Twenty-Two Calamities

But the girl, who is she? Did Lisa have anything to do with it? I play to audio again and again until her voice just sounds like a muffled up scream in my head.

I walk out of the bathroom and down the hallway to the locker number -021. The halls are deserted and the principle only roams around the halls when it’s been fifteen minutes into first period. So far I have ten minutes left.

I brush my bangs to the side and focus on the numbers of her locker. She told me the number once; it started with a 4 and ended with a 2. I don’t know the other two. I take my earphones out and listen to the audio again, despite it being a muffled scream to me now, and fiddle with the lock.

Eight more minutes.

I fiddle with every possible 10 digit number code I can think of until it hits me. I pause the audio right before she says heck then press play again.

Heck, like I know how to tame a flame, ha!
Translation:
4, 4 1 4 3 2 4 1 5, 2!
Damn you Lisa and your mysteries.
3 minutes. Shit.

I twist in the numbers and when it clicks open, I mentally high-five myself. Her locker is still intact, like nothing ever happened. I imagine her walking up to me in one of her flower dresses that she only wore on Mondays and stayed in sweats for the rest of the week.

I search her locker for 30 seconds until I realize I have no idea what I’m searching for. Maybe if I took a couple of her books with me, I could go through them and find more clues.

1 minute.

I grab her chemistry, World studies and Poetry books and shut the locker as silently as possible then hurry back to the library. The librarian, as usual, is seated behind her desk, her eyes glued to Sherlock Holmes.

Stella scoots to the side when she sees me and pats the space she left for me. I want to tell them what I’ve discovered, but the more I think about it, it’s not such a good idea anymore. Lisa never even noticed Jack or Stella. The only time she actually acknowledged their existence was when she stopped by my house in her red Honda CR-Z to study chemistry. She said hi to Stella and Jack with that bright smile she’d always throw around like it was confetti. Then she told me she wanted us to study alone so I left Stella and Jack playing Call of Duty 4 in my room and we went downstairs.

“Alex, I’m really bad at chemistry.” She laughed and sat down next to me. Her boobs looked like two bouncy, full pumped baseballs squeezed in real tight against each other. She wore a strapless shirt and a blue skirt. The only reason I remembered what she wore was because she’d worn it before outside of school when she took me to the park with her.
“Well, I’m always happy to help.” I said smiling back at her nervously and opened my chemistry book.

“Okay like,” she crossed her arms right under her boobs which made them look even bouncier, “how are you so good? According to Mr. Freeman I always ‘lack specifics’ in my answers.”
“Umm, I don’t know. I study,” I teased. She squinted her eyes at me and frowned that cute teasy frown she’d give me when we’d joke around.
“Okay, Mr. Gaskarth, you’re the teacher and I’m the student. Educate me.” She leaned back into the chair and her bouncy boobs separated from each other by a centimeter. Her arms lazily dropped to her sides and her eyes clung onto mine, hanging on. She looked beautiful, and not just because her breasts were perfectly perky and bouncy but big enough to support her shape, but because she wasn’t wearing heavy make-up and her lips were lightly glossed and her tanned skin looked pretty and seemed to glitter in the dull dining room despite its only light source being the heavy sun’s rays. Her hair was in that bun-braid thing she’d always do and tell me was her ‘smart look’. And her voice wasn’t raspy, though it never is, or overly coated with cuteness and persuasion, which was something she’d uncontrollably had the control of, and she wasn’t being mean or rude or cringe-y.

“Where’d you dash off to?” Stella asks me. I look at the books in my lap and stand up then sit across them before they notice the name on the top of them. “Umm, I had to get a few things from my locker. Did Miss Sherlock come round?”
“Nahh,” Jack replies, “she’s in too deep.”
Usually, Stella would make some dirty comment to what Jack just said but instead she says, “I think she’s alive.”
I put the books on my lap and my eyes widen, attentive. “What makes you say that?”
“Well, I don’t know. She just is, you know?” I nod my head then avert my eyes to the tiny crack on the table. Beside the crack it says you crack me up with a laughing emoji which someone drew on.
“You can’t just decide someone’s alive because you want them to be. You can’t decide something just because you want it to be true.” Jack says and my eyes scroll up to his. His narrow nose looks smaller from the angle I look at him at, but then again nothing feels right anymore.
“Oh fucks! You’re suddenly Einstein, aren’t you?”
“I didn’t even fucking say that!”
“Uh-huh well Peter Pan taught me to believe no matter what.”
“He also taught you how to be stupid.”
“Shove a sock in it Barakat!”

I stand up and hit my hand on the table hard. The loud sound echoes through the library but luckily enough, Miss Sherlock Holmes is still glued to her Sherlock. “Guys, Lisa wouldn’t want us arguing about this.”
“We aren’t even talking about her anymore.” Jack says.
“Actually,” Stella starts in her matter-of-fact voice, “we were symbolically and metaphorically.”
“Metaphors can only be written, not said.”
“Ey, Einstein? Shove. A. Sock. In. It.”
“Make. Me.”
I rub my temples and politely tell them to shut up. “I swear you two will either be married with kids ten years from now or dead.”
Stella over exaggerates a gasp and looks from Jack to me with deep disgust and shock with my mean words. “Mr. Heart is suddenly heartless.” Then she mutters, “I guess Peter Pan can’t save us after all.”
I sigh and look at the crack again. Lisa hated the library. The only time she came in was to ask the librarian for the documentaries on Hitler and that was it.

“It smells like too many words on books and dusty closets,” she told me once when she made me go in and get a magazine for her. I wasn’t her toy if that’s what you’re thinking, I was her friend and she’d tell me stuff I swore not to tell anyone. But now I don’t know if they’d count as secrets anymore; so much has happened since and, just like rumors, secrets fade.

Yeah, what rumors? Well, I’ll tell you. Cassadee started the first one.
After Rian cheated and Lisa discovered they’d been dating secretly for months, she came to me and told me she wanted to get back at them. Well, not them but Cassadee. You see, Cassadee and Lisa were friends since middle school. They both started off with geeky outfits and progressed their way to the Goddesses they are now.

It was past midnight and I was just about to go to bed. Lisa called me and told me to go to the park so I did. I found her sitting on one of the tire swings in a robe and bed slippers. Her hair was tied up in a bun and her eyes looked sleepless and deprived.

“When I was still with Rian, he was dating Cass behind my back for half of the time we were together. I looked at her every day and thought ‘Wow, I never knew one could be lucky enough to have such a great friend.’ But now I spit on that thought with every salivary spit left inside of me.” She started crying so I held her tight.

She cried and I comforted, she talked and I listened and that was all she needed. Then, after a few hours, she got out of the tire and wiped her face a million times. Her face was a dark blur in the night but even so, she was beautiful.

I walked her to her house; it wasn’t all that far from mine; roughly ten minute walk. We didn’t really talk and that was fine. I said good night and she hugged me and I didn’t see her until the next morning.
Cassadee had printed pictures of her in a night dress and a freshman guy kissing. ON the top of the printouts it said once a slut, always a slut. There were little comments everywhere herpes origin = Lisa’s vagina, gets a boob job every week, WHORE ALERT! I took down most of the ones in the hallway at lunch but Cassadee made more copies and distributed them around. The freshman guy had his hand wrapped around her waist which pulled her dress a little and showed part of her ass.

This rumor went on for weeks and I noticed her crumble every day someone would look at her in the hallway and call her those words.

Then, after school once, she called me to come to her house and that it was an emergency. I rushed as fast as I could and when I got there, she was sitting on the front porch; shades on, cigarette in her mouth and cheeks swollen from crying.

“What’s the emergency?” I sat next to her. I wanted to take the cigarette out of her mouth and throw it away, but she was Lisa and one simply did not do such to Lisa.

She pulled up the sleeve of her shirt to her biceps. Her forearm was purple and blue and scratches and cuts filled it. “I was going to make a sandwich. So I took a plate from the top right shelf near the sink. I dropped the plate on my arm. It was an accident. I think it was accident. Alex,” she turned to me and took her shades off.

All I could do was hug her because I didn’t know what to say or when would be the best time to say what. She sobbed on my shoulder and said, with a whimper, “She’d be the reason why. One of the calamities.”

I didn’t get what that meant, I still don’t.

I wish I did. I want to get all of this. But, like Jack said, I can’t just decide that I know everything just because I want to.


I don’t know Lisa as well as she does. She a mystery, and like mysteries, she’s turned out to be one.

Notes

Chap. 2

Hope y'all like it. If you do, stay tuned but if you can't wait much longer, start reading my first fan fiction on this site called 'Bad Enough to Get You'

Bad Enough to Get You