Leaving

I fucking hated school.

I’m being honest to God when I say that I see no point in it. Okay, so knowing the correct spelling and definition of words like irrelevance, oppressive, gesticulate or multitudinous could come in handy one day.

If you were in a fucking spelling bee.

Sure, it’d be helpful on occasion to know that the formula for Ohm’s Law is ‘voltage equals current times resistance.’

If you were building a fucking computer from scratch.

And it’ll totally cost you your entire life if you don’t know forty percent of some chicks income when it’s five eighth’s that of another.

What am I, a fucking human calculator? My math teacher apparently thinks so. The thing that I hated most, however, besides the ugly, uneven caterpillar he bounces over his eyes, was the way he’d scold me daily, “If you’re not going to try, Jayvyn Harper, then stay in bed.”

I would, you dumbass, but if I missed any more days of school my parents will be thrown in court and I’d spend a lifetime in a juvenile detention center.

My mom, fragile and sulky, cared about school. She kept pushing me and checking up on how my grades were doing, despite the fact that she always lets me stay home on days I’m ‘not feeling well.’ My dad, indignant and complacent, cared about school. He was the one paying for my time at Eminence Prep Academy, with it being a private school and all, despite the fact that he lived a hundred miles across town and abandoned me when I was twelve. Even my teachers, aggressive and clannish as they were, are constantly throwing lectures at me saying that I should care about school, despite the fact that they despise my very presence. All that mattered, however, was whether or not I cared about school.

And God knows I don’t.

I was pretty damn satisfied with the conclusion that school didn’t give a fuck about me, either.

Leaving that hellhole five times a week—It was definitely the highlight of my day. Either I resented it that strongly or my life was just so damn dull that sitting in a smelly bus was the only exciting thing to ever happen to me. I didn’t mind either way; both statements were true.

I stared down at the blank piece of notebook paper sitting on my lap. I should have been done writing a seven-hundred word essay by now for my World History class. We were given a two week time limit, but it’s not like I haven’t done anything so far. Reading over the first line on the page, the words ‘The Mongol Empire Under Kublai Khan’ were sprawled across in my naturally unreadable handwriting. Under it read, in an even worse print, was my subtitle: ‘by: Jayce Harper.’

Only six hundred and ninety-one more words to go.

And hopefully the words in my title can add onto the word count, because otherwise, I’ll cut another hour thinking of nine words to replace the one’s I already have written.

I let an aggravated, dramatic sigh escape my mouth so loudly that I seemed to claim the attention of the entire bus. This includes the tiny brunette over there who couldn’t seem to take her eyes off of me. I’ve been taking this same exact bus every morning and every afternoon since my first day of high school. Today, however, was the first time I’ve ever seen her.

Not that she was hard to look at it or anything, because believe me, I’d pry my eyes away if I could. She had silky, auburn hair running down her shoulders in curls. Her eyes, deep set and vividly green, aligned evenly on her heart-shaped face. And when she finally noticed that I caught her gaze, the skin on her face, which previously looked like it had been rubbed with a million peaches, lit up like a fire truck. She sheepishly lifted a hand up to move a loose strand of hair behind her ears before peeling her eyes away from mine.

Definitely a new girl.

She would have looked even vaguely familiar to me otherwise.

She turned to another girl taking up the seat directly beside her. They resembled each other in a way that was easily noticeable, sharing the same shade of forest eyes, the light skin, and the high-pitched laugh I could hear from my seat a few rows away as they talked. This girl hadn’t caught my interest as much as the first, despite the fact that I’ve never seen her around, either. Her hair—darker and thinner—didn’t cascade down her neck in quite the same way. And her smile—a crooked, gap-toothed smile—wasn’t nearly as alluring as the corresponding one it mirrored.

When the first girl turned around again to smile at me, I nearly melted.

At least I liked to think she smiled at me, no matter how much my mind told me that she was smiling at something her friend had said.

I finally tore my eyes away from the two girls. Just because my ears had to put up with their unending giggle-fest, my eyes didn’t have to encourage the annoyance by giving them a sign that I was interested.

I wasn’t interested.

No matter how attractive smiley over there was.

I leaned my back against the window behind me, pulled my legs up onto the empty bus-seat on my side, and just stared at the window directly across my fatigue figure. The scenery was zooming passed in a blurry mixture of brown, green and gray. And I suddenly felt like I was the bus, dashing through everything on the earth like a bullet. No time to take a break, no chance to stop and smell the flowers—I was constantly on the move, while at the same time, letting the world pass me by in a dull, messy blur.

The bus came to a stop. Albeit, it wasn’t my stop.

The kids began to disperse. A line of them eventually formed in the center aisle as teenagers fought their way out of the bus first, obviously just as happy as I was knowing they’d be going home. Once the line had disappeared, I found my eyes traveling a few rows of seats ahead of me to see that the two girls were still there. And when the first girl stepped into the now-empty aisle, I figured she was getting off.

But before the bus began to move, she was already making her way down towards the back—the area of the bus I was currently residing in.

The first thing I noticed as I watched her stride closer to my seat was that she couldn’t be any taller than five foot one. She sauntered over in a summer, milk-white dress and her clumsy, graceless steps made it look like she was pulling off an awkward dance. Nonetheless, her exuberance shone throughout every inch of the bus like the first trace of sunlight reaching the sky.

I succeeded at playing on a face that was far from astonished when she planted herself into the seat across from me. She was silent, returning my seemingly blank stare with her enthusiastically brilliant eyes glowing. Just as I felt the bus shoot forward and climb back onto the road, I felt a wave of discomfort pulse through me.

I didn’t want to seem like a total pansy by jumping at the opportunity to introduce myself, and yet I didn’t want her to think I was unobtainable by ignoring her very presence. So I just continued to stare.

But dear God, I swear I was drooling.

“Hi,” she started, and her lips—thin, pale and glossy—pressed together in an angelic smile.

Hey baby, cupid called. He wants my heart back.