they peruse a prom magazine and discuss prom dates. I am almost certain two of the three are single until The Boy Who Asked Me To Sit There places a hand on the girl's waist and leaves it there.

They still might be single.

Sometimes I forget that I'm quiet. My thoughts are loud and occupy me well enough, so it isn't so lonely.

I watch people, their stories playing out before me, as I sit.

I want to be one of them in the sense that I want to be a part of something, but I find peace in the fact that--it just isn't my time yet. My adventure is only on the cusp of beginning, and I think for now it is okay not to be. I don't want what they have. I don't want drunken nights and a baby at sixteen and a life stuck in this tiny town. The voice telling me that I want any semblance of these things is simply a liar.

A pair of black Nikes sit on the desk of the boy next to me. Earbuds blast music I can hear from four feet away; his phone is well loved, scratches abounding, and sits next to his shiny black iPod. As I write he folds his arms on the desk and rests his head on them, temporarily muffling the music. He wears a maroon hoodie and has artfully styled his hair into what might be a faux-hawk if his hair were longer. He has a long, placid face and a mouthful of braces. For a second he mumble-sings a lyric off-key. The phone buzzes. My Physics class is a helter-skelter of conversation, and the teacher sips a large drink from a nearby fastfood place.

"I love you, sir," one of my peers informs the teacher, "no homo."

Two boys return from a search of the bathrooms; a classmate has been missing for fifteen minutes, ostensibly gone to relieve himself across the hall. "He wasn't in that bathroom," one of the boys says. "I think maybe he went to Ms. Reynaldo's." A pause. "Frank wanted to lie and say there was blood on the floor."

If this isn't a metaphor for the state of my education, I'm not certain what is.

No fewer than two girls are doing their makeup as catlovingmathteacher explains the problems we have been reviewing. The Boy With The Underpants hijacks a small tub of foundation and mimes applying it.

I wonder what kind of world this would be if we didn't feel pressured to fix ourselves.

I want to be me--not my eyelashes, complexion or, god forbid, waist size. And I don't want to lie, either, because the fact that boys have never paid me much heed does occasionally cause me to wonder whether I am really that outwardly unappealing.

But I am learning that there is merit in letting feelings be what they are with the knowledge that they are apt to be deceiving. My surroundings are not who I am.

At lunch my sister and I render crude drawings of our enemies and attack them with the remains of our hard plastic fruit containers. I enjoy it immensely as Dobbin looms behind us in the otherwise empty array of tables. I still find his voice in hallways. He still bothers me.

I don't know why it is that the news that Dobbin has managed to romantically entangled himself once more doesn't surprise me. Part of me wants to gag. Part of me is merely numb.

I deserve much more than this boy. Still he flits, vaguely peripheral, around me like some demented test.

I find myself too caught in the idea of how I'm supposed to be feeling to let myself truly feel things.

This too, I suppose, shall pass. So many other things have. They will.

10/22

"I'm sitting in Pre-Cal class," raps The Boy With The Underpants, "over here it smells like ass. But it's gonna go by real fast. Gettin' out my iPhone, checkin' my apps..."

A preliminary glance counts six phones hidden behind bags on desks and in laps as catlovingmathteacher goes over last week's quiz.

The boy to my right asks "Who're you writing to?" and I slam my notebook shut, saying no one, they're just words. Just words.

"Thank you for the help, Winston," says catlovingmathteacher.

"You're welcome, sir."

"I was being facetious."

A cowboy sitting on the other side of the room, the one who threatened to kill himself when his girlfriend (an acquaintance of mine) tried to break up with him last year and admits to being racist and I shy away from, interjects: "Hey, no big words!"

I have been feeling wordless recently, and it scares me. Words do not bubble up inside me. I'm supposed to have my college application essays written. I'm supposed to be figuring things out. I'm supposed to attempt NaNoWriMo again and apply to colleges and take the SAT again and hope last month's scores don't prove my idiocy as a human being.

I'm supposed to prove things with my words.

But my words feel cold.

