CHAPTER ONE OF EDIT

Whoa, is that a structured chapter?! Man, that's pretty crazy

I walk through the parking lot next to Paavo. I don't know how he can be so confident. It's insane that he can walk into this school like he has gone here his whole life. I can't even figure out how to get my legs to move forward properly; I just trip and stumble with every step.
    "Pellervo calm down already. This is your first day, I get that, but you can't be so nervous. If you go into this thinking it will be terrible then it will be terrible." Paavo stops and stands in front of me. "Say with me now..."
    "What, is this a pep talk?" I sigh.
    "Shut up and just speak this." He glares at me. "I am confident that today will be not suck."
    "You might want to double check your English there Paavo. It should be I am confident that today will not suck." I laugh. "You were never good at English, were you?"
    "I only learned recently, you have been taught English all through school, piss off." He rolls his eyes. "Now come, bell rings soon."
    I look over his shoulder at the front doors. Students gather around them, talking happily about their summer vacations. They all look so normal. I can't fit in here. Paavo can't fit in here either. We are two Finnish kids thrown into a small American town. I know for a fact that we are too different from these people. That is why I cannot be confident about going to this school.
    As we get closer to the doors the people notice us. I pull my hat down more, hoping to cover my face and hide from them. Paavo grins and says hello to them. I wish he wouldn't draw attention to us like this. I was hoping I could just appear in a chair at first class and have nobody notice me. Yet, here I am with Paavo, and everyone around is staring at us.
    I look up at him with a death glare. "Can you stop being so damn friendly so we won't be late to class?"
    He looks down and gasps. "Paskaa!"
    "What?" I ask.
    "I think he is amazed at how absolutely retarded that safety pin in your eyebrow looks." Some idiot calls out.
    "Haista vittu!" I flip him off.
    "Excuse me? I don't speak alien, damn spick." The guy laughs with his friends.
    "I'm not a Mexican, s**t face! Do I even look dark? Paavo, I am going to class. I have better things to do." I turn to the idiot again. "Voi vittu."
    "Pellervo, that is not necessary!" Paavo chases after me as I storm off.
    I have been at this f*****g school for five seconds and already some idiots have started pissing me off. If this entire school is filled with morons like that I'm dropping out. America is horrible compared to Finland. Why did we even have to come here?
    I find an empty hallway and drop my bag down on the floor and sit against the wall. Paavo doesn't follow. He probably went to class and made some new friends already. Knowing him he won't even know I exist by lunchtime and I will have no one to sit with. I guess this hall will be my new home then. It seems empty enough. There are only a few lockers in it, so it shouldn't get a lot of traffic. The only door in the hall has a sign that reads 'maintenance closet'.
    I sigh and take out my CD player and my notepad. I jot down notes to myself that would make no sense to someone on the outside. These notes are only for me and I don't need or want other people to understand them. I quickly write wherever I can find room for the words. 'Smooth, trippy, like sinking under water, peaceful, little guitar.' I also leave myself little doodles to help me remember what I was thinking at the time of writing the notes. For some reason my mind has always worked better with pictures involved. I draw a rough sketch of a girl sinking head first with head phones on into an endless abyss and I leave little trails of musical notes and bubbles behind. That is what I want it to sound like, my music. It will sound like sinking into an endless abyss in a warm sea and loving every moment of it. And at the end, the guitar will pick you up and pull you back to the surface.
    "What does all that s**t mean?" A voice I have never heard before speaks from above me. I jump and slam my notepad shut.
    "Who the hell are you and why are you standing there?" I shout at him. Who does he think he is that he thinks he can just barge in on someone's thinking time?
    "I'm sorry," He looks at the ground, "I should have told you that I was standing here."
    "You think? Jesus." I sigh. "Anyway, what's up?"
    "Uh, I'm Mark, more commonly known as FAB, and I was curious as to who you are and why you are blocking my locker." He laughs awkwardly and I realize that he has his arms wrapped around himself as if he has a blanket.
    "I'm Pellervo, nice to meet you, and I'm sitting in the way of your locker because I didn't know it was here." I scoot across the floor to the next locker down.
    "What are you writing?" Mark asks as he puts the combination into his locker.
