Chapter Fifty-Four
Thomas’ POV:
I walk into the hallway, and I’m met with the usual chaos. Farting Fanny is at his locker, a little crowd around him while he apes around, trying to make them laugh.
Everyone at Rock-side High is always trying to be funny or sensational, so there’s always plenty of entertainment around here.
Of course, that also means that there are many exaggerated and overdrawn stories and minor accidents. I wonder for a fleeting second, how sensational I’d be if I flashed them all my wounds right now.
It’ll probably be the equivalent of a 10 on the Richter scale on my school’s gossip grading, something around the level of Susan and Fred’s incest gist from last year.
Thinking about the Richter scale makes me think about my earthquake dream and I wince, shaking my head.
I’m so lost in thought, staring ahead that I bump into a skinny girl in an ash jumper, her bleached blond hair in pigtails.
Our things clatter to the floor; more of hers than mine, and I help her pick up the rest of her stuff while apologizing.
I hold out a drawing book and plastic palette to her, and she snatches them from me, her mouth in a thin line.
She looks back towards where I had been staring and sees Farting fanny still at his act.
“You should watch where you’re going,” she says condescendingly, obviously misunderstanding my stare.
If I was in a better mood, I could have had a sharp retort at the ready, but that is the least of my concerns right now.
She starts to saunter off when she gets a response, “You see where you’re going, skinny thing, she has already apologized.”
Walking towards me is a girl in a pink crop top and black jeans with combat boots. The blond-haired girl looks back and flips Amber, my best friend, off before walking away with a huff.
Amber rolls her eyes at her retreating figure and turns to me, her eyes alight, “Did he do anything particularly interesting today?”
I’m about to ask who she’s talking about when I realize she means Farting Fanny. I looked back towards his circus and notice that the show was over.
“Not sure,” I mumbled, and her eyes dropped in disappointment.
I suspect Amber has a tiny crush on Fanny, though she swears every time that her curiosity is for gossip. I can’t argue with that point anyway.
My friends and I are suckers for gossip, even though we stay well out of the eye of the sensations. I took another look at her outfit and shook my head in despair.
Amber is currently in a phase where she likes to tell us that she’s a fusion of hybrids, whatever that nonsense means.
Anyway, as the hybrid with habits and features of hybrids that she is, she decided to start combining Barbie dressing with Goth makeup, eating glazed doughnuts with spicy noodles on the same plate, and planning a leisure timetable combining Shakespeare and Aristotle’s works.
That girl is simply weird. Her current dressing is a product of her fusions.
I think she just looks ridiculous with her hair dyed a bright purple and her pink top reading.
Wait! I make the realization just as Amber’s face morphs to a bashful look, while she pulls her mouth to a pout.
“Is that… your T-shirt?” the idiot completes for me.
I sigh, and my original exhaustion seeps into it a little. Amber must notice because she asks, “What’s wrong?”
For a second, I almost blurt it all out, everything going on.
Instead, I shake my head and say, “You owe me a new T-shirt for that.”
I must have been convincing enough because she dropped the issue right away.
Though, knowing Amber well enough, she probably just wanted to get off my back.
She latches onto my arm with a pout “Aren’t I worth more than a million wardrobes of T-shirts?”
“No,” I deadpan, and she grabs her chest in a mock show of pain and starts mumbling what I suppose are words expressing her pain.
I’m close to telling her to quit the boring act when Gold shows up, his dark hair tousled, he’s probably been sticking his neck out his older brother’s car window again.
“Why does she look like one side of a Gorgon?” He asks, facing me.
At this, Amber quits her drama and tries to hit him. He evades her and makes hissing sounds at her.
She tries to hit him again while still holding onto my arm. I look at my two friends playing and feel a sense of loss.
We had shared every moment since we had known each other as a unit, sharing and keeping each other’s secrets.
*******
Amber has been my best friend since grade school after we had bonded over a team assignment in grade two.
We had our first crushes around the same age, inventing cringe ship names and dreaming up future families and cute kids.
We got our periods around the same time, torturing Gold, who had by then transferred back to our school with random menstruation trivia and information.
Amber and Gold had been best friends in kindergarten until Gold’s father got a job in another state when Gold was 4, and he took his family along.
They had kept in touch, first through their mothers who were close friends, and later personally until Mr. Sherman had been transferred back to Rock-side after 8 years.
He and Amber had been excited to be reunited and Gold, with his quirky attitude and dreadlocks, had fit right into our weird friendship group.
Watching them right now and realizing that I might never tell them anything about what was going on with me made me incredibly sad.
I had told them when I had had my first dream, and we had all made light of it, thinking up different theories on what it could mean. Perhaps it was best to leave it as it was or maybe not.