Wanting

I sit in Economics and pretend to review for a test that was supposed to be today but now isn't. Thoughts drift, thinking--the boy who sits behind me has nice lips, it embarrasses me a little that stupid memories of Dobbin make me smile sometimes, I think I might be the only white girl in this class, I wish someone here would just get me. The four white boys in this class group in one corner of the room, talking with the teen mom I know and her cohort, who wears a lot of eye makeup and seems to have a dose of sense about her. The guy who wears ironic t-shirts makes funny faces as the guy who sleeps grins drowsily and one of them takes on a silly voice--"spank me harder!"

The substitute comes around to the front of the room and a wide-eyed girl whose words string together very precisely, almost like questions, exclaims "my nipples are freezing!"

"Did you hear that, ma'am," one of her friends shouts across the room, "did you hear that? She says her nipples are freezing!!"

The substitute only scoffs.

"If you knew Sally," The Boy With The Underpants told me in math class today, as I helped Teen Mom with the worksheet we were doing under the orders of yet another substitute, "you would hate her. So nice, but dumb as a brick."

"Really," I said, noncommittally. A group of boys huddled around the desk to my right, deeming themselves The iPhone Club and discussing bandwidth or something equally Interesting.

"The other day," he began, "I said to Sally 'hey Sally, did you hear about the fire at the Eiffel Tower? It killed everybody in France!' and she was just all, 'Everybody?' And I said 'hey Sally, did you hear that everybody in France was also decapitated?' and she was all 'what's decapitated?' So I said 'it means everybody had their head cut off, Sally, everybody had their head cut off!' She believed it all."

"Yeah," agreed the girl who sits behind me, "really nice girl, so much fun to be around. If you are around her you will have fun, but she's as dumb as a brick. Dumb as a brick."

Today is nerd day at school, a theme child of The Opulent And Important Homecoming Week. In Physics I submit a personal tirade to the boy costumed in suspenders, plastic glasses and a set of (green) fake teeth. As I try to explain that I am firmly rooted in team nerd and do not find the term demeaning, my Physics teacher asks for my nerd credentials. I draw a blank.

And while this leads me to question whether I am a nerd at all, instinct tells me that I can be a nerd if I damn want to, no matter what my 'credentials' might be.

My words do not appeal to me as they hit the page lately, scattered and self-pitying and downright confused as they are. I question the very foundations on which I have always stood, write myself into loops.

I've been thinking a bit about want. Specifically in monetary terms, as I am now being paid for my time (what?!) in my school's library, but want can be such a big thing in many areas: What do I want? What don't I want? Why does all this wantwantwant have to make my heart hurt so much?

So much revolves around want, and I've never been sure. My hesitancy to choose has always brought about conflict. Oftentimes I just don't want things enough, and it worries me.

And it goes back to trying, too.

As a child (which I still am, but work with me here) I thought that if I tried hard enough, if I was Perfect, equilibrium could be reached. I thought I was the keystone in my family; only a handful of years ago I still believed this, that I was the only constant, and in some ways this still plagues my thoughts. I watched as my immediate family went through atrocities of their own and thought, ridden with panic, that I could not let myself fall apart. I could not make waves. Making waves was Bad. Making waves was Wrong and Not Allowed.

I still feel this way.

Eighth grade self wrote kept a journal in a word document. Eighth grade self, only just fourteen years old, was confused and hurting and arrogant. Eighth grade self felt like she knew everything and nothing all at once, keying words into her refurbished (see: used, 300 dollars, internetless) laptop.

I skimmed through hoping for inspiration, insight or magic sparkles and return here with only the impression that fourteen year old me was severely confused. She also feels distant. Only about four years have passed since eighth grade self wrote these words, but I no longer feel they belong to me. I am no longer that person.

I will not always be the person I am now.

I want to be more than I am, maybe. I want to stretch farther, be more than the words I will later cringe over.

I help my mom make pizza on Monday night and tell her about the journal, tell her that it scares me how far away my words seem. Encouraging words: It's a function of growing up. Will it always be this way? No. No, it gets less so as you get older.

It is all so distant and cloistering at the same time.

Sometimes I can draw no conclusions. This is scarier, I think, than it sounds. I am one to search for logic where none will ever appear, parse out reason and reach for truth. Which isn't to say that I am a lover of reason, either, merely that I look for it. It isn't even that I lack answers, though I grieve that too, but that my experiences muddle together in such a way that sometimes I just don't know that to make of them. Am I fourteen year old me, angry at the world without really knowing it? Am I the girl who tried so very hard to be perfect only to write that despite all this, her father was angry with her?

