Waiting Outside the Window

Chapter Three

Val counted down the seconds until lunch. She was sitting in History class and didn’t think she could take another minute of her teacher talking about what they would be learning this semester. 3…2…1…

The bell rang, signifying next period: lunch. Val grabbed her backpack and headed off towards the tenth grade hallway to find her locker. It wasn’t dead like it was in the morning, which was nice. Val shared locker 362 with a girl from her creative writing class named Felicity. They had been assigned to be partners for their first assignment.

“Hey,” Val said as she reached their locker. They had agreed that Felicity gets the top and Val gets the bottom because Val wasn’t too good with hanging things up. She stuffed her new books at the bottom on a shelf she put up.

“Hey, wanna eat with me?” Felicity asked.

“Sure, why not?”

Val slung her book bag over her shoulder and walked side-by-side with Felicity to the cafeteria. There were two lunches since there were too many students for just one, so not everybody that Val had met was there. She did spot a few people she knew, though.

Felicity and Val walked over to the far end of the cafeteria, next to the large windows seeing into a small courtyard where many of the students were sitting and reading or doing other artistic things. It was, as I’ve said before, an art school.

“Hey Felicity, mind if we join you?” a girl asked. She was short, like Val, with light brown hair, green eyes, and a t-shirt and jeans on. The girl she was with was tall with dark brown hair, dark brown eyes, and was wearing black tights, a short white skirt, and a red t-shirt. She seemed shy, the way she looked at her tray instead of at Felicity and Val.

“Of course. The more the merrier, right?” Val nodded, and the two sat across from them. “This is Val. Val, this is Amber and Melissa.” The short one, Amber, shook Val’s hand and smiled, while Melissa merely nodded her head in acknowledgement. This was fine, since Val wasn’t big on introductions; she never knew what to say.

“Oh my god, Mrs. Peterson’s class is the worst!” Amber exclaimed.

“What does she teach?” Val asked.

“French. It’s not that I won’t be able to get the language down,” she boasted, “it’s just that I can’t stand the teacher.”

“I don’t have French. I’m taking Spanish,” Val said.

“Lucky. You’ve got a cool teacher. Mr. Dileo, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, he’s supposedly the best teacher in the school. He was voted favorite teacher last year and the year before.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Hey Felicity, can I have a cookie?” Felicity was holding a small bag of mini chocolate chip cookies in one hand, and a sandwich in the other.

“Sure, why not?” She set her sandwich down and handed Amber one of the cookies. “Anybody else want one?”

Val and Melissa nodded, so cookies were passed around the table for everyone. For the rest of lunch they all listened to Ambers non-stop talking and gossiping, getting a word in every now and then, but mostly letting her go ahead and get it out before class. According to her she’d been holding it in all morning.

Ryan ate lunch with Eric and his friends, Caleb and Jesse. Caleb was short with wavy, dark brown hair that went past his chin and to his shoulders. He wore shorts that were frayed at the ends and a tie-dye t-shirt with a giant black peace sign in the center. He didn’t wear shoes unless necessary, and otherwise he wore sandals. Jesse was about as tall as Val