You're Mine

Chapter 3

The public school cafeteria of the United States is a place that tends to bring physical reactions to those who have been through them. Oddly scented, not always terribly clean, and full of one’s peers, hostile and otherwise, it’s a place that sends adults into fits of nostalgia while the hapless students look on with a mixture of comfortable familiarity and self-esteem shriveling anxiety.

On no other day were those anxious feelings more prominent than the first day of school. Well, except maybe that last first day. The last time one experiences that first day can be bittersweet, but for some, for those who would laugh derisively at the notion that high school contains the best years of your life, that final first day marks a great relief. With adulthood and independence on the horizon, and the desperate hope that one will no longer have to suffer the forced society of public school, that last first day is actually pretty f*****g incredible. Freedom was less than a year away, and the world opened up with endless possibilities for those new graduates. At that age, with inexperience allowing optimism to rule, people tend to think that time is limitless and all things are possible. Experience teaches which of those things is true and which is absolute soul-sucking bullshit.

On this last first day, the cafeteria was noisy with excitement as students milled in and sorted themselves into their appropriate social groups. Colorful clothing adhering to style standards detailed in popular magazines washed through the large room. There were the style anomalies, of course. In Stearnsville, a town that boasted an almost twenty percent poverty rate, there were more than a few tattered shirts and hole-riddled pants that weren’t made so on purpose. Even with those stylistic aberrations, one’s eye was inevitably drawn to one particular table in the room. The weirdo table.

Calling the high school seniors seated at the table “weirdos” was a broad enough description (and insult) for the small, mostly white town to handle. Heavy, black eye-makeup, piercings, and tattoos adorned the four as did surprising flashes of color in either clothes or hair dyes that contrasted with their mostly black wardrobes. Where most of the other students were exuberant and energized, the four at the weirdo table were more subdued, talking among themselves privately. They weren’t goths, really, a style that still had a sizable fan base at the time, but they were certainly alternative.

“Everybody must think we"re over here plotting something,” Ioni thought as she looked at her three companions. “Nothing could be further from the truth.” She smiled as she listened to the conversation going on.

“Oh, come on!” Nathan Newell said. “This group is every bit as attention-getting as any other group of obnoxious teens! I have every reason to believe that I can land a Marlon Brando look-alike in this crowd. I stand out!”

“Nath,” Arlie Swiger said, smiling. “I’ll never understand this weird infatuation with Marlon Brando. Did you ever see him in his later years?”

“Girl, my god!” Nathan squeaked. “Don"t try to crap up my mental image like that! I"m talking a young Brando here! Young!”

“Look how you’re dressed,” Adam Burnside interjected. “Aren"t you supposed to lust after dark brooding types who understand darkness the way you do?”

This was an inside joke among the group. They weren"t dark, nor were they brooding. They liked art, music, and movies and while Nine Inch Nails and Orgy were CDs frequently listened to by the group, most of them would shame-facedly admit to liking Britney Spears and The Backstreet Boys as well. They weren’t much different from their peers, but their aesthetic set them on the outskirts as the strange ones. It bothered them from time to time because the teen years are full of doubt and the need for acceptance, but it also thrilled them because they felt a little bit of pride in daring to be different. That something as trivial as their clothes could upset people emboldened them to take it further, to push ridiculous boundaries.

“Listen here, Mister Adam,” Nathan said tartly. “Just because I choose the lifestyle of the dark and malevolent, doesn"t mean that I don"t enjoy a good ol" American boy every now and then. I know you and Arlie make the perfect picture of goth love, but I really couldn"t bear not being the pretty one in my relationship. What can I say, I just want a manly man to sweep me off my feet.”

“Whoa, whoa,” Adam said, waving his hands. “Are you trying to say my lady ain"t pretty?”

“Arlie is breathtaking,” Nathan said, smiling. “Only half of her head has hair, and the hair that she does have is purple. She"s the only person I"ve ever met who can actually wear a size zero pant and she has fantastic taste in body ink. I think what I was saying was that it"s you who aren"t the pretty one.” Nathan gestured to Adam. “I mean, come on. Platinum hair, pale skin, shaved eyebrows and like six holes in each ear? Striking? Sure? But Jared Leto you ain’t, my friend.”

“Piercings, pale skin, eyebrows plucked to near oblivion, and I"m pretty sure your hair was dyed platinum just a couple of weeks ago,” Ioni said, smiling.

“I learned from my wannabe ways,” Nathan said, gesturing to his pink mohawk with his black painted fingernails and smiling with his black-lined lips. “It"s also precisely why I need a manly man in order to be the pretty one.”