Despite the arrogance I see in that me now, I really did try. But trying doesn't necessarily equate to change, and the obstacles I was facing were insurmountable. There was nothing more I could have done--and maybe it isn't about being enough. Maybe it's about realizing that there are some things you cannot do.

Fixing the situation I've been placed in is one of them.

What do I want? I want a lot of things. I want to feel whole, feel (honestly?) perfect. I want to read more and sleep more. I want to smile, a lot, and I want to be happy. I want to breathe in clear, cold air on an autumn evening as the sky dims. I want an uncomplicated and exquisite love story, I want to hold someone's hand, and I want it soon. I want to hold a star in the palm of my hand. I want friends here in tiny town Texas, birthplace of the mother effing cowboy. I want to know exactly where I want to go to college. I want out of the box I've built around myself. I want to replicate moments as words and live within their immensity.

It is in Physics class on Tuesday that the teacher's aid says "so I can assume from the noise level in here that everyone understands the work and needs no help at all?" and I snap.

"No," I say, and it is unlikely that anyone listens, "because I haven't said a word." I want to rest my head on the desk and scream, I want to leave, slam the door to this classroom, and I want to slap words against the concrete walls they have built until they break.

Maybe I want justice. Maybe I want to feel whole and I want to be happy and I want to stop wanting for things so ill-defined and unreachable.

There is some beauty in chaos. That's all I can think.

Steam of consciousness.

"My sister, when she was born, she had blonde hair," said the girl sitting next to me, twisting in her seat to talk to a friend. "Now she has brown hair. That's weird, right?"

Tuesday.
"How old are you?" asked The Boy Who Invited Me To Sit There of the Chinese exchange student.

"Uh, eh, seventeen," he said. There was some ruckus over the age of his girlfriend.

"That's okay," The Boy Who Invited Me To Sit There assured him, with a wave of his hand, "I can do twelve, I can do twelve. This is America, after all."

Friday.
On Fridays the school serves us corndogs for breakfast.

I do not eat breakfast on Fridays.

Monday.
English presentations. Four girls lean against the whiteboard as a shoebox diorama with play-doh figures in it sits on the teacher’s desk beside them.

A girl with empty eyes goes first—she looks sad and lost, and I imagine that no one notices. I follow her words as they all work to unfurl her poster.

A girl with glossy teal fingernails goes next, reciting from memory until her “um”s and “like”s become cause to ask for assistance and she begrudgingly fishes notes from her backpack. I stop listening around now, plan to find information elsewhere if I have to. I can’t see her eyes due to makeup and her nails distract me to no end, and when she smiles it doesn’t seem real to me.

I wish I didn’t think this way, like everyone I meet becomes a character I try to pick apart, not imagining people complexly because all I can see are the shadows they cast. Like what I see is black and white when surely, hopefully gray is what ultimately prevails.

I can’t follow the rest of the presentation, an overview of Upper Hell in Dante’s Inferno. I rub at the blister on my thumb and consider how wrong I might be. I bite my lip.

Ye Old Initials tells us more and I scrawl ideas next to thoughts, juggle worlds as the girl next to me asks to borrow my notes and I oblige. In the hallway after class I study the pretty tulle skirt of another girl in that group, think that I have never spoken to her and wonder what she thinks of it all. She works in the office and I have never seen her smile, can’t remember what her voice sounds like.

I rest my books against my chest as I wait for my Economics teacher to open the classroom door. The cute, nerdy boy who sat behind me in English last year passes by. He wears plaid today and I wonder, like always, if he ever finds me in hallways too.

And I wonder—how do you do it? They are locked doors and I am fumbling with—maybe the wrong—key.

Tuesday.
We are moved into the room next door and presenters rotate. The second presentation involves getting into the groups, and I am guided into a group that includes a tall guy with definite puff levels and some semblance of perceivable knowledge. I think, quietly, that I would like to be his friend.

How to go about this is beyond me.

Wednesday.
The smattering of us without waivers line the walls of what is usually the volleyball practice area directly behind the bleachers in our shiny sports complex thingamajigger. Students in groups are sneakily tricked into sharing personal facts about themselves, and for some reason it makes me smile.

The groups are in circles, small voices rising from the quiet until, every so often, there is a burble of laughter.

