Chapter Text
The world keeps spinning the same way a vinyl disk does—going round and round and round until it doesn’t anymore. This is a problem of great magnitude, because I once was a speck of dust sitting nicely on the disk until the needle hit a scratch, jolted, and I was thrown off, wondering what went wrong.
God, isn’t the world stupid?
Anyway—all that is to say that my name is Alfred, I am 13 years old, and I have a pet dog. His name is George Washington, like the American Revolution leader. Mom says that I need to find new friends, but it’s hard when you’ve just been thrown off a vinyl disk and you’re watching everyone else on it, standing there like nothing’s happened.
I don’t want to talk about that right now, so instead I’ll tell you about George. He’s a golden retriever mix—we don’t know with what, since we got him at the local shelter. It doesn’t matter, though, because he licks my face when I feel sad (which is most of the time now), which makes me laugh until he stops. You don’t question what breed a dog is when he makes you laugh when you’re sad.
Right now, George is under a table while I sit here and mope about my life. It takes a long time, because I have a lot in my life to mope about. Like making friends in school and fixing my absolute disaster of grades after what I did last year and trying to figure out how long it will take for me to find the length of this stupid, stupid side of a triangle. I spend more time thinking about how long it will take me than actually trying to solve the problem, because it takes less effort. I calculate that it will take me approximately five hours. It doesn’t make sense, but I did say that I had bad grades.
I also mope about—well, I don’t have to tell you everything. I’m sure you can figure it out on your own.
I have class on Monday, since administration doesn’t think that divorce is big enough of an issue to let me skip school. (If Dad had just flat-out died, I'd've gotten a week, which I think is hilarious.) Until then, I have about two hundred math worksheets from the summer to finish. The other teachers were nice enough to give me an extension until the beginning of next month. I’ll probably do it all on the last day too. I am awful at planning things out.
Eventually Dad comes around to me sitting stupidly at this table and helps me with my math. He calls it maths because he’s British, which I hate, but I’ll take any help I can get with homework.
Ever since the divorce, I’ve been living with Dad, who has the house now. The problem is that he’s never here anyway, so I just hang out with George. Mom is probably at her friend’s house, lividly calling her lawyers and stuff. I know she wants the house back.
I read somewhere once that the divorce rate is 40% or something like that. I think it’s Bull with a capital B. I definitely know at least twenty kids at my school, and none of their parents are divorced. Unlucky me. I also read that only 6% of divorced couples marry again. I’m not going to hinge my entire life on hoping for that 6%, so I’ve decided to spend most of my time with George instead of Mom or Dad.
George is the best dog anyone could ask for. Since Dad isn’t here and neither is Mom, he chills with me in my bedroom. When Dad comes back, I put on my headphones and pretend to be listening to music so I don’t need to go downstairs to dinner. That’s what I’ve decided I’m going to be doing for the rest of my life now.
I don’t see why Mom wants me to make new friends. I think that George is enough. I’ve had, like, one friend at my school who left way back in second grade. The one time I’ve met his parents, they were really nice. They didn’t scream and fight during every single argument, or throw things at each other. His mom made us pancakes, which my mom used to do too, but doesn’t anymore.
The thing is—people don’t break up the same way they do in the movies (which I’ve watched a lot of), after a fatal argument that they don’t recover from. People fall out of love slowly: they start eating dinner at different times, then they forget each other’s birthdays, and one of them stops making pancakes because she’s terrified of angering the other by waking him up too early. And sometimes I hate that. Because if my parents broke up the way they did in the movies (which I don’t watch anymore) then maybe I would understand it better. Maybe I wouldn’t stare at the curtains wondering where my life fell off the vinyl disk. I could see it, like: Hey, this conversation is where everything started falling apart. Could you talk it over and fix it, please? Instead I stare at the curtains, like: Hey, did this start when you and Mom had that argument on that road trip to Maine once? Or was it when you forgot your anniversary two years ago? Or has it been going on for longer and I haven’t noticed because I was too young? Actually, let’s forget this whole thing exists and I’ll just go back to staring at the curtains. I gape and gape at the curtains until the curtains gape back and I look away because—God, I’m going insane. This is how I’m going to die: holed up in my depressing bedroom voluntarily with the lights on because I’m trying not to fall asleep but miserably failing, and the curtains are all a huge void staring at me, radiating emptiness as if outside of it people weren’t going about as usual, safely tucked in some groove on the disk because the world doesn’t discard them like a misprinted sheet of paper the same way it discarded me.
In case you haven’t noticed yet, the universe hates me.
On the first day of school, everything is fine. There’s a new kid or something like that. I fall asleep in half of my classes because I pulled an all-nighter last night. It doesn’t really matter anyway—the first day of school is always just sharing your name and favorite color and stuff; as if we needed to know that. For the record, my favorite color is blue.
On the second day of school, I have math second period, and I know that I’m screwed because the math teacher, Mr. Garfield, already hates me and will probably hate me even more after this. When I can’t answer a question, he asks me to call on a friend. It sounds threatening, which is concerning because I do want to survive the school year. He’s probably taking notes in his head on how much I suck at this. The instant the clock strikes 10:00, I skid down the hallway to the bathroom. There I come across 8th grade boys; at least, I think they’re 8th grade boys, I really can’t see anything because of the smoke.
“Kid,” one of them starts—I think my throat is trying to strangle itself - he moves menacingly towards me - “You’re gonna wanna scram.” Scram it is. I heed my warnings, I’m not that dumb. At 10:05, I burst into my next class. People are staring at me weirdly, probably because I smell like smoke.
So of course the teacher comes over to me and asks why I smell like smoke; I don’t answer because, again, I’m not dumb, I don’t what happens when you rat out 8th grade boys, but it can’t be pretty; the teacher squints and says, “Alfred, smoking is strictly prohibited at this school.”—And I say, “I know.”—And she says, “I’m sending you to—”
Except that’s as far as she gets, because whatever happens when you rat out 8th grade boys, it can’t be worse than what happens when you’re sent to the dean or the head of school or whoever she wanted to send me to. I tell her about the 8th grade boys.
Is there something that happens when you enter 8th grade? A mean, faulty lightbulb pops on and your brain starts thinking, I’ll scare some children today! Or is it that I just have the worst luck ever and run into the worst ones?
Thankfully, my luck proves not to be that bad, because for the rest of the week I avoid everything.
Trouble starts the second week. Why? For three reasons, mostly:
A), The 8th grade boys found out that I told a teacher, and now have made it their life goal to ruin mine. They try very hard, but it doesn’t work, because my life is already ruined. Still, it’s annoying enough when I always open my backpack to find that it’s filled with gorilla glue.
B), Mr. Garfield assigns way too much homework, and I’ve bombed a quiz already. Dad refuses to help me unless I agree to actually come out of my room and eat dinner, which I’ll never do in a million years, probably. I’m still under the delusion that the Youtube tutorials work just fine.
And, finally, C), Since I don’t have any friends, I sit at my own lonely table during lunch. (These are supposed to be getting worse as I go along, by the way.) Ha, ha. I have a deficiency of parents, friends, and grades, but the world took the effort to give me my own little table at lunch! Thanks, world. What that means is that since all the other tables are filled, the new kid (who’s name is Ivan, by the way) sits with me now. Which wouldn’t be that bad if he wasn’t the worst person at talking. Ever.
And I’m not talking about the “bad at talking” like the “can’t small talk” sort of bad. I’m talking about the “literally only speaks when I’m asking a question and even then only gives one-worded answers” sort of bad. I’m talking to a brick wall that blesses me with an answer once in a while but is otherwise happy to listen to me slowly go insane as I rant about everything in my life.
I’m just here, like: please please please please please give me a response so I’m not just saying the same few sentences over and over again just in a different way because I don’t have anything else to talk about. I tell jokes, sometimes. Like a robot, he responds, “Ha, ha.” And it’s infuriating because I know that he can talk: I’ve definitely heard him talk in math, he’s very good at it (both the talking and the math).
It’s nearly October and I’m almost ready to take my extension-ed summer homework to school just to do something during lunch (yeah, the situation’s that desperate) when he finally gives me a genuine reaction to something.
“Did you know that I have a dog?” I ask. Of course he knows that I have a dog, I’ve said this fifteen million times before. “His name is George Washington, like the American Revolution leader. Can you imagine a golden retriever leading the rag-tag gang of soldiers to war with Britain?”
Ivan looks startled for a second, then finally grins as the mental image washes over him. “Yeah, I can see that,” he says.
At first I think, God, he’s not a robot! He can smile and imagine stuff in his head and think about golden retrievers and speak more than one-word answers like he’s programmed or something! And then I think, Oh my God, I gotta see that smile again.
That’s about as much progress as I make until October, but I don’t start bringing my summer homework to school, which doesn't improve my academic life at all but probably isn’t bad for my social life, I hope.