After Anderson

Section 8-1

II

deserve

My buzzing alarm clock woke me up in a cold sweat. I slammed it with my fist and it stopped. I suddenly felt uneasy at the thought of going back to school. It hadn’t bothered me like that the first day, but then again I hadn’t known what would have been waiting for me in there. My day obviously hadn’t gone as planned.

After I got up I ran to the bathroom and opened the bathtub tap, stuck my head under the cold running way and drank it like a dog. I then sat on the side of the big white tub and let out a big exasperated sign as I looked around the room seeking a distraction. The tiles covering the walls were adorned with little fishies and mermaids and other aquatic-themed decor because it was the only real way that Anderson would actually take a bath. He could pretend to be one of them instead of just sitting in lukewarm water with your parents’ soapy hands all over you.

I washed my face in the sink and went back to my room to put on some half-decent clothes to return to school. I picked out a white Lacuna Coil band shirt and the first pair of pants I found in my dresser. They turned out to be designer jeans so I happily put them on and accessorized myself with a golden heart pendant and safely tucked away my stainless steel ring on a chain under my shirt.

I brushed my long, very straight hair that I wanted to tint with a hint of red over the weekend and debated for a moment whether or not I should pull it up into a ponytail but I ended up deciding against it. I put on a hint of dark green eyeliner to compliment my golden hazel eyes so I could look as presentable as possible following my previous little puking episode that undoubtedly every student came to find out about in the last twenty-four hours.

My mom drove Anderson to school and then dropped me off in the parking lot of that big white and grey building safely tucked away in a residential neighbourhood. I stepped out of the little burgundy Ford Fusion and stood on the sidewalk for a few moments, just looking at that nasty building. It looked a lot scarier in person than it did on the news. It had two floors unlike most of the other high schools in the area, a big flat roof, cement bricks painted white and big windows all around.

The building seemed to loom over me in some twisted and menacing way that left me with chills running down my spine. I couldn’t help but think that it had done the same thing to Anderson, and that it was part of the reason why he’d decided to not let it victimize him anymore. I took a deep breath and barged in through the door much like my mother had barged into my room just a day earlier. I walked down the same hallways I always had and made my way up to the second floor of the place and sat by the window not far from my locker.

“Aly!” Jennifer’s gentle mousy voice shouted from the end of the hall.

I turned over to look at her and she and the Petrov twins waved at me and signalled me to join them. I got up and joined the three of them in an adjoining hallway. At the same time I had the chance to take a good look at the twins. Vera had long hair dyed a bright carrot orange that extended down to the middle of her back and Svetlana seemed to have a good bundle of it underneath her hijab as well. The two of them had jade green eyes, perfect oval faces and complimenting small noses centred in the middle. The two of them had dark eyebrows and Vera had a lip piercing on the bottom right side that she always bit.

Svetlana appeared to have the same taste in designer clothes that I did but Vera’s clothes were still dingy old rags. They appeared less like rags in the sunlight than they did in the darkness but they were still a stark contrast to her sister’s attire. The upper class would definitely have called them something worst than rags but I didn’t because I had respect for others, especially after everything that had happened in the halls of the school just two short years prior.

“Hey Tammy!” Vera’s voice was apathetic yet soft at the same time.

I turned around in a jolt, just praying that the person I would see wasn’t the person I feared seeing. Yep, it was her. Tammy Davidson. I felt my body stiffen at the sight of her standing right in front of me. Her literally square head was covered with greasy bleach-coloured hair and two big round eyes the colour of diarrhea peered at me right in the middle of that ugly disgusting face covered with a mixture of pimples and creases.

She looked like a middle-aged woman going through puberty. She was the ugliest person I’d ever seen in my life. She wasn’t ugly because she had pimples, because I had pimples too, but because her soul was ugly. Most people found her disgusting because she had started sleeping with boys in the fifth grade but I thought that she was disgusting for much more than promiscuity.

“Hi Aly,” she greeted me in that annoying, high-pitched and self-righteous voice a lot like Pasquale’s, “I haven’t seen you in a while. I thought you had dropped out.”

“You goddamn ugly w***e! He should’ve shot you!” I snapped back apprehensively.

She hadn’t been expecting that. Nobody had.

“He should’ve shot and killed you! He should’ve served you with what you deserve!”

Her eyes grew big like they were going to explode out of her head before she flipped me the finger and turned around and walked quickly back down the hallways to where she’d come from. Jen and the twins looked at each other in complete astonishment, not having expected that either. I wasn’t sure I had expected it of myself. It had just really come out of nowhere.

No, it had come from somewhere . She should have been shot! People who only wasted oxygen did not deserve life. I tried to take a deep breath but anxiety restricted my airways so I let out another sigh of exasperation to try to alleviate the stress. I was beginning to sound just like Anderson. I felt like I was suffocating so I turned around to have my back to where she had gone.

