Wordplay

She was tiny.
That was all I could think as I watched the new girl rock side to side nervously in the front of the room. The chatter in the room seemed to dwarf her, and she shrank backwards into the blackboard Mr. Cochran never used because of his asthma. As she fiddled with her dark brown hair - more accurately, her dark brown bangs, since the rest of her hair was an inch long at most - her chocolate eyes caught my studious gaze. She blushed and absorbed herself with something very interesting on the floor.
Mitch nudged me with his arm. "Don't tell me you're checkin' her out, mate," he drawled in that British accent all the girls joined this class for. Even though he was lanky with a gauge in his left ear, an industrial piercing in his right lobe, two ball rings in his top lip, and emerald green hair constantly gelled to perfection, his voice was enough to captivate any girl in the school. It's really too bad he was an asshole. Which made me wonder why I was friends with him in the first place.
"Yo, Jesus, you all there?" Fae asked, waving her hand in my face.
I smacked her wrist. "Yeah, sis, I'm fine. And don't call me Jesus. It's Hay-soose and you know it."
She yanked on my hair mercilessly, so I pulled on her Hayley Williams-inspired locks. Not kidding. She seriously looked like Hayley's blue-eyed clone. "You are Jesus," she hissed. "You turn water into wine and you are edible."
"Now that just sounded obscene," I reprimanded, earning myself a slap for my trouble.
"May I have your attention, please?" Mr. Cochran, a tall, well-built walnut-haired man with bizarrely red ears, addressed the class loudly.
Mitch shot me a mischievous grin as he cupped his hands around his mouth. "May I have your attention, please?" my clown of a best friend bellowed in a nasally voice, lurching forward in his seat. His spiky green hair shook as he moved. "Will the real Slim Shady please stand up? I repeat, will the real Slim Shady please stand up?"
I leaped to my feet, causing our audience to explode into laughter. With a quick bow and an Elvis-style 'Thank you, thank you very much,' I sank back into my seat and gave Mr. Cochran a satisfied smirk. The poor man sighed and continued at a normal volume, "As you can see, we have a new student. Aislinn, would you do the honors?"
It was strange, what happened then. As though Mr. Cochran's words empowered her, she stepped forward and seemed to swell with confidence. Although she was still very much a petite teenage girl, when she was given the floor and the peace of our silence, she was no longer miniscule compared to the rest of us. She jammed her hands in the pockets of her jeans and crossed her ankles to stop the rocking. "My name is Aislinn Teague," she began simply, her voice soft but strong and rich. There was a nice rhythm to the way she spoke, and I imagined that she sounded great giving a speech. "I aspire to be a graphic novelist. I'm fifteen, and I'm a sophomore."
The class sucked in a collective breath. A sophomore in the AP Creative Writing course especially for seniors? Impossible. We accused Mr. Cochran with our eyes.
"Now, I'm sure we'll all do our best to welcome Aislinn to our circle." The sophomore looked like she wanted to start laughing at the idiocy of that statement, but instead let out a delicate snort. It was hardly dainty - just subtle and quiet - but somehow my mind invented that horrendous oxymoron, and I snickered to myself.
"Something you want to share, Lucifer?"
I smirked. "No, Mr. Cock... ran."
He rolled his eyes good-naturedly as my classmates tittered (that's right, bitches, I make people titter). Turning his back on us, Mr. Cochran popped open his grape-scented purple marker and began scribbling on a large pad (Demetri Martin fans, cue laughter). "Today we will be freewriting," he began as the sophomore sat down in the open desk - next to me, of course. "You may write a minimum of two pages on a topic of your choosing, and you will be graded on mechanics, grammar, and sentence structure as well as flow, voice, and organization. Its due next class."
We groaned. Every possible weak point was covered. Meanwhile, the sophomore yanked out a small journal - a black, spiral-bound book with a red heart graphic on the cover - and began scribbling in it like her hand had been possessed by the Muses. A satisfied smirk crossed my face. She hadn't even brainstormed or stopped to organize. She wouldn't last a day in this class.
"Um, can I help you with something?"
I jumped at her voice, pitched slightly higher than when she had addressed the class. Curious and even a little deferential, if I was really looking for some ego-inflation. Of course, I gave a very eloquent, subtly sarcastic response to put her in her underclassman place. "Huh?"
Her pink, bow-shaped lips twisted into a wry smile, but she kept her gaze trained on the paper. "You've been staring at me since I walked in."