And here I am, detached. I am more comfortable this way, finding words and observing moments that are not strictly mine. I am more comfortable borrowing memories, filling my blank space with this--with this.

Thursday.
With minutes to spare, music is blasted from speakers in the auditorium. A math teacher demonstrates a dance, slicking his hair back dramatically and bopping up and down with mad skill, and a group of students take the stage. They dance ridiculously and it makes me smile. It feels like recently I have made myself a character in my own life and I stand still watching people and lives move around me.

Like I have no place grasping for happiness when they all have their groups, their lives. I struggle with wants and their rationalizations; wanting to say words, move forward, carve some space for myself that isn't cold. Say words to the boy I would like to know and he doesn't respond and I tell myself that I don't need drama or wondering when I am just some girl and they all have their places.

Wednesday.
Cute Guy sleeps on the floor at the end of the gym, next to a girl with pretty red hair who I believe to be in a nursing program many students are in. She bends her knees close to her chest and rests an open booklet against them, reading.

A few teachers sit on folding chairs nearby, at the entrance of the space. Most of the others not participating line the next wall, three of the six wrapped in jackets and in various stages of repose.

The person nearest to me is about ten feet to my left, his head resting on a drawstring backpack, and I remember that he is one of the pranksters in my English class, a member of The Infamous Group Of Boys.

Friday.
Pep rally. I stand on the bleachers, periphery as the group I am attempting to cling to fill the seats just below me. The crowd of seniors stand on the seats themselves, the rows, and roar as we compete for the Holy Spirit Stick.

I crane my neck to watch the student conductors through small gaps between people. Their arms move up and down and just so.

They are smiling. This is why I watch them.

Wednesday.
Everyone cheers as a boy manages to carry three girls at once across the gym.

Cute Guy is roused and moves to sit along the next wall, observing. I click my pen open and closed until I decide to write this sentence.

I lament my lack of proper peripheral vision as Cute Guy catches me glancing his way. It's no big deal or anything. It isn't as if people throw stuff at me or anything.

This happens way too often, actually.

Wednesday.
But still, I shy away from what might be advances. I interpret until my thoughts spin circles around me.

I refuse to sign waivers.

Thursday.
English presentations. The Infamous Group Of Boys present their project; The Boy With The Underpants takes this as an opportunity to dress in a red spandex body suit. It is skintight and covers him head to toe.

I dearly hope you can imagine this.

Standing beside The Infamous Group Of Boys, The Boy With The Underpants does a brief jig before undoing the zipper on the back of his head and taking great (poised) gulps of air. He makes a funny face.

Thursday.
It strikes me, standing outside the school's performing arts center as we wait for the doors to open, how alone I am. A five foot radius stands between myself and any other person. My peers group together frantically, as if being alone is a disease they might catch.

The degree at which I am alone makes me feel antisocial.

Wednesday.
It is another beautiful day, one of three I can recall in ages, all of them stacked together this week. My disbelief grows. The weather is pleasant, so much so that I wish to bask in it, and I have never been on the best of terms with the out of doors.

My peers form groups in the shade and in the grassy-ish courtyard area behind me. The dirt here has the consistency of sand. In fact, I'm pretty sure it is sand. While this has been explained to me as the result of the prehistoric existence of some body of water, I choose to find it ridiculous anyway.

A girl my sister knows passes by and asks me if I'm okay. I am. She leaves, a carton of rice in hand, off to a doctor's appointment.

Thursday.
By sheer luck I land an aisle seat next to a boy I have a passing acquaintanceship with. He's very talkative and it's difficult to process what he means by the words he strings together, but he's nice and finds me in hallways to say hello.

Some might find this annoying, and I've had a share of that sort of relationship, but somehow it doesn't bother me. Maybe it's the fact that he cuts through the layer of not knowing and goes straight to words.

Even if I don't fully understand him, his presence makes me feel less alone.

Friday.
Drumline. They pour down the hall in a steady stream--ba ba ba BAH BAH BAH ba ba ba BAH BAH BAH--arms flailing as they pass. My peers rush to line the walls outside the classroom, to watch, enraptured.

I just sit here.

Thursday.
Stretching hurts. I come up short and want to crawl into myself, more so than I ever have. I feel antisocial.

I feel like hiding.

