Falling for the Teacher Is Never a Good Idea

"Charlie!" I said seeing her walking out a little tired, but with a look of excitement.

"Uh Dean?" She said back looking confused and amused by the look on my face.

"We need to talk. We really really really need to talk. But not here. Not now," I said remembering what Mr. Novak had said about talking in public.

"Well that's informative. We need to talk, but not here, why did you even bother saying anything here?" She asked.

"Because I will kill you if you run off on me."

"Where am I going to go? We're in Washington, it's not like I could just hijack a car and joy ride through the capital," she said smiling at me.

We didn't talk much the next few hours as I tried to keep my brain from disbanding into treacherous territory, like the idea of
Mr. Novak flirting or whatever he was doing. Teasing was a better word. Or Taunting.

I just blearily walked with my classmates, there were maybe forty of us and eight teachers, and tried to keep my mind out of the gutter. I almost grabbed someone else's suitcase as it revolved around the conveyor belt but Charlie just snapped my hand away from it and pointed out that my suitcase is not pink with Dora the Explorer on it. A little girl a few feet away looked a little freaked out though.

The hotel that our group was staying at was a little ways away, and while everyone was peering out the window of our bus pointing out monuments they recognized I was just staring at the back of the seat in front of me. The brown fabric was pealing from little kids having picked at it for years but it hypnotized me by catching me in a reverie.

"Earth to Dean? Are you even aware that you're in DC?" Charlie said pushing me. She had taken the window seat, and I didn't even notice that we were across the aisle from Dick and his little minion whose name was still inconsequential to me.

"He's just thinking about guys in the locker room," Dick joked, making his friend laugh with him.

"Hey now, that's enough," Mr. Novak said from a few rows in front of us.

"Whatever," he just said, and pretended to immerse himself in conversation with his friend, meanwhile throwing the occasional gold fish cracker at me. It made me wonder if he was in fact a senior in high school rather than a fourth grader.
That's the thing about teenage guys though, they're either immature idiots who draw phallic objects on everything in sight, or they're a little more complex like me and feel like an outsider.

I've always called it the egg theory. The egg theory is applicable to many different situations but pubescence especially. It goes like this: There's two sides to every situation. The people who are egging things on, and the people throwing the eggs.
If you're a homophobe, than you're throwing the eggs, and if you're gay or an ally than you're egging it on. If you're an emo than you egg the emo movement on, and if you're not then you throw eggs at the emo. It's a basic social concept, and it's true that sometimes there's a middle but there often isn't. Dick is the guy who eggs people, I'm the guy who eggs them on.

I've been there most of my life, the one getting egged. One time when I experimented with eye liner I got scrunched up pieces of paper thrown at me all day and people yelling "emo faggot." It's safe to say that I never tried that again.

Charlie scooted me out of the seat and I became aware that we'd stopped.

"When did we get here?"

"Lost in your head are you? Are you thinking about pie, or sweet man love?"

"Don't say things like that out loud! And thanks, now I'm thinking about pie."

We entered the hotel lobby and it was disappointing to say the least. It wasn't as grand as I'd have thought for such an impressive city. It was definitely a hotel chosen for price rather than for aesthetic purposes because it had a cheesy red carpet that looked older than Larry King and walls covered in decrepit beige wallpaper. There was a dim chandelier above us with half of the fancy crystals that make it a chandelier missing, so it was more or less just fancy shaped brass hanging above us. The desk at the front was wooden and scratched to immensity, and the couches across from it, which had a breakfast bar surrounding them, look cramped. The layout of the entire room needed some serious feng shui advice because it jammed your senses with pure idiosyncrasy.

"Yeesh, this place looks like my grandma's tearoom," Charlie said taking our surroundings in beside me. I nodded, but I didn't really care as long as the rooms were at least livable.

"Where do you think Norman Bates is hiding?" I replied, and she just nodded in agreement. A few of the teachers went up to the man behind the counter and checked our group in which took a little while so I just listened to Charlie talk about something or another, nodding with her when I knew she was looking for acknowledgement. I'm not normally that rude, and I generally do listen to her but I couldn't focus on anything just then.

"Alright everyone, room assignments! Get in two lines, girls and boys, and pair up with the person you want to room with!" Mrs. Mills said.

I groaned. I hadn't even considered who I'd room with but the worst thing imaginable happened as I thought that. Since I was near Mrs. Mills at the front of the group, she saw me first and paired me up with the person who grabbed my hand and shouted "we're going to room together." I didn't really blame her for assuming it was a mutual choice, but I wanted to rip my eyes out at his words to escape the situation.

Who other than Dick Roman would decide to room with me? He was a lot more pissed then I'd taken, and he was just trying to make this trip hell for me. I could see it. The second Mrs. Mills threw the room key at him, he gave me this evil glare.
Either he wanted to viscously murder me or he was just a jackass who wanted to torture me. At that point I was actually more open for the first option because it was going to be hell either way for me.

I went up to Mrs. Mills to try and convince her to let me room with someone else but she was adamant, "Mr. Winchester I already wrote it down on my clipboard, and I don't have an eraser, so suck it up, it's only two weeks."

"Two weeks is a long time for someone who hasn't been on this earth all that long. Comparatively, two weeks is like a month for me!"

"I'm sorry Mr. Winchester I didn't realize you were ten. Deal with it, make nice, maybe you'll make some friends."

"Yeah or maybe I'll wake up in a fish tank, or disemboweled… or both," I mumbled back.

"That's the spirit," she said not really listening to me.

I checked my watch to see that it was almost four already, so we were guided to the elevators and filed in a few at a time.
Mr. Novak got on my elevator with me, and I felt him discreetly slip something into my back pocket while we were shoved into the corner but I didn't even dare to look at it until I was at least off of the elevator.

"So here's how this is going to work faggot," Dick started, looking at me as we entered our room, "you're going to stay the hell away from me and my friends, and you're not going to try to take a peek at me when I'm changing."

"Why would I want to?"

Dick rolled his eyes, and grabbed the pillow from the bed he'd designated as mine. To my disgust he spit on the pillow cover and then tossed it back on the bed. Well wasn't that just dandy.

"Why are you doing this?" I asked him.

"It's fun to piss you off," he said shrugging.

"It's also fun to not room with someone who you want to eviscerate but I wouldn't acknowledge that because I'm a decent human being."

Dick just threw the comment away which was a little annoying. It was a golden pun considering his name was Dick, but I wasn't about to argue, so I just, left the room eagerly and walked off to find Charlie's.

Her room was down the hallway and up a flight of stairs from mine, but I found her sitting awkwardly on her bed, eyeing her roommate unenthusiastically, a frilly girl named Katie and her friends. They were standing in a little group taking as if Charlie weren't there. The door was open so I just went in and sat next to her.

Katie saw me and decided that was her cue to get away from me, and they walked off to one of their rooms leaving me and
Charlie in the empty room. I don't know what Katie thought was going on, but I knew she knew Charlie was gay, so she probably just wanted to be away from her.

"What did you want to talk about Dean?" Charlie asked.

"Uh… it's about Mr. Novak."

"Of course it is. What is that piece of eye candy up to now?"

"He sort of was… I think the term is 'coming onto me.' He said he… oh god I don't even know, I'm just thinking way too much into this aren't I?"

"Wait no. Are you serious he flirted? How? Tell me more! Tell me more! Did you get very far?"

"Ha. Funny," I said looking at her grimly, "he was writing these messages in this notebook. The first one said that my feelings were mutual. And then he, uh, he called me cute."

"Oh my god, really? I was just messing around earlier, but wow, this is getting juicy," she said her eyes portraying her curiosity.

"Ugh, I don't know what's going on though. I told him he shouldn't be saying or doing whatever it was he was saying-"

"You did what? I'm appalled with you! You like him, he likes you, don't stick your nose up at that attention."

"I mean, after I said that he just got really close and he was like 'you like it' and I just… I keep hearing his words in my head like they're on repeat or something."

"It sounds to me like someone wants to get into someone else's pants," she said looking blasé about the whole manner.

"Yeah, that or he's messing with me!" I answered, and then I remembered the note he slipped into my back pocket and almost jumped.

"Shit, I almost forgot!" I jumped up off the bed and pulled it out. I looked at the folded paper in my hand and continued, "He slipped this into my pocket on the elevator."

"No way, what's it say?" She looked ecstatic.

"I don't know, let me read it first, it might be personal!"

She put her hands up defensively as a joke, and watched me as I opened up the paper to evaluate it.

There weren't any words on it. But it wasn't blank. Instead there was a drawing. Of me. It was amazing, practically a photograph. There was something off about it though. The Dean Winchester looking at me from the paper was much better looking than myself.

"Wow," was all I could say.

Charlie just looked at me, gave me her best puppy dog eyes and batted her eye lashes. She wanted to see, so I turned it over to show her and she looked taken aback.

"Woooooooow," she mimicked, a little longer than I had, "Did Mr. Novak draw that?"

I shrugged at her, "Must have, why else would he have given it to me?"

Charlie just scrunched up her face, "I wish I had an attractive stalker."

"Why? It's nerve racking!" I replied. At this we heard Mrs. Mills announce from the corridor outside that we'd be going out for dinner. I shrugged at Charlie and folded the drawing, and stuffed it back in my pocket gingerly so as not to tear it, as it was, truly, a good portrait.

We walked out to dinner, and then back to the hotel and the whole time Charlie kept prying at me to spill what I was thinking but I waved away her questions. Each and every one of her questions stuck in my head though.

"What are you going to do about it?" That was the question that had stayed with me the most, and the one that kept me awake that night.

What was I going to do?