With a noncommittal shrug, I ripped out a piece of notebook paper and sketched a basic organizer. I planned to write out the never-ending saga of my efforts to break up with my obsessive ex-girlfriend.
"I like your hair."
How she was writing so quickly yet carrying on a conversation at the same time eluded me. "What?" I managed, staring at her flying hand.
"Your hair," she repeated, jerking her head in my general direction as she flipped her pencil over and scrubbed at the paper furiously. "It's nice. I've been thinking about doing my bangs blue like the cover of your notebook."
I blinked at her. "Oh," I told her, imagining it with some difficulty. She didn't seem like she could pull off a weird hair color.
She stopped and looked up suddenly. "I'm not distracting you, am I?"
"Uh, kinda..."
"Sorry," she mumbled as she turned back to her journal. "I forget that not everyone multitasks. No offense."
"None taken," I replied, scribbling something on my organizer to make it look like I knew what I was doing. To be honest, freewriting was my weakest point. If I had a topic, I pulled As without difficulty, but I had yet to pass freewriting, simply because I could never get through the first two paragraphs. "So... you're Irish?"
"I'm pretty much everything," she replied with a grin, even though her gaze remained on her scrabbling pencil.
Something dug into my ribs. Mitch gave me the 'I-told-you-so' smirk as he retracted his elbow. In return, I gave him the 'I-am-not-checking-her-out-you-fucking-retard-there-is-nothing-wrong-with-making-light-conversation' glare.
"Mind if I call you Luce?"
My attention successfully shifted back to her. "Luce?"
"Yeah, Lucifer's an awesome name, but it's kind of long, don't you think?" She stuck her tongue out inanely as she dotted an i.
I hadn't thought of my name as anything remotely awesome since Bobby Baker told me it was dumb in second grade. "Um, everyone just calls me by my middle name, actually."
"Oh? What is it?"
Of course, my sister chose that exact moment to screech, "Jesus! I need your expert writing skizzills!"
As I let out a slow breath and counted to ten, I heard the sophomore giggle. "Your middle name is Jesus?"
"It's Hay-soose," I grumbled, ignoring Fae's frantic shouts for my help.
"Which is Spanish... for Jesus." A grin this time, half-covered by delicate fingers. "Now, I'm an atheist, so I don't know much about this, but I'm pretty sure Lucifer and Jesus aren't names that should be put together."
"Oh, shut up," I snapped before turning around. "What, for Christ's sake?!"
"Don't you mean for your sake?" Mitch asked with a cheeky grin.
"Oh, go back to Britain," I grumbled. "What, Fae?"
"Umm... I forgot," she informed me sheepishly, twirling her bright red-orange-blonde hair around her finger.
I smacked myself in the forehead and refocused on my paper. When I was halfway through my second paragraph, someone tapped me on the shoulder. "What?!" I shouted, flinging my arms in the air.
"Sorry, Luce," the sophomore said with an apologetic smile that didn't reflect the mischief in her eyes. "I just wanted to know if you would check my work real quick. Something's wrong with the beginning, but I can't pinpoint it."
I was about to tell her something else she could pinpoint when Mr. Cochran caught my eye. With an exasperated sigh, I snatched the paper from her hands, prepared for the worst: 'I am a sofmore. I sit neer a wierdo. Cheez is yumy.'
Instead, I found myself staring at Paul Laurence Dunbar's "The Mask." I cocked a brow.
"It sets the tone for the story," she clarified at my expression.
"You just have it memorized?" I asked skeptically.
With a sheepish grin, she rubbed the back of her neck and replied, "It's my favorite."
Shaking my head with a smile, I skipped the poem and was instantly mesmerized by the first line of her piece.
'She died smiling.'
My eyes darted up to the sophomore. She was watching me hopefully, expectantly, so I flicked my gaze back to the paper.
With words as fine as Chinese silk, she expertly wove the tale of the 'it' girl who suffered from too much pressure to be perfect. Her parents constantly nagged her about minor mistakes and never let up about her attitude, forever envisioning their perpetually happy, ridiculously smart baby girl instead of a stressed out, broken down teenager. Her attempts to explain herself and find answers to her questions were dismissed, and she spiraled downward helplessly. In the end, the very thing that had driven her to her terrible state prevented her from committing suicide - she felt that dying would just make her a bigger disappointment. So she tried to act happy, and her parents remarked on it and fussed over it, assuming that her previous moods were a result of rebelliousness and hormones, never knowing that she cried herself to sleep every night. 'And so she died slowly, always smiling.'