Monday.
My thoughts slip together like staircases.

Monday.
I want to split words, fuse them together, intertwined tightly—and mine. Strung together with breath.

Thursday.
The speaker is a zany scientist, an expert of drug effects on the brain with many a story to his name. A movie has been made based on his impact on history, and at several points he ferries various brains around the auditorium for our viewing.

At least they're frozen.

Wednesday.
If all goes as it is likely to, half of my face will be sunburned following this ordeal.

I decide that I don't care.

Monday.
Clear skies so bright and chill almost enough to call for a sweater, just, and thinking that everything might be okay because it is pretty outside. Good weather makes me happy in a way I cannot replicate, like some sort of mystery I wouldn’t mind living forever if they would just let me keep sitting here as people call to one another around me, a comforting scatter of noise and sunlight gleaming against parked cars.

It also makes me wish I understood things. Ye Old Initials passes by and I wonder if all these years of teaching have made him happy, though my feeling is that he would either question the definition of happiness or say, matter-of-factly, “of course I’m happy.”

Breeze wafts against my neck and I choke against the smell of cheap perfume, a scented wish gone terribly wrong. I stop to stretch my hand. People group together in pieces of shade, spill against a handicap ramp and huddle around the statue of an eagle (gift from the class of 1956!) centered in front of the flag poles.

It isn’t a memorable space of time, but for this reason I wish I could hold it forever—even Dobbin across the courtyard, today wearing a checkered red shirt. He faces away from me and wanders out of sight, and for this moment it doesn’t bother me. It is one of those moments that I like anyway.

Great Art Of Being Thrown Statistics, The

The guy who invited me to sit here is enigmatic mixture of slime and well-meaning. His skin is the color of cocoa but I feel like he must be Mexican for the simple reason that, let’s face it, statistics make it likely. His voice is laid back, promising, and I do not trust it.

"Are you just going to sit there and do work or what?" he asks, a few chairs away from me in the vast land of the school cafeteria. My notebook is open. I scribble.

"If they let me."

"If they ask you if you have your papers, just tell them you turned them in, that Mr. L has them,” he says. Then: “I got your back."

I didn't turn in the permission forms needed to see this presentation. I was handed forms and expected to sign them. These forms were not explained to me and made it clear as mud that the material could be a) scarring or b) kill me.

Well, thanks.

The presentation has started. We are being given the beauty of AWARENESS regarding teenage drunk driving. AWARENESS is important, and I tell you: we are positively riveted. The group beside me passes around a pack of gum and, if I'm honest with you, the only perk in this situation remains that a really cute guy from my advisory class is within eyeshot.

"The worst thing that can happen," says a trauma nurse on-screen, "is that he could go brain dead and die from this injury."

Blood is gushing from a hole in a boy's head as another nurse talks him through how many drinks he usually has.

He only had three drinks, he swears!

I really shouldn't be allowed to make commentary on this. I mean, I don't have forms or anything.

Every few minutes, though, I feel like crying. I am not completely immune to this HBO special on AWARENESS. I am not immune to that which is being pressed against me, not completely, though I do appreciate the fact that a neurologist has referred to a head injury causing the brain to "pooch out."

I love learning new things.

Cute guy has donned a jacket now. I do not know his name. Have you ever tried to find someone one Facebook when you don't know their name?

Ahem. Me neither. I did not spend thirty minutes of my life searching through The Boy With The Underpants' six hundred friends for his existence.

But just that idea--well, I thought it might amuse you. You're welcome.

I feel like I am over this bout of AWARENESS. There is blood and sadness and ruined lives—and oh, it's over.

Okay. Thank you, HBO special.

A few scatter as we are given a bathroom break. The Boy With The Underpants walks past on his way to be facilities, boxers (purple plaid) peeking slightly out of his Bermuda shorts.

I am not making this up.

The announcer pronounces documentary as "dock-you-meant-airy" and sprinkles us with Consequences, all the while mispronouncing our town's name. I am amused.

LOOK AT ALL THE AWESOME DEATH JUST LIKE ME!

"We don't have to show movies like this to my kids," she says, "because they have experienced it firsthand."

They probably mean well.

A retired police officer gives a presentation on nefarious groups. He's "tatted out" and seems okay enough, only now he is telling us about how gangs might kill us and I really don't want to be killed by gangs please thank you--how will I sleep at night?