    I look at my notepad. "Music." I answer simply. I don't want to try to explain to him that I think like a psychotic weirdo and have a notepad full of mental images.
    "It's full of music? Do you record any of it, or are you looking for a band?" Mark starts organizing his locker, even though it looks clean.
    "I'm always writing it in my head, but I never really have the chance to record anything other than the synth parts." I chuckle.
    "Synth parts? What kind of music do you make?" He glances at me for a short moment as he speaks and goes back to cleaning his locker.
    "I make a weird mixture of dubstep and post-hardcore. Or whatever the hell it's called, badass music of epicness." I shrug.
    "That stuff is almost impossible to put together well. If one thing is off, it all falls apart." Mike nods, impressed for some reason.
    "Oh, trust me, I figured that out very quickly. I am very picky when it comes to sound. I have to have it perfect or it drives me insane. I make other people go crazy when I mess with stereos for fifteen minutes before I can actually listen to and enjoy music." I laugh. "I'm a strange person."
    "Hey, I do the same thing. It drives my brother insane." Mark laughs too. Maybe this school isn't entirely s**t. There might be a few good people hiding still. "Anyway, what classes do you have? I can help you find the first one if you want."
    I take my schedule out and look at it. "I don't know what I have." I frown as I hand him the paper.
    "You have art, the same class I have first. That's pretty rad." He gives me my schedule back. "But we should hurry before we are late."
    "Paskaa, I haven't gone to my locker yet and I have no idea where it is. I guess I will carry my stuff with me." I look at my messenger bag. "Even though all I have in there is a few notebooks and a pen."
    "Oh, that is so much! It must be so heavy, how do you carry it around?" Mark's voice is overly sarcastic.
    "Well f**k you then." I glare before laughing. "There are people here that understand sarcasm. I'm so happy." The last school I went to not a single person got my sarcasm and always took everything I said so seriously that it made me sick.
    Mark closes his locker and signals for me to follow him. I stand up and put my notepad away as I walk. We get about three steps before the bell rings. Mark doesn't seem bothered by being late, so I guess it isn't that big of a deal. Or maybe he is just regularly late and isn't bothered by it anymore, who knows.
    I notice that Mark is walking with his arms wrapped around himself again. It's weird. I don't think I've ever seen anyone do that before. I'm curious as to why he does it, but I know it would be rude to ask. Why did I even notice it? I'm so strange. I need to stop being strange or I will forever stand out and be without friends.
    Mark stops and I run into his back. I mutter about my nose hurting and step back a few steps. I look around him to see why he stopped. In front of us is a door. It says 'art room', so why aren't we going in? Then I notice a post-it note. I lean forward some to get a better look at it.
    'Gone for five minutes, be back soon, sorry about that.
                    -Jerry'
    Who is Jerry? Is that the teacher? What teacher goes by his first name? That's informal and weird. Do all the teachers here go by first names? That would be very weird.
    "Who is that Jerry guy?" I ask.
    "Jerry is the art teacher." Mark states.
    "Oh. Do all the teachers in America go by first names?" I feel like a child, asking a million questions.
    "No, it's too informal and generally frowned upon by the rest of the teaching society." Mark shrugs. "But Jerry is in his first year of teaching and doesn't really understand a lot it. He more runs around and asks students to actually work on the projects. No one listens though."
    "That's weird. My last art teacher was a crabby old woman that looked a lot like a crow. She yelled and made us do history of art papers all the time. It was a s**t class and I dropped it." I start to pace the hall. No one else is around, but the bell rang already. Are they late or already in the room? I turn towards the door to check. No, no one is in there. They all must be late. How weird.
    A man walks towards us, fumbling with a keychain. "Sorry, Mike, I had to go get more clay and..." He looks up and stops. "Who is she?"
    "This is Pellervo, she is new here." Mike explains. I give a half assed wave.
    "Well, welcome to the class. I don't know how you got scheduled to this hour because it is my free block and I only let Mike get scheduled because he works silently on projects; but you have the look of an artist, so I will let you stay without complaint." He babbles and about halfway through I stop really listening to him. I don't care that much what he has to say. I got the point of it in the first few sentences and he didn't need to continue on. "Well, let's get to work. Mike, show Pell the ropes."
