27
Aug

Spirit Week

On Monday morning, Drew gets to school earlier than usual. It makes sense, probably, but it does pose one small but annoying inconvenience: he has to pull his car up outside the entrance to the parking lot and climb out to unhook the chain, then drag it off to the side.

Rebecca is just pulling up as he gets the chain wound up, and she rolls down her window to say, “Oh, thank you, Mr. Wachowski! You’re certainly early this morning.”

“Spirit Week, Principal Hopkins,” he says, smiling at her, “Everybody on deck, I hear.” She laughs, and he ducks to peer at Neil through the window into her back seat. Drew says, “Go Manatees!”

27
Aug

This Story Is Full of Scorpions: Seriously, Dude, Don’t Read It

According to Multiverse Theory, you, in an infinite number of universes, right now, are fucking Rick Santorum. All it takes for there to be a divergence is a decision, no matter how small: the second you make a choice, you go one way, and a universe where you make the other choice goes the other way. Another choice, another split. Every decision you make, from where to go to college to when to scratch your balls, is happening at that very same moment in an infinite number of other universes, and some of you are making one choice, and some of you are making another.

Or maybe the choice got made before you even got there. Maybe your great-great-great grandmother had a pickle for lunch one August Thursday, and that set off the chain of events that led to you, where you are, right now, reading this. Maybe if she’d had an apple instead, you wouldn’t be sitting here at all. Instead, you — or someone enough like you that it might as well be you — would be knees-up in some sturdy Pennsylvania Dutch four-poster bed, taking it like whatever you take it like from a former senator and presidential candidate in a sweater-vest. There’s even an infinite number of universes where he’s removed the sweater-vest.

There is, of course, an infinite number of universes out there where this is not happening. But mathematically speaking, infinity and infinity are the same — that is, you can’t have more of the infinity where a thing is happening than you can of the infinity where that thing isn’t happening. So if you could step through the thin membrane separating these universes into that next universe over’s version of you, odds are fifty-fifty that you’d find yourself on the receiving end of Rick Santorum’s glorious Republican penis.

Think about that next time you’re having trouble sleeping.

27
Aug

Reed Fixation

“Justin Preston!” a voice calls over the din of the symphonic band warming up. I start from my fingering and look around. The voice calls my name again. I can’t see who’s calling my name until Carson Finn of the varsity orchestra mounts the podium and blows our conductor’s whistle. There’s immediate silence.

“Once again,” he says, sounding annoyed, “I need Justin Preston to meet me in the instrument lockers. Now.”

Everyone stares at me as he steps off the podium and heads out the door. I nearly bite my reed as I maneuver my bassoon’s butt strap into my left hand so I can carry my bassoon with one hand and pick my way through the seats. My second chair looks like she’s about to cry as my first chair slaps my ass and makes a comment about making messy cork wax with the Prince of Double Reeds.

27
Aug

Consequences of the New York City Smoke-Free Air Act of 2002

He had a thing about rooftops. For a couple of years in there, he had gotten anxiety just looking at a ladder, but now as a grown adult man with a couple of years of therapy under his belt, he found himself hauling up to hang with the HVAC systems surprisingly often. Admittedly, the main impetus for getting over his hangup was the perpetual rooftop parties thrown by a dude he’d desperately wanted to hook up with a few years ago, but you had to take the motivation where you could get it. Making out with that dude as the sun set over Manhattan had worked like magic, really.

That dude was just history now, and as Dante staggered up through his mid-twenties and into his late-twenties and terrifyingly closer to thirty, his opportunities to go to rooftop parties with sexy hipsters were ever dwindling. He’d climb up to his apartment building’s rooftop from time to time to write, but most of his upper-storey time was spent on top of the school he taught at, lurking behind the ventilation so he could smoke without anyone getting on his case and without being a bad influence to the children.

He could hear the children, out at recess in the small amount of field the school managed to claim in Brooklyn. For the amount of tuition their parents paid, damn right they were going to a least get a swingset. His own class was down there knocking each other into the dirt, but it was happily not his day to supervise the insanity, so rooftop it was. He wouldn’t say he hated his job, but he also wouldn’t say that getting a nicotine infusion into his brain didn’t help get him through the afternoon.

27
Aug

Part of Something Ours

Zack pulled up his hood and slumped over the table, using his arms as pillows. Showing up at school when the sun wasn’t even up, on a Saturday no less, wasn’t what he signed up for when he joined the engineering club. It was a cruel and unusual punishment, as far as he was concerned.

A hand clapped him on the back, jolting him back into consciousness. Zack cracked open an eye and glared up at the culprit. Bryce looked down at him with amusement clear on his stupid face.

27
Aug

See You After School

“See you after school.”

It wasn’t loud enough for anyone else to hear, just a hiss across the aisle between the rows of desks. For a second Kiran stopped, in the middle of getting up, frozen with his backpack halfway hefted up; then he swallowed, and made himself finish and pick up his test sheet to deposit at the front on the teacher’s desk. He made a business of keeping his body between it and Jeff, though, blocking any possible view of the paper from across the aisle, and ignoring the sullen glare up from the circle of Jeff’s arm on his desk. If he was in for a penny, he was in for a pound, he guessed.

There was always something to set him off, anyway. A wrong look in the locker room after gym, a wrong word in the hallway between classes. Sometimes even less than that. It was just how guys like Jeff worked; they’d find any excuse in the end. This time it had been the history test, but it might have been anything. When Jeff had turned his head toward Kiran, under the screening cover of Tammy Fitzpatrick’s frizzy hair in the seat ahead of him, and whispered, “Hey loser, let me copy off you,” Kiran had just set his jaw, and shaken his head No. The consequences, whatever they might be, were beyond his control.

See you after school.