The Fox and The Hare

The beginning of this tale starts with calculus in eleventh grade.

The funny thing and Michael and I was that we had had homeroom together since seventh grade, and even before that we had had kindergarten, second, fourth and fifth grades together in elementary school. Yet, it seemed that the clichéd trouble boy had never really noticed my clichéd bookish self until Calculus, in eleventh grade, forced to sit with one another in Ms. Browning’s class. Now, Ms. Browning was an strange lady. She was convinced that students learned better when they were put in groups of three or four, forcing them to “work” together,. When, really, if she would actually look at the groups, she would figure out that all that happened was the group split up the problems equally between one another and then just copied down all the answers and sloppily scribbled down some form of work when everyone was done.

But anyway, Ms. Browning had placed Michael, a boy named Sue (no, I’m kidding, his name was Timothy, Timothy West) and myself at a group of desks of four, why she hadn‘t put another person there (a girl I knew and talked to would have been lovely) I didn‘t know, but she hadn‘t. The thought of being placed with two people I didn’t know, and boys at that because I had never been one to talk to someone, never mind a boy - I was far too shy, from a young child to today. If only I would’ve known that everything would’ve been okay to say even the softest hello on the first day, that they wouldn’t have bitten my head off or damned me into hell (Michael‘s language, not mine, I swear). I hadn’t known that though; I was, and still fairly am, a very shy person. I talked when I had to and everything other time I had my nose shoved in one book or another.

I knew of Michael Monroe, and like I said, I had had multiple homerooms and grades with him throughout the years, and yet, I didn’t really know him. I knew what people said of him: a smoker, a bad boy, dangerous, too cool to go to class most of the days (and to be honest he hadn’t shown up the for the first week of school, either, and I had been nice enough to take notes down twice so he would be caught up whenever he decided to come back). It was said he had been to a boot camp, was an army brat, and that he both took and sold drugs. Most of that wasn’t true, I knew that now, but then, then I hadn’t the slightest clue what was true and what was false; I was slightly scared to actually know him. It was bad of me to judge a person I didn’t know, but judging just comes so easily to the human race that it’s just so hard not to. I’m sorry now, that I had judged him so early, when I didn’t know him from any other person walking down the street.

It took to the second week of school to finally come in contact with Michael, and just the way he looked and the overwhelming scent of cigarettes, or something richer, like cigars or something, well, it scared me a bit, I won‘t lie. He hadn’t shaved that morning and that was something I had immediately thought of as unattractive (now, not so much) and the flannel he had on was worn like the safety blanket of a seven year old. His jeans looked like they were hardly jeans, but some sort of jean-like substance painted over his skinny legs. Disheveled hair made it look like he had just woken up, not even bothering to run a comb through it, but he probably had it like that on purpose. In a short, he looked like someone I wouldn’t want to walk by and maybe it was just the overly cautious, antisocial, shy me that would rather not walk by and talk to anyone at all.

Michael looked at me, and I had hid my face away, shoving it deep inside Looking for Alaska, a book I’ve read multiple times before and every time, it never gets old and I always manage to cry, and cry, and cry. Michael always said the way I got into books the way I did always amused him, as if someone caring so much about fictional characters was somehow funny. I never thought so, but this was Michael, not myself and anyone can tell that we are two completely different people. They say opposites attract, and that’s exactly what we were - opposites, and we did come together like magnets; the pull was inevitable. We couldn’t stop it, but it wasn’t like we wanted to, others, well, they would want us apart; like Romeo and Juliet, without the whole dying part (though, death was just as inevitable as the pull between Michael and I was).

And then class started, and Ms. Browning started rambling off some words and equations that barely registered in most of the classes tiny brains (that was mean, but it’s true) when Michael turned to me again and asked, very loudly, if I may add, “What the hell is this woman going on about?” And while everyone stared over at us, eyes wide and mouths slightly agape, my cheeks flushed the bright red cheeks do when one is embarrassed and I stuttered out an explanation of how to do what she was saying to do while shaking, giving him the notes I had neatly copied down for him. He just nodded his head. He then proceeded to turned back to his notebook where, just a simple glance at it, it looked like he was either sloppily writing down what I had just said, or drawing. I hadn’t been able to tell which one it was, because with shooting a slight glare towards me, he hastily closed the notebook. I wouldn’t know which one it was until later on, much later on actually.

Forty-five minutes later the bell rang and I didn’t see Michael for the rest of the day. I didn’t see him at lunch, which made me thing that the rumors of him sneaking outside to have a smoke was true, and I didn’t see him coming out of the building as school ended, making me think that he might have just skipped classes from after Calculus on. It made sense, really, it did. At the time I didn’t know why I was thinking so much of the guy, which was all he was, some random guy that I’d rather not pass walking down the sidewalk and nothing more than that. People come to us in the strangest of ways: some we see in dreams and meet the next day, others you just pass by on the street and you don’t know a thing about them but they become the person you’re going to marry some day, and others, well, others just show up for a class period after skipped the whole first week of school. People really do come to us in very odd ways. In all of the ways Michael and I could have first met, when he first noticed me, I should say, it had to be Calculus.