He educates us on various tattoos now and I quietly fear for my life. This is why I do not watch the news. Duty shirker I may be, but I feel that if I did this I would never leave the house again. Priorities.

The other grades are taking ever-important benchmarks this week. They have to keep us seniors around or else Break The Law And Lose Money, so now we are being educated in various ways. I am disgruntled.

"The crime stats in this area are great," the officer says. "This is why it is up to you guys to be safe. It's up to you."

The presenters trying to decipher YouTube and give up, making d0.

"They're not just going to kill you, they're going to kill your family." A dead woman and baby flash onscreen.

I didn't sign my forms! Why do they have me in here?

Like, dude.

That felt appropriate.

Sexting is brought up by Announcer Lady. She waves her purple Blackberry around to prove her points. With a winning “Nothing is ever deleted!” my peers begin buzzing as if this had never before occurred to them—QUICK, WE NEED TO DELETE STUFF FROM OUR PHONES.

Maybe it’s the fact that I don't get the concept of secrets. Maybe it's that I am a horrible person who judges her peers harshly. But really?

I wouldn't be thrilled if my peers read this blog, I'll give you that much. But am I lying? My conceptions are just that, mine, and I am painfully aware how fractured some of them have been in the past. I hope to be right, but I am stumbling. I will stumble. This is all I can do.

The presentation ends without a bang and students begin to disperse. My advisory teacher stops for a moment as he passes by.

"What are you doing, writing a book?" he asks. He wears suspenders and a smile framing sincere eyes. He has an accent I can’t place.

"Sort of."

The Boy With The Underpants, a tale

We've spoken on the topic of my English teacher before now. While somewhere in the depths of middle age, he gives off the air of a crusty old man and is somewhat of a fixture at my school. He is addressed by his first and last initials, which I find endlessly entertaining, and he has a smirk.

Surely you know what I mean by this. When certain humans purposely make scenes for his amusement he smirks, sticks a hand in his pocket and makes some suitable statement that both tells them off and contributes to the general hilarity of the situation. Hawaiian shirts are his stock and trade, despite the fact that he is not really a Hawaii kind of person. Or maybe he is. I am just making grand and beautiful assumptions here.

All of these things manage to contribute to a slightly creepy feeling about him. Last week, for instance, we were taking notes on The Inferno and, as he read aloud, he stopped-- "...they descended upon the Mount of Joy. Doesn't that sound like a great name for a porno, 'The Mount of Joy'?"

He's either really cool or really creepy. I've been a student of his since last year and the only thing I'm pretty sure of is the fact that I (and, indeed, the world) will probably never know.

Last year I took "Team Sports" for a semester. The class fluctuated from three to ten people and, due to size and the beautiful soul of our instructor, our only requirement was to keep moving. I fully admit, with great spasms of pride, that I took this opportunity to navigate laps around the gym while reading a book. The instructor was a burly guy with a partial beard and I liked him because I generally like teachers and also because I was allowed to read books during gym class.

I tell you, I have had best high school gym experience ever. I took my first semester of gym freshmen year (which now feels like a billion years ago), when I briefly lived in the magical land of Florida. Here we had the opposite problem; the space was so crowded with people that they simply did not want to wrangle us all into submission. Instead they gave us the option of shooting hoops or sitting on the floor of the gym and using the period as a study hall. I spent many an hour masterfully dodging basketballs launched at my face. Worth it.

The gods of gym class have smiled upon me.

My burly bearded gym teacher went AWOL around December and we were given Ye Old Initials' son, at that point a long-term substitute, as our replacement. I'm pretty sure people have decided to call him by his initials, too, which I'm sure thrills him to bits. My sources cite him as a colorless, gangly creature who gives the impression that he might be toppled over by the slightest breeze. On the converse, however, I know of at least one girl who daily giggled over his existence ("he's so hot!!!"). In any event, he would ask after my books and I would give vague answers from my spot on the bleachers, hoping against hope that he would not make me perform physical activities.

Remember VoldeTread? I haven't visited with him since I completed the journey that is Supersize Me and fell into a slight state of panic that I might die of deathness. This was about a month ago. School is a valid excuse, OKAY?

I managed to skate by over midterm exams by throwing a frisbee to myself. I haven't really seen him since then.