I didn't have to know Aislinn well to realize that this was her, and I wondered if that was the real reason she had handed me her paper.
"Well?" she asked anxiously, brushing her hair out of her eyes. Nervous. I suddenly comprehended exactly what I was holding. Her writing style was distinctly fluid because it lacked background information and detailed description; all the focus was on the characters and their actions. Every little movement, every tick and twitch and sigh, was an emotion. I had the key to reading her in the palms of my hands.
I turned my gaze back to the beginning. Ah, there it was. "You repeated a sentence start here," I told her, poking the spot with a satisfying thump.
She stared at it for a moment, then smacked herself in the forehead. "Wow, I can't believe I missed that! Thanks." With a quick flourish of her pencil, Aislinn corrected the problem and stood to hand it in.
"Oi, mate, what's with that mug?" Mitch whispered, leaning towards me conspiratorially. "Was it as bad as I know it was?"
"Did you see the way she was scribbling all over her journal?" Fae giggled. "It looked like she was hopped up on the Q!"
I grinned weakly at the Dane Cook joke as I crumpled up what little story I had and threw it in the wastebasket. I would've been the basketball team's star shooter had they not insisted that I dye back my hair. "Can either of you help me at all with mine? I'm clueless, as usual."
Mitch shook his head with that smug smile of his that I hated, the one that made girls swoon. "No can do, mate. You've got to learn to come up with your own stuff."
"I'm no better than you are," Fae offered with a shrug. "I can barely scrape out my own ideas. Sorry."
"I'll help you."
I tilted my head backwards so I could grin lazily at my upside-down would-be savior. "Really, Ace?" After a short moment of surprise, she smiled at the nickname.
"It's ok; he doesn't need your help," Mitch jumped in quickly, narrowing his eyes at her. "I've got it under control."
Ace rolled her eyes, and I quickly nicknamed her 'Master Eye-Roll' in my head. "I'm sure." To me, she offered, "If you want my help, just tap me on the shoulder. I promise not to fling my hands in the air and almost smack you in the face like someone I know..."
I gave her a Cheshire Cat smile. "Now who would that be?"
With a chuckle, she slumped into her seat and popped some earphones in. I turned back to Mitch irritably. "What the hell, man?"
"You don't want the fucking sophomore helping you," he hissed. "You'll look like an idiot. Talking to her is bad enough; you don't need to be getting any worse. C'mon, I'll help you just this once."
"What's your problem with her? She's cool," I argued, deciding to ignore the fact that I had felt the same way initially. At least I wouldn't have been rude to her face.
Mitch shook his green, green head. "Whatever, man. Just cause you fancy the sophomore doesn't mean you've got to be pussy whipped already."
He didn't see Ace slit her eyes in his direction, and he didn't care enough to watch her bend down and pull a cup of applesauce from her lunchbox. Right as the bell rang, she let fly. It exploded on Mitch's shoulder, leaving darkish yellow glop all over the front of his new white t-shirt.
I couldn't help it when I started laughing. Fortunately, lettuce head decided to ignore me for now. "What the hell do you think you're doing?" he growled, leaning on her desk menacingly.
She widened her eyes naively. "Just some target practice."
"Clean it up," he snarled.
"I'm not cleaning it up," she argued. "You stood up when I threw it at my target and got it on yourself. You should pay more attention."
"What target?!" Mitch snapped, slamming a fist on the plastic.
She pointed at a poorly drawn bullseye etched into the corkboard. The one Fae had carved into the wall out of boredom two months ago and thrown way-too-sharp pencils at.
"So what am I supposed to do? Walk around with applesauce on me all day? What are people going to think, hmm?"
Her mouth twisted evilly. "Well, chances are they'll assume someone threw up on you, seeing as it must happen a lot with you being a disgusting jerk-off and all." And with that, she stood up, gathered her things, and left.
"Would you like some aloe for that burn?" Fae asked Mitch, grinning from ear to ear.
Pictures will be up... eventually... And to explain the the Hay-soose thing, accented letters don't show up here, so I wrote it out in TSHLD PHONETICS (patent pending)! It's really just Jesus with a little slash over the U.
I'm working on getting pictures up. :P