My Life As I Knew It

Section 2 – Dealing with Emily, Chris, and the worst side of Marshall

I scanned the bus. Once again the only seat was next to Chris. I pushed over and flopped down. Surprisingly Chris didn’t talk to me. He had a far off and distant look in his eyes but I was too busy enjoying the silence to ask if something was wrong.

I was just about to my locker when I noticed that Emily was standing right in front of it.

"Please move, I have to get to my locker." I offered politely.

"Hey nerd turd! You can’t get into your locker until ya promise to do my math homework."

"Emily if I did you homework you teacher would know that it was not you and give you a F." "Which wouldn’t be that unusual for you." I muttered under my breath.

"Listen you little brain in a jar! If you don’t promise to do my homework, you will regret it."

"No." I said defiantly while crossing my arms. Bad move. Emily sucker punched my in the stomach.

"I got'a get to class. Think about what I said."

Band was nothing new. Band is a year round class so the start of 2nd semester doesn’t mean anything. In world history we did a little history trivia and a get-to-know-you game. In gym class we played soccer and I tried not to get in the way. Geometry was not that bad, now that the teacher knew what I could do.

On the way to my locker I saw Chris shuffling by.

"Hey Chris!" I shouted… but he didn’t answer. Normally if I had said hi to Chris, he would have run over looking for the world like a little puppy. The fact that he didn’t bothered me.

"Hey Chris, is something wrong?" I grabbed his shoulder and turned him around to face me. His face was wet and his eyes were blood shot.

"Its… hmfff… my parents… they’re breaking up!" He sniffed but chocked trying to hold back the crying.

"Hey, I’m sorry… is there anything I can do to make your feel better?"

"Well well well. What have we got here? Oh, did one of the nerds get a bue bue?" Emily snickered. That was it. Chris couldn’t hold it any longer. He started to cry. The tears ran rivers down his face, soaking into his collar. He almost fell over, clinging to me for support. It was awkward but I did not try to remove him. My parents weren’t divorced, but my dad was away all the time, so I was empathetic to his plight. I let him stay there, dampening my shoulder.

"HIS PARENTS ARE BREAKING UP!" I shouted at her. This only made Chris wail louder.

"YOU ARE SO HEARTLESS! SOMEtimes I just want to…"

"Want to what geek?"

"I want to… to … to see the di-ester bonds on your dioxyribose compounds dissipate causing your nucleotide pairs to separate, thus making it imposable for your ribosomes and endoplasmic reticulum to produce and transmute amino acid chains into complex proteins." Of course it was a death wish, but I knew Emily would not understand it.

"Yah whatever, You little tech jabbering freak." She snapped. "Do my assignment or ELSE!" She headed off towards the buses.

"Chris," I said grabbing his shoulders and pulling him off mine, "she didn’t mean it, she was just being mean. Try to calm down. I’ll call you when I get home."

"Ok," He sniffled, "I’ll try."

I ran to my locker. That had taken up a lot of time, and I did not want to miss the bus. I shoved my books into my backpack and made for the door. I meet up with Marshall about half way there.

"Hey Zack… can I ask ya somethin?"

"Sure, what?

"Well how'd'ya think I should approach Nicole? I mean… if I… if I wanted ta have some fun and~"

"YOU IDIOT! You should not be thinking about doing that. Sex is so over rated! I mean, it is just the process by which a species continues mix their phenotypes in an effort to allow evolution and genetic variation, but that is not the point! All nature meant it to do was fuse two haploid cells from different individuals, but the human race and our culture has made it into something more ‘important’ than it should be. Marshall do you want to accidentally have a kid? Or worse yet, catch a STD? Do you know how many of them there are? Let me remind you… The hurpies virus caused sores on the genitals and around the mouth. The warts virus is similar but can cause sores on the hands and feel as well. Ghoneria causes inflammation of the genitals. Syphilis is a fungus that can spread to the entire body. Crabs are insects that cause unbearable itching. The HIV virus causes AIDS which destroys your immune system leaving you vulnerable to any disease and can eventually lead to you dieing from something as common as a cold!"

"Ok, ok, dude I get it! Disgusting!"

"Good. You should be repulsed. Just wait until you’re married."