In my AP English class, turf of Ye Old Initials himself, we have managed to partition ourselves into three groups. The boys find themselves on one side of the class and the girls on the other, with a few girls breaking ranks and scattering out towards the middle. The boys, of which there are approximately five, feel it necessary to pull glorious pranks on Ye Old Initials. Yesterday, for instance, one particular boy left a pair of his boxers in Ye Old Initials' desk chair before class. Ye Old Initials was unfazed upon discovering them. He picked them up and tossed them onto the corner of his desk-- "These belong to anybody?"

The boys cracked up and the owner got up to collect his underpants (sky blue with steam engines, for those wondering).

I could make jokes here, but I definitely may have had a discussion on breast reductions and a Venezuelan woman who chopped her abusive husband's genitalia off with my groupmates a few minutes later. This may have happened.

But I would like to take this opportunity to go further into my long and illustrious relationship with the boy with the underpants.

The Boy With The Underpants is a wide-eyed, excitable human with whom I occasionally exchange words. In addition to making himself present in my English class, he sits next to me in math class.

It occurs to me now, in the frantic editing stage of this post, that this sounds exactly like the beginnings of The Dobbin Situation. Not happening.

In math class, home of catlovingmathteacher, he sits next to me and alternates between words of confusion and the phrase "this is cake" accompanied by a chuffed sigh and rolling of shoulders.

I made the mistake of calling him out on a personal tirade/guilt trip last week by noting that some people (namely me) do not actually have friends. He immediately contradicted his assurances of friendlessness by informing me that I was his friend.

"You're not my friend," I said.

"Come on," he said, "we talked on the first day of school, we're friends."

"I think we have contradicting views of friendship."

He handed me his phone as catlovingmathteacher explained a graphing problem, grinning at his own brilliance. With the skill of an everlasting ninja, I hid the phone behind my binder and noted that he had brought up the dictionary's definition of "friend."

Apparently we're friends now. Like I have any choice in the matter. Now he attempts to get me to shake his hand every time we meet and dramatically shouts "friend!" in my direction at strategic intervals.

I'm going to go with the idea that my denial is a character building activity for his benefit.

The guy has over six hundred friends on Facebook. Yes, I am a stalker.

When he isn't declaring Precalculus to be cake (duh!), The Boy With The Underpants spends his time in math class calling the girl who sits in front of him "baby girl" and trying to braid her hair. I was asked to teach him the great art of hair braiding at one juncture. He's improving, I'll give him that much. His greatest accomplishment in life (or at least the summer) was reenacting a horror film at midnight with his friends for the benefit of a group of girls who, after finishing with their shock, joined forces with them and helped them repeat the ordeal for another batch of humans. Judgment. He appears completely earnest, yet acts in a way that suggests he is a slimeball. Or maybe he's a teenage boy. Who knows?

Last week he and his fellow male humans hijacked tennis shirts from Ye Old Initials' back room and decided to model them. Grand ideas were painted for us--they would join Ye Old Initials' tennis team and take over the world. Ye Old Initials wasn't convinced, noting he had two freshmen who could easily take them on. Soon they were planning a take-down.

"If I win state," said The Boy With The Underpants, miming a tennis racket in his hand and readying for victory, "you have to persuade Sarah Johnson, with your mad serenading skills, to marry me."

"I thought you were going with Brady's sister."

"Her too!" he said, eyes bright and words tripping up on the way. "I'm marrying Sarah and taking Leeann to prom."

This was all fine and well and amusing to me until a few days ago, in math class, when he beckoned to the boy who sits behind me (a slimeball, I feel, but here I am Judging The World). "Oh my God," he said, "Sarah Johnson likes my status! She touched my status. I tell you, we're getting married, dude."

The beginnings of a love story if I ever heard one.

"I feel ready to stay up for, like, two days straight, man," he says, in English class this time, rubbing his face. "Like, Jesus, man."

Now the class is discussing Halloween and attempting to coax one of my groupmates into saying vulgar things in Spanish for them.

Now he says: "Ye Old Initials you should, you know, shave the sides of your head."

"Earl is naturally white, dude, I mean." The boys lift up the sleeve of a Mexican boy's t-shirt to reveal a farmer's tan.

"It'll get better in the winter," he says.

One can only hope.