    "You don't f*****g address me as Pell." I growl.
    "I... I'm sorry?" Jerry looks uneasy and takes a step towards the door.
    I blink a few times, wondering why the hell I got that mad. Then I remember; Mom. "No, it isn't your fault. It's just a personal problem and I don't like being called Pell."
    Mike looks at me, with his eyebrows furrowed. "Let's go. I can show you all the stuff and help you get started on a project." He tugs at the side of my messenger bag to get me to move faster.
    Once we are on the other side of the room, away from Jerry, Mike pretends to be showing me paints. "What the hell was that? You just snapped at a teacher! That could get you a serious detention."
    "I apologized and it isn't any of your business! I don't need to tell someone I just met why I have problems." I frown at the bottle of blue acrylic paint in front of me.
    "Okay, but don't do that again. Jerry gets upset when student get angry towards him. It's some ego thing I think." Mike sighs. "Alright, this is the paint; over there are pencils, colored and graphite; markers and pens are over in that corner; the darkroom is down the hall; cameras are in that cabinet by the window..." He goes on for quite a while and I tune him out. I keep staring at the bottle of blue paint. It has strange swirls of sparkles in it. They don't look like they were there from the beginning. Maybe someone mixed them in then didn't use the whole bottle.
    Before Mike is done talking I snatch the bottle down from the shelf, take any paintbrush I can find, and a piece of canvas paper. Mike grabs at the strap of my bag but can't stop me before I take off outside. Jerry watches with a what-the-f**k expression.
    I get outside and my mind goes absolutely blank as to what I wanted to paint. I throw everything down and start pacing, hoping to remember. Mike comes outside and glares at me. I ignore him and take out my notepad. I see the doodle of a girl sinking and immediately know what I need.
    I run past Mike and back inside to the shelves of paint. Without much concern for what kind of mess I might be making, I search for a metallic paint. On the highest shelf I see a shimmery paint. It is perfect for what I want to do. I throw my bag onto the floor and climb onto the second lowest shelf to reach the paint. Jerry shouts something at me, but I am too busy to give a damn.
    Once I get the paint I run back outside. I forgot to grab something to mix the paint on, so I just pour it onto the sidewalk and mix it. Mike stares, unsure if he should yell at me or not. I quickly get the paint onto the paper and paint as fast as I can before the sun dries it all up. It takes me about fifteen minutes to finish it.
    "Paskaa." I sigh. "It's awful." I hold it up and frown. I don't know why I do this painting s**t. I'm terrible at it. Everything I make looks like a bunch of random swirls.
    Mike and Jerry stand behind me. "That is actually very interesting." Jerry speaks. "It's not abstract, it definitely isn't surreal, but it isn't realistic either."
    "You have created an indefinable painting in fifteen minutes with little to no thought. I don't know if that is awesome or crazy." Mike studies it like there is something there to see.
    "Uh... I'm going to go throw this away now if that is okay with you two..." I start to crumple the paper.
    "No!" They both shout out.
    "I'll just put it on the drying wrack then you can decide what you want to do with it later." Jerry takes it from me and goes back outside.
    Mike and I are left to stand in awkward silence and stare at the paint on the ground. "Are you gonna clean that?" He asks. I shake my head. It's a sidewalk on the back of a building; who cares if it has a little paint on it? Mike sighs and goes back inside. I pick up the paint bottle and the brush before going inside.
    I need to work on acting a little saner if I plan on not being a freak at this school too. Even if my brain doesn't function rationally, I can at least pretend that it does. I'm good at pretending. I do it all the time. I could pretend that I was happy when I moved to England. I pretended to be okay when Grandma died. I pretended to not mind having to move to America.
    So I should be able to pretend that I am a perfectly normal person.

Author's Note

It's going to be less funny in the beginning, but don't fret! (Correct usage?) The chapters to come shall be jam packed with piss-yourself-laughing funnies!! (not really(maybe))

Reviews

[GrandDystopia]

I'm glad youre back to writing this, while like you said this was less funny than before, as always i enjoyed the characterisation and youre use of finnish culture, makes youre characters very 3 dimensional. Good work, keep it up:)