Beginnings.

                            Chp.1

                There is nothing more tedious in this entire universe than waiting for the final school bell to ring.  I can see the second hand on the clock moving, but it just feels like every tic is a personal eternity.  After the day I’d just had, it was pretty understandable, and the fact the a*****e responsible was still sitting in my class did not make that any better.  Tim McHarris.  That is the real word you want to use for the definition of “complete douchebag”.  I guess that at some point in High School, everyone gets at least one bully and I had the misfortune of getting stuck with this guy.  6’1” at the age of 16, he was a year younger than me, but he was also 30 pounds heavier.  He dressed like a typical metalhead: denim jacket, tight black jeans, a dirty “Slayer” band shirt, and hair greasier than an oil refinery that hung messily down to his shoulders.  I was used to that description, I tended to gravitate towards the Goth kids in school, the ones that weren’t understood by everyone else, but this guy just seemed to hate everyone and everything indiscriminately.

 

                I never really could figure out why either.  At first I thought it was just because his social view was bathed in pure nihilism and pessimism because of his social addiction to the subject, then I thought it was due to family issues, but earlier today it dawned on me: some people are just a******s and there’s not much more to it than that.  I believe that was the realization I had about two seconds before I felt him grab my hair from behind me at lunch and banged my face right into the table, walking off afterward like it didn’t even happen.  I believe that in my psychology textbook it stated that things like that are what to look out for in Psychopathic behavior, huge bouts of passive aggression.  My head was still pounding from that.  The school bell finally rang, the shrill sonic velocity causing my headache to intensify even more.  I was relieved, the quicker I could get the f**k out of that classroom and just be alone for a while, the better.  I grabbed my backpack, littered with patches from various bands, and Japanese Anime’s that I liked, from beside my desk and got up and headed for the door.  I didn’t really bother listening to the babble from our teacher about having a great summer and all that nonsense because the snide tone in his voice, which seemed to be her only tone of voice, just screamed of insincerity.

 

                I would’ve just been OK with Tim hating the living f**k out of me because I was a “goth” kid, dressing in all black, having longer dyed black hair, liking darker music and imagery that isn’t based in anger or nihilism, and having a more melancholy view of the world, but even that notion was blown out of the water when I was “introduced” to the only friend he seemed to have at this illustrious “Western Valley HighSchool”: Craig Orion.  You can find his picture in the dictionary next to the word “arrogant”.  Coincidentally, he was waiting for Tim at the door I really REALLY wanted to be exiting.  I knew that wasn’t full reason for being there, they were both just waiting to give me s**t one last time before the end of the semester.  It’d be the last time for three months these guys could be a******s to someone in order to satiate their astronomically large egos.  Craig I hated more than Tim because he was always so self important.  He thought of himself as Jesus like he could do no wrong and acted like he’d worked all of his life for various material possessions like a nice expensive car, and his own house at 17. 

 

                In reality, he was a lazy a prick who only had these various things because his father worked for the Geneva Corporation.  That, was the other reason I hated this guy.  The Geneva Corporation is like a real life version something you’d see in a movie.  A multi trillion dollar company that will advertise on just about every channel on TV all day, and you still don’t know what the hell it is that they are trying to sell.  A bit of Google searching showed me however that almost all of their money came from secret research done strictly for the military.  Their presence is all over this damn town, country, and school.  Craig likes to preach that they do such wonderful things for the country, but he just LOVES to dodge the issue when I bring up the fact that plant of theirs not far from where I live exploded due to a classified accident, and killed like 300 people, many of which were just people living in the vicinity of this place and had no idea what it was even being used for.  Seeing military vehicles about town in traffic has become normal now that the Geneva Corporation has seemingly “taken over”, and this stupid f**k Craig seems to think that there’s nothing at all fishy about this entire thing.  “Whatever…”, I used to just think to myself.  He only supports whatever the hell it is they do because his father pulls in a big fat f*****g paycheck from it and he doesn’t need to work a day in his damn life at this point.

                As I approached the door, the ultimate tool of the universe bumped into me intentionally as I was just about to leave.

                “Look, in three months, you guys get to be a******s to me again, just give it a vactio-“, I couldn’t even finish that sentence before his soft, weak, sissy voice assaulted my eardrums from a vicinity so close I thought a sexual assault was about to happen to me.

 

                “Oh, I’m sorry; I don’t listen to poor kids, Chris.”  His arrogant smirk made me want to punch him straight in the face, and then it dawned on me that doing that would probably be the best possible way to enter the summer.  He was also wrong about my life, I’m not poor, but he and Tim love to play on the fact I don’t live with my parents.  It’s not really that big of thing to me, I just wonder if they think that somehow or another that this is supposed to get to me somehow.  It was a bit ironic that most of everyone in the school already knew how big of an a*****e this guy is to most of everyone, especially women.  That was another thing I didn’t understand.  Like Tim and his nihilism, Craig has had some weird major control issue with women.  He treated every girlfriend he ever had like some kind of possession, like an object and when he had run his course with them, he just threw them by the way side and found someone else.  By the time he’d done this to about 3 different girls here, people caught on, and he ended up having to turn to freshmen and new kids to the school to flaunt his fake snaggletoothed smile and handout money at as they were unaware of his childishly stupid games.

                “Well, I’m sorry, I just don’t reply to womanizing a******s”, I simply stated before exiting into the hallway. 

                “You know I can sue you for slander!” he whined. 

“Right, using his father’s money to do something that any judge in the world would be bored to s**t with hearing about, and would just throw out because of its level of insanity”, I thought to myself.  By that point I was already halfway down the hallway, just wanting to get my stuff out of my locker, and f*****g leave.  I was already feeling rather dejected, and was hoping to god they weren’t following me.  I was in no mood to deal with any more of their crap and was about to seriously just do my best to knock them both out and get on with my life.  The halls of the school were covered in the typical school spirit nonsense, preparation for graduation nonsense, and ad’s about a new college being built in town that was solely funded by Geneva. 

 

               Earlier that day we had to listen to a 30 minute bloviating speech about it from Craig at an assembly that none of us had any choice but to attend.  If it weren’t for the lines of lockers that adorned the walls and the sense that this was a school, one could easily wander the halls in here under the impression that they were in a mental asylum.  The stark light above bathing the endless white wall corridors and linoleum floors in its sickly hospital like florescence, the labrynthian maze of hallways, and the limited sense of time due to a lack of windows in this particular sector of the school.  Behind me, I could hear the taping of footsteps against the hard floor, they echoed almost like drops of water in a pond.  I’d reached my locker by the time I heard them and clenched up first, preparing for the worst case scenario when I realized that they were far too light and delicate to be those of a 170 pound future 7-11 robber, and a narcissistic self loving woman abuser.

 

               Feeling my heart rate start to slow back to normal, and feeling much less apprehensive, I turned around and saw the face of someone I was much happier to be in the presence of.