Chapter Text
This morning, Jaime woke up and got out of bed and scratched his back, and something was wrong.
He couldn’t put his finger on it. Like, not literally, but metaphorically; he couldn’t think of what was wrong. It was just something from his gut.
He got dressed and went downstairs for some cereal before heading off to school.
It was the same day as the past hundred (okay, minus weekends). Wake up, dress, cereal, school. Nothing was different. What was wrong? What could be so wrong it made him feel empty down to his bones?
He ducked the big kid in the hall who always lunged at him. He didn’t even look. The big kid probably didn’t either. It was such lazy bullying that both of them could hardly be bothered to do their part. He swerved around the teacher who taught homeroom on the fourth floor and had to leave the teacher’s lounge early to make class on time. He waved to his old lab partner by the lockers and they avoided eye contact because they had to maintain their social reputations.
He took note of the poster for the upcoming prom night on the school corkboard. That hadn’t been there yesterday. Neat.
He couldn’t help peering over his shoulder every few steps, and it was driving him crazy that he felt so disturbed and didn’t know why.
This day was no different than any other monotonous day in his boring, high-school-going life.
The thought rattled in his head, lonely. He shook off the feeling that someone had hung up on him; that wouldn’t make any sense.
.
Bart woke up. He blinked one eye. Then the other.
He looked out the window of his room with his right eye. His left eye was looking at his pillow. He was sideways.
There was a yellow school bus outside his window. It was driving away.
He put his right hand to his right eye and rubbed at it. He pushed on the bed and sat up slightly so he could look at his clock.
It was an analog clock. He squinted at it. He might as well have tried to read a sundial at night.
He pulled out his phone. The time was late. He had ten minutes to walk himself to school.
He sat in the bed. He smacked his lips groggily. There was a teddy bear on the shelf on his wall. One of its eyes was lopsided and it was missing patches of fur.
There was a US History textbook next to it.
Oh. Right. Ten minutes. Maybe less than that, now.
He climbed out of bed and pulled on some clothes.
Something was rotten in the state of Denmark.
.
Jaime doodled into his notebook, trying to keep himself awake. Signing up for Spanish class to raise his GPA was not as good an idea as it should have been. He wanted to blow up the building and fly away, if that would make him any less bored.
He furrowed his brow. That would be a serious crime. It wasn’t even funny as a joke. Shame on him.
A few more things about that thought bothered him, but they slipped from his mind like oil from his fingers. He wanted to wipe his hands; he hated goopy, slimy things.
Something buzzed next to his ear. He swatted it away.
.
Half of first period was gone when Bart walked into class. The teacher furrowed his generous brow at him and hefted a huge sigh without missing a beat in his lecture. Bart walked to a chair near the back of the classroom and sat down. He looked out the window.
He’d seen a book cover once where kids went to school on top of a huge skyscraper. He watched the sophomores running the mile outside. He imagined the same view from a mile above the ground.
He slumped in his chair. Rotten indeed. So rotten there were worms crawling from it. But was this an apple or a corpse?
Some of his classmates were writing into notebooks. The teacher was showing a slideshow. He reached for his bag; he hadn’t brought it to school today. He’d forgotten. Oops.
He put his palms on the desk and leaned his head against the back of the chair. He dragged his palms down the desk, trying to make moisture trails. It was hard because he wasn’t sweating at all.
This probably isn’t an apple.
.
There was a test in World History. Jaime couldn’t remember studying for it, but he paid attention to all the lectures and the subject made sense to him, so he wasn’t worried.
The test came to him and he wrote his name and opened it. There was a terribly photocopied reproduction of an Egyptian tomb painting. He scanned over it and answered the ten multiple choice questions about it.
The next page had Mesopotamian carvings, but there must have been a photocopying error; part of the Egyptian painting was imprinted over it. He rubbed at the paper, but the imprint had already dried. He squinted around it as best he could.
Khepri was on the third page, too. And every one after that. There must have been a printer jam.
.
Bart wasn’t hungry, but everyone was heading to the cafeteria, so he did too.
While he stood in line for food, he scanned the tables for available seats. He caught sight of a junior sitting by himself in the corner. There was something strange in the way he absently scratched at his neck.
Calzones today. Cool. Chocolate milk hadn’t run out yet, double cool.
… Definitely not an apple. Huh? No.
He took his lunch tray over to the junior. “What’s wrong with your neck?” He asked.
The junior jumped. His eyes darted up to meet Bart’s, then looked around and slowly relaxed, his brow furrowed. He lowered his hand. “Nothing’s wrong with my neck,” he said. He scooted over in his seat to make room for Bart.
“Oh,” Bart said, scooting in. He leaned back to get a closer glance at the junior’s neck; there was nothing there. “Nevermind,” he said. He dug into his lunch.
The junior was pushing his spaghetti around his plate. They both stared ahead as the sound of moving kids rattled from the cafeteria wall behind them.
“Ever notice that nobody really talks to anyone else here?” the junior said. Bart turned to look at him, and he turned to look back at Bart.
“Isn’t that what people do, in high school?” Bart asked. It wasn’t an idea he would run for president with. But, well, it was an idea.
