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A day in the life of Noel Gruber wasn’t exactly the glamorous, dramatic, tragical joyride he had always wished it was.
He didn’t wake up in an alleyway in his own vomit, missing teeth. He woke up in his rickety child’s bed, sunlight glaring through his shoddy blinds as the day threatened to burn away the glum darkness of the night that he liked so much.
He didn’t have a breakfast of wine and cigarettes, lounging seductively on a chair on the balcony as he eyed the busy, wealthy-looking men who rushed past. He trudged downstairs, made himself a bowl of cereal and leaned against the kitchen counter as he shovelled cornflakes into his mouth.
He didn’t make his way to a cheap motel in the middle of nowhere to get paid for the night.
He headed to school.
His mother had left early that morning, as she always did, to go to work. Not even she had some mysterious past; she grew up in Uranium, stayed in Uranium, got a job as a store clerk in Uranium, got pregnant in Uranium, had him in Uranium, and got dumped in Uranium.
His parents had barely been married for a year before his dad left. And it wasn’t even like she spent her years grieving and wallowing in a deep depression, crying and screaming while she ripped down the shower curtains in anguish, wishing desperately for a new life—!
She just moved on.
Noel grew up in Uranium with his tired, painfully stereotypical mother who was lovely, but hardly home enough to even get to know her own son. And Noel hated it.
All he wanted was something to happen in life, but nothing ever did. Every day felt the same.
He would get to the rusty front gates of Saint Cassian and ignore the groups of friends standing around, talking and laughing with each other. He would keep his head down and walk straight through the halls to his locker, avoiding eye contact with anyone and everyone until he had retrieved his books and was safely tucked away in the corner of his form room.
If anything, that was the trickiest part of the day – the mornings before school actually started were usually the most dangerous. Teachers weren’t around (or just weren’t paid enough) to deal with the bullshit some kids pulled before nine o’clock.
Which meant it was prime beating hour for the big ugly gym kids who preyed on him every week.
And, to Noels utter delight, today seemed to be one of those days.
“Hey, princess! Why didn’t you call me back last night?” one of them sung mockingly as he roughly shoved Noel’s shoulder into a locker. He winced, but managed a smirk as he met the dickhead’s eye and forced himself to respond.
“I was with another man, I’m sorry,” he said, fighting the tremor in his voice before winking. “I can call you tonight though?”
The small gaggle of cronies behind Noel’s attacker let out a chorus of teasing oooh’s, and the last thing he saw was a furious scowl before Noel was struck with another blow right across the jaw. His head was thrown to the side with a sharp crack and he gasped.
“Fag.”
The word was spat with such venom that even Noel, who had been through this shitshow a million times by now, flinched and suddenly felt very inclined to wriggle from this kid’s grasp and run off to go hide in a bathroom.
“He even gasps like one!” one of the guys behind laughed giddily, punching his friend on the shoulder as the other one imitated the sound, raising a dainty hand to his chest as he exaggerated a very effeminate sounding gasp. Noel stared at the ground, refusing to look up.
He distantly heard footsteps hurrying past, pretending not to notice the little exchange going on in the middle of the corridor. It was pathetic.
But, for once, luck seemed to be on Noel’s side. The screechy bell rang out loudly across the cramped hall, and Noel was promptly released. He let out a breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding when the full weight of his feet hit the floor, and he leaned against the locker. The group of boys all wandered off, still laughing and mocking the sound he’d made when he’d been boxed around the face by a fist the size of his entire head.
The spot on his jaw ached like a bitch and burned with that familiar, painful tingling. But like usual, he sucked it up and went on his way to his first class of the day, smoothing down his hair as he went.
His lessons were as dull as everything else in his life. Their town was only, like, the tiniest little thing in the world, so all of his classes had the same people in them from his year. Which was great because his little Fanclub were all the year above, but awful because that meant he spent every single lesson with a certain insufferable redhead who seemed incapable of shutting her damned mouth for more than three seconds.
“Constance! Stop copying from my sheet! You’ll never learn if you only ever leech off of me.”
“Sorry, Ocean.”
Noel frowned and turned to glare at Ocean. They had known each other since they were kids, but that didn’t mean he liked the girl at all. He hated how she treated the people around her, let alone her supposed best friend. Poor Constance deserved someone so much better than Ocean Rosenberg. She was a bitch.
Ocean stared levelly back around at him. “What?”
He just made a show of looking her up and down and giving a passive aggressive scoff before turning back around. As expected, she gasped and immediately stuck her stupid little hand up in the air.
“Sir! Noel is distracting me and Constance!”
He rolled his eyes.
“Noel Gruber, eyes on your own paper, please. Stop distracting other students,” the teacher’s bored, exhausted drone said on autopilot from the front of the room.
Ocean would smirk, apparently satisfied with her snitch-ery, and Noel would pick at his nails, unbothered for the rest of the lesson.
And that was basically the structure of every class, every day. He sits in a grim little classroom, pretending to listen or work in his book when really he just spent his hours daydreaming about dark, mysterious Parisian evenings behind alleyways or in glittering casinos where people drank and threw money around like they were the stale, little beanbags launched at him every PE lesson.
And then, finally, at the end of it all, was sixth block. Everyone had a free option for sixth block where they got to pick from a short list of extra-curricular activities. Most kids picked something sporty, like Football or Basketball. And, surprise-surprise, the shitty little school didn’t have enough funding for anything interesting like art or theatre or even just anything that required more than a ball to kick around or throw into a net.
So, he was stuck in choir for an hour, every single afternoon with three other kids he hardly knew, one he despised, and a senile old man (who wasn’t even present half the time) as their choir conductor. Noel found it quite telling that, despite the very limited activity choice, there were still only five kids in the entire school who chose to dedicate their time to choir.
“Okay, everyone!” Ocean called in her shrill, annoying voice as she smiled far too widely for the lack of energy in that room. “From the top! One, two, three, four…!”
Noel looked around at everyone as he sung his boring, uninspired tenor line. There was Constance, of course. She followed Ocean around like a lost puppy, and was basically forced to do everything Ocean did.
Then there was the new European kid who had just moved over from some foreign country and could barely speak a word of English. Noel was pretty sure was only in the choir because he broke some law and was being forced to as part of some kind of community service type thing. Still, anyone with eyes could see that he was annoyingly pretty for a dicky straight guy, so Noel didn’t particularly mind spending an hour of his day with him every afternoon, even if he did seem like the kind of guy that would beat the crap out of him if he even blinked in his direction.
There was also Ricky Potts, the mute, disabled kid from their year. Literally all he did was stand there; Noel didn’t know why he was in the choir in the first place. He wouldn’t have been surprised if it was some stupid pity-act from Ocean who just wanted extra credit. Still, he seemed nice enough – if not a little bitter all the time. It’s not like he could blame the kid; Noel would be too if he couldn’t walk or talk, and was still forced to join a fucking choir.
Either way, they’d sing one song, and then the European kid would stomp over to one of the pews in the corner and bury his nose in his phone, and Ricky would sit down and stare aimlessly out the window.
Noel would lean against the doorframe with his notebook, listening to Ocean squeal about getting everyone to join in singing again, and Constance trying to politely knock some sense into her and say that literally no one cared about this stupid choir.
Noel would simply wait to leave, and write out stories of Monique Gibeau and how wonderful and exotic and dark and devastating a day in her life was.
Monique would never spend her days being called names at school and being forced to solve algebraic equations. She would secretly like the name-calling and the beatings, deliberately provoking her attackers for more. She would leave the room with a dramatic flourish of her black feather bower as she unapologetically ditches the hellish world of mathematics.
But sometimes, Noel had to admit that he just wasn’t her. He had to accept that his dead-end life would never change, and he’d probably be stuck in this stupid little town for the rest of his pathetic life.
Noel didn’t get home and dramatically serenade himself in a mirror or try a new makeup look while getting ready for a night out where he would get wasted and probably laid. He got home, said hello to his scruffy white dog, and did his homework.
He didn’t have cigarettes and wine for dinner. He had frozen peas and left over chicken from last night.
He didn’t go to bed feeling fulfilled and content with life.
He went to bed feeling heavy and low. He went to bed feeling like nothing in life mattered. He went to bed hating his life, and its agonizing mundanity.
And then he woke up the next morning, ready to do it all again.