Pen 15 Club

The opening to a book I'm toying with! Constructive criticism to spice up the first paragraph please!

Despite my stereotypical insecurity about my weight I actually was one good lookin’ b***h. At least that was my own truth… it didn’t seem to register with many other people I knew. Still, I was one of the only people in my group that didn’t mind changing after gym. I would always go in first if I could, only because I wanted to get out quick so I could shoot the s**t with my two Asian friends after class, I call them my two Asian friends not because they were only two Asian friends but because they were my only two friends and they both happened to be Asian.

I would strip out of the clothes I probably didn’t actually sweat in pretending to be something awesome and sexy like a supermodel or a porn star until I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. Ah… and to your left you see the girl with the winter coat she can never take off.

I looked around the room at everyone else there and did a mental head count. For some reason, ever since middle school, I took it upon myself to do a check-in and check-out list of every one in school. I really don’t have much of an idea why, I just always thought it was a s****y thing when someone went missing and no one noticed.

When you are the only one to take a personal headcount every day there are certain facts that are privy to you.

For example, every day after lunch last year, her lunch period my fourth period, there was a girl that I counted standing in front of her locker switching out her Algebra book for an Intro to Psych (except for three days last year that I presume she had the flu, and the day we skipped last month which is still unknown). She was small and skinny, with mousy hair and eyes to big for her face. She wore a lot of clothes like she was always freezing, and had several different knit hats that she impressively seemed to make herself (knitting is definitely on the long list of things I blow dick at doing). I called her locker-book girl two, as opposed to locker girl and locker-book girl. 

I saw her surreptitiously take something out of her pocket one day. I noticed that she took a little too much care with it. She tilted her locker door so it was open at an awkward angle so really only she could see inside.  It looked as if she was trying to fix something, or cram whatever it was into a pocket with a broken zipper. This repeated for a week and two days, until I finally could not take the suspense any longer.

Instead of passively standing by, what we considered, the good bathroom and joking around I decided to visit the cafeteria myself and grab a soda from the vending machine. I timed it perfectly so that I could pretend to round the corner and not know she was there.  My friends would probably be confused and thrown off our daily pattern but I really had to know what she was doing in her damn locker.

I began walking, purposefully looking down at my phone in feigned unawareness. I pretended I was reading something interesting, big news from my rich great-aunt, or a spoiled party that was meant to surprise me.  It wasn’t hard to look distracted because I accidentally (yeah… accidentally) logged into my Tumblr app, and found myself ferociously re-blogging pictures of cats, beautifully made birthday cakes and clips from Disney movies which I loved (I mean who doesn’t).

I bumped her with my overlarge hip, only so that if she said something in protest (which based on my long term assessment of locker-book girl, I doubt she would do) I would have plausible deniability. Sorry, I was just fat.

            I may have hit her with a force greater than I anticipated (man my hips really were huge), so much so that her tiny body spun around and flung a handful of corn nuts all over me.

            “Sorry! I must’ve…” I was cut short by the sheer f*****g confusion of what I saw in her locker. It appeared to be a small to scale apartment complex, complete with a hand painted hamster wheel right in the middle of the teeny living room. I mean, this girl must have had some serious engineering skills (okay YouTube instruction follower level engineering skills) in order to install this thing on the fly. Inside was a gargantuan jet-black hamster with a white eye-patch, gorgeous and haughty as ever.

            “Is that your hamster?”

            “It’s not your hamster.” She giggled at me as her tiny stick like body (she really did not stand a chance against my hips of steel) began to conjure a devilish aura. She placed a strawlike finger on her lips as if to instruct me to keep the hamster that was not mine a secret.

            There are certain facts that are privy to you when you pay attention. It was a fact that there was not only one hamster living inside a locker, but in fact four equally dispersed throughout the entire school. It was a fact that their parents were all in a secret society called (yes and they really called it this) the Pen 15 club. Perhaps it was so titled to deflect suspicion, but it was impossible to fool me because it is also a fact that I see just about everything.