The group snickered. Nathan was the clown of the group. Ioni became friends with him in the sixth grade. He was the first openly gay peer she’d met up to that point. Their town typically saw the gay kids move far away before coming out of the closet, but Nathan was comfortable with who he was and equally comfortable with letting people who thought him laughable or worse know that they could go straight to hell. Since Ioni had a rather rough time with puberty and identity, it helped her to know someone who was comfortable in their own skin when she felt anything but. As a teenaged girl who carried more weight than others her age and who developed breasts about two years before anyone else, feeling normal was nearly impossible for Ioni Davis.

Arlie and her boyfriend Adam came to the group by way of high school art class. They were a strange couple. Adam"s family was famously wealthy for the area and Arlie lived with a single mother in HUD housing. Arlie joked that the only reason they had come together was “when you"re the only two goth kids in school, nobody else wants you,” because they’d gone to a different middle school than Ioni and Nathan and actually were the only two kids with that aesthetic there. But Ioni knew better. There were real feelings seated in the foundation of their relationship and while it was possible that weird attracted weird, it was deeper than a similar taste in black eyeliner.

Ioni, herself, came from a well-to-do family. With a CPA for a father and a caterer for a mother, money wasn"t tight for her family like it was for so many other families in their town. She was the middle of three sisters. Her older sister, Rose, still lived at home with her baby and her younger sister, Amanda, was a shining beacon of perfection and athleticism next to her large, awkward sisters.

Ioni was very awkward, she had to admit. She had made it to her final year of high school without ever having a boyfriend, the epitome of the teenaged experience as she saw it. At five feet eleven inches tall, she towered over most other girls, and her curvy figure seemed grotesque to her when compared to the more fashionable bony figures she saw all around her. Her friends did their best to combat her self-loathing, always assuring her of her beauty and winning personality, but she couldn’t internalize their words. All she saw when she looked in the mirror was a towering bulk who wore loud clothes to cover up the endless faults reflected back at her.

Nathan let out a long high-pitched whistle. The group looked in the direction of his pointing finger.

“What the...?” Adam said.

“Oh no,” Arlie said, laughing.

“Another goth?” Ioni asked, smiling.

“Another goth,” Nathan confirmed.

The tall, pale, heavyset, and bald kid was wearing a long black trench coat over black pants, something only the edgiest of personalities dared to do after Columbine. His eyes were lined heavily with black liner and his ears were laden with silver earrings of all shapes and sizes. He was standing alone, staring at their little group. Ioni felt a rush of heat run up her neck when his eyes grazed over her, returned, and settled on her face. His stare was even and intense.

“Let"s be hospitable and welcome the new school freak,” Nathan said, waving to the new stranger.

Ioni drummed her fingers on the table nervously as he approached them. For such a large guy, he moved lightly. His gaze stayed on the group as he approached them, and Ioni noticed that he refused to push his body up against the wall to avoid the other students passing by him, and he never lowered his eyes to stare at the floor as she often did.

“Greetings!” Nathan said, standing and shaking the stranger"s hand. “We were shocked to see another goth in this place, man. Hi! My name’s Nathan!”

A warm smile spread across the stranger"s full lips and he put a large hand on Nathan"s slender shoulder.

“My name is Raber Belliveau.” He looked around the cafeteria, at the other tables and then again at the group. There was a note of desperate hope in his voice when he spoke again. “Please tell me you’re all seniors,” he said.

“Thankfully, yes,” Nathan said. “All four of us are Class of 2002, on a glorious countdown until our tenure in the public school system is at an end.”

“I"m glad we agree on that sentiment,” Raber said, eying Ioni. He turned fully to her and held out his hand. “I saw you from across the room. I"m sorry if I look like a creep, but I just couldn"t stop staring at you. Hi, I"m Raber, and you are?”

It felt like gallons of hot blood rushed into Ioni"s face all at once as she blushed heavily. Nobody, nobody had ever talked to her like that before. Raber looked down at her with amusement in his eyes, waiting for her to gather herself enough to respond. She looked at the trusted faces of her friends and nearly bust out laughing when she saw them all wearing a uniform look of gape-mouthed shock. She looked back at Raber, into his lovely, green eyes. They were wreathed with luxurious, long eyelashes. She blushed when she realized that she had been quiet for too long. She swallowed hard and took his large, cool hand.

“I"m Ioni,” she said, relieved that her voice sounded calm and even. “I, uh, I don"t think you"re being a creep. I didn"t really notice you staring at us.”

“You,” Raber corrected. “I was staring at you. At first I did notice the group. I can"t tell you how relieved I was to see a group of similarly-fashioned folks at this podunk school, but once I got a good look at you and your amazing face and that gorgeous hair of yours, I think I almost crossed the creepy line.” He leaned ever so slightly closer to her and seemed to almost breathe her in.

Ioni choked on her own saliva and started coughing.

Nathan, Arlie, and Adam burst out laughing at that. Ioni felt a cloud of tension dissipate from the group and she smiled down at her lap. Raber straightened to his full height and joined in on the giggles, still looking down at her.

“You never talk to me that way, you jerk!” Arlie said, playfully swatting Adam on the arm.

“I"ve seen you at your worst, woman!” Adam said, smiling. “Let"s see him talk to her like that after he"s seen her with a raging case of the puking flu!”

“And you two are?” Raber asked, still smiling.

“I"m Arlie and this is my long-time love monkey, Adam.”

“These two have been a couple since before puberty,” Nathan interjected. “The whole school has a sort of long-running bet about how long they"ll be together. They just keep beating the odds.”

“I like that,” Raber said. “This is my fourth school since I started kindergarten and this is the first time that I"ve met a long-term couple that lasted more than a year or two. Maybe you guys are the real deal.”

“Don"t get them talking about it,” Nathan said, putting his hands over his ears. “They don"t believe in soul mates or true love but then again, these assholes have the luxury to say that while the rest of us losers keep looking for the next short-term heartburn.”

“But enough about us,” Adam said, throwing a wad of paper at Nathan with a smile.

“Yes, enough about you,” Nathan said, dodging the paper. “Raber, I"m sitting here and I"m thinking that maybe you should answer us some questions about your intentions toward our beloved Ioni here. She"s gorgeous, for sure, but are you some creepy predator hoping for a swim in her cleavage or are you really just some poor schmo that got gobsmacked by her? I"m not bringing the claws out, yet, but I"ve been this girl"s bestie for a while and I"m not gonna be okay with someone who just wants to use her as a grope-fest. I know I"m scrappy and your size, frankly, scares the sparkles right out of my eyeliner, but I will not allow you to make an easy meal out of my girl here.”

Raber looked Ioni in the eyes and spoke to Nathan, never pulling his penetrating gaze from her.

“I"m not a predator,” he said. “Gobsmacked is a good way to describe my reaction to seeing this beautiful creature. Honestly, I hadn"t noticed her splendid womanliness until you pointed it out.” Ioni frowned and crossed her arms over her chest. She was uncomfortable being talked about like she wasn’t there. Raber went on.

“I was brought in by her beautiful, shiny, black hair and her magnificent lips.” Raber laughed and ran a hand over his shining head. “I"m making her uncomfortable. I"ll stop. I have no real plans for Ioni as of now, except to just let her know that when I first saw her, I was so taken with her that my lungs could not draw air. I hope to be friends with all of you and that includes Ioni. That"s all.”

“Well, damn,” Arlie said, fanning herself, laughing.

“No s**t, my friend,” Nathan said. “Why can"t I find a silver-tongued guy like that?”

“Okay, that"s enough of me making an ass out of myself,” Raber said. “How about we all compare schedules so I can hope to run into some of you during the day?”

Schedule cards were produced and there were pleased mumbles when Adam noticed that Raber was in a lot of the advanced and college-level classes with him. Then Nathan burst out laughing, pointing at the cards.

“Oh man, we all went the predictable route with art class? Could we be any more cliché?” Nathan said.

“It"s not cliché! It"s the easy class!” Ioni laughed. Art was great because Ms. Mimm, the art teacher, was an old hippie who let the students mess around as long as they took time to admire her work from time to time. They weren’t really expected to produce much themselves. They told Raber as much.

“Why are high school art teacher always hippies?” Raber asked, laughing. “I mean, it"s that way everywhere I go! Does Ms. Mimm have a little studio somewhere in town? Like a cheap little mission-style house that is just covered with her weird paintings and clay sculptures?”

“Jesus, dude. You describe it perfectly,” Adam said.

“Well I have no reason to feel displaced here, then,” Raber said.

“Look, Raber,” Adam began. “We"ve got a few classes together and obviously we shop at the same stores so how about we exchange our personal information and just go ahead and call this initiation done?”

“That"s a good idea,” Nathan said. “Newest member of the weirdo club, welcome!”

Pieces of notebook paper were produced while phone numbers, and ICQ and AIM handles were written down. When Ioni passed her paper to Raber, he looked it over carefully and tucked it into his coat. He put the papers from everybody else into his 5-Star binder. It was a deliberate act that she was meant to see, but her friends’ smirking faces showed that they’d seen it too.

The bell rang and the group disbanded, everyone heading to their respective homerooms. Ioni smiled to herself when she noticed a slight bounce to her step. That year, things were going to be much different for her. She just knew it.