The junior raised an eyebrow and turned his head back to the rest of the room, the sound of clinking utensils and footsteps. He chewed his lip. “I don’t think so,” he said.
Bart shrugged. There was probably something else he could say about this, but he thought of nothing. “Something’s rotten in the state of Denmark,” he said, and took another calzoney bite. Burnt his teeth a little.
The junior was still chewing his lip, his brow making a squiggly line over his eyes. “By the pricking of my thumbs,” he said in an agreeing tone, but Bart had no idea what he meant.
.
Jaime had eaten his fill at lunch, but somehow he didn’t feel satisfied. Or full.
He pulled his hand away from his neck again. Was this what they meant when they talked about phantom limb syndrome?
Wait, he wasn’t an amputee or anything. What a stupid idea. Maybe he needs to stop studying so much. No, wait. He needs to study harder.
There was a used petri dish on his desk, with mosquitoes flying all over it. He had to ask around to find where to store it; someone must have left it over from biochem. Ew.
He turned over the words the freshman had said at lunch. Something’s rotten in the state of Denmark. Yeah. Something was. He was going crazy from not knowing what it was.
He slapped his arm; he thought he’d felt a mosquito biting his arm, but there was nothing there. Just the buzzing in his skin, slipping away. It made him feel ill. He dove into his notes.
.
Bart frowned down at his bare knees while his gym teacher barked at them. When she stopped, they would need to run the mile.
Bart hated running the mile.
The teacher blew the whistle and his classmates ran off. He put his hands in the shallow pockets of his gym shorts and paced leisurely along the tracks. The teacher yelled at him.
There was a park next to the tracks, on the other side of the school fence. It was shady and pretty, and was nicer to look at than the glaring sunlight reflecting off the track. He looked at the park.
There was a cat sitting next to the fence. Its eyes trailed along the rest of the class lazily, then found and rested on him. He could hear the gym teacher’s voice ringing in his ears. The slits in the cat’s eyes were giving him a stomachache.
His hands fisted in his gym short pockets, and he broke into a jog, then a run. Before he knew it, he was sprinting.
When he completed the mile run, he looked at the teacher’s astonished face, then turned to see that he’d finished before anyone else had even gone halfway. The athletic kids were already puffing red trying to catch up to him.
His pulse was pounding in his ears. There was probably sodium chloride in his eyes. He grinned. He felt like his body was about to crash. It was glorious.
.
Jaime watched the freshman walk into Calculus with great surprise. How long had they shared a class together, and why didn’t he remember?
The freshman wobbled a little as he walked and all but poured into his seat near the window. His relaxed face formed a goofy grin before he flopped onto his desk and turned his head to the window, and Jaime lost sight of his expression. His fingers dangled vaguely over the edge of his desk, and he looked for all the world like all his bones had liquefied.
Jaime frowned, weighing the merit of going over to the kid to say hi. He watched other students file into the classroom, not looking at each other, and the teacher clearing his throat at the front of the room. He ducked his head down, glancing carefully at the freshman one last time.
The kid was probably pretty smart, if he was in Calculus at his age, but he better sit up and pay attention if he wanted to pass the course.
For a second he thought he saw a flash of blue; he jumped in his seat, startled. He looked closer at the freshman, but there was nothing there but a shining beetle crawling along his neck. The window had probably been left slightly open.
A few of his classmates turned to him, glaring at him for causing a commotion. A few shushed him. The freshman turned his head over, and they caught each other’s eye.
.
The junior was in the class. His brow was again a single, crumpled line. Bart pictured himself rubbing at that brow, trying to flatten it and see what the guy’s face really looked like.
Bart tried to lift a hand to wave at him, but it was difficult. Since gym class when he outran everyone, his whole body was disobedient, had a mind of its own. And it ached, oh did it ever. He managed to lift his left hand an inch, and twitch it a little, before it fell. The action made his vision go white.
His eyes rolled closed. The teacher spoke to the class. Yesterday he was three steps ahead, but today he was four steps behind. The world was running off without him…
He drifted off to the sound of functions and the slight glow of the junior’s blue hoodie in the afternoon sunlight. Something in him hummed in contentment.
.
Jaime kicked his shoes down the hall when he came home, and sat against the door for an hour, thoughts rattling and echoing through his vacant head.
There was still that unsettling feeling that he was being stood up, or rejected outright. He glanced around the living room of his empty house and found himself waiting; for one of the doors to open, or the doorbell, or the sound of the stove turning on. There was nothing.
Outside, inside, Jaime was alone.
He sighed and dragged himself to the kitchen. He had some rice and cheese left over from yesterday. He was not in the mood to cook tonight.
.
Bart opened his hand, twisted his fingers. He closed his hand. Opened it.
His feet hurt. His legs burned. There were cracks in his bedroom ceiling…
He tried to set the alarm on the clock earlier. An exercise in futility. He and his body would need to be on better terms in the morning.
‘Ever notice that nobody really talks to anyone else here?’ the junior had said.
There was something to that. He was so tired; he couldn’t get up the momentum to puzzle out why it mattered.
Bart put his left hand to his face. He covered both of his eyes, sliding them closed.
This was rotten like a corpse. Any minute he’ll wake up spitting ash.