Jennifer looked at me with a mixture of both shock and compassion on her face. She knew that I had always been a gentle and soft-spoken person myself, but the twins were completely bewildered. Vera and Svetlana looked at each other, both impressed and taken aback by my bold outburst.

“You knew him didn’t you?” Sveta asked me in a gentle tone of voice, seemingly not wanting to provoke me further.

“Yeah, I did,” I replied as I tried as best as I could to dismiss the question.

“Well, just know that I have a lot of compassion for that kid,” Vera added softly as she put her skeletal hand on my shoulder.

“Let’s not talk about this okay?” Jennifer interjected before anybody got the chance to say anything else.

Jen had known him too, and had also been there during the whole thing. We had all known each other since forever, or at least that’s what it felt like to me. My forever had been wiped away from me right in front of my eyes and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.

“Come on, let’s go to class,” Jennifer proposed, “I’ll catch you up on that stupid junk you missed yesterday.”

As it turned out, Jennifer, the twins and I would share all of our classes the entire first semester. That thought comforted me because I felt so alone and out of place in a big building filled with nothing but hate and selfishness. Thankfully, I didn’t have any classes with Tammy but I knew that we were bound to run into each other at some point because we had classes in the same hallway in the morning.

In our first class together, I sat in the back row with Jennifer sitting on one side of me and Sveta on the other. Her sister Vera sat on the other side of her, similar to what we had done in the auditorium. Once we’d taken our seats Jen then caught me up on all the crap that Mr. Pasquale had rambled about the previous day.

He had basically just flapped his gums about the free counselling services available on campus as well as brag about the school spirit and all of that stuff about coming out strong after the whole ordeal. I knew that already. In other classes no lessons had been taught or assignments handed out. It was just the usual introductory stuff all schools did on the first day.

The second day of class was much of the same story. I figured they took it extra easy the first week back at school because so many of the students were still so fragile and traumatized. I fell into both of those categories. Jennifer also seemed to be pretty shaken up by the whole thing. How could one not be? Unlike me, she hadn’t been out of school for almost two years and she had to deal with being victimized and harassed on a daily basis because of her weight and her social status.

Even after brutal vengeance and retaliation, bullying and harassment was still rampant throughout the halls of the school. The building consisted mostly of multiple short halls put together like a maze and it was impossible for the administration to monitor them completely, but it wasn’t like they ever made much of an effort to monitor them in the first place.

At lunch I sat with Jen and the twins in the empty halls of the second floor. The school let us bring food outside of the cafeteria except in the library, the auditorium and the computer room. Apart from that, you were free to eat wherever you wanted as long as you cleaned up after yourself. You weren’t free to eat whatever you wanted though. The school had this stupid policy that you couldn’t bring in food from the outside .

Unless you brought your own lunch, and there were restrictions as to what students could eat, you had to eat what was served in the cafeteria or not eat at all. You couldn’t go out and buy food during lunch or the morning break and then bring it back. You had to eat it outside of school if you decided to go down that gastronomical route.

“Do they still enforce that stupid rule of no outside food?” I asked the girl.

“Yep,” Sveta replied apathetically, “they do.”

I grinned to myself at the memories of the better days I’d spent in that school. I was one of the biggest food smugglers in the school, a real kingpin in the business. After all, who would really suspect a good all-American middle class teenage girl who never got in trouble? Not the administration, which made me the perfect candidate for the job. I’d always hated stereotypes, but for once they had served me well.

The school was so afraid of people smuggling in drugs and trafficking them in the middle of a truly horrific boom in the narcotics business and the opioid crisis so they didn’t let us bring in food from outside the school during our lunch hour. The polices were overly strict, extreme even, going as far as monitoring the exits during those short fifty minutes. It wasn’t even a real lunch hour!

During the morning break I went around collecting the money of students who wanted the sweet treat of outside food and marking down their orders. They paid the price of the actual food, plus the taxes, plus the “trafficking” fee since the food trade was as notorious as the d**g trade. My car needed gas to get that food, and I took a great risk doing that so I wanted my reward for making their tastebuds happy.

I had an online course during the second period which allowed me extra privileges that included ample opportunities for food trafficking. I still had to be in school but I didn’t technically to be in class since all the course material was online and it could be accessed from anywhere. I always did as much work as I could in a single burst and then quietly disappear from the various unmonitored rooms I was allowed to quietly do my work in so I could then go to town and collect all the requested food items.

I came back to school just before the lunch hour began and safely hid the food until my customers came to pick up their orders. Back in the day I drove my mom’s car to school and ended up doing the larger part of my online class back home after school once my food smuggling business grew larger and consumed more time. The excuse that it was research for other homework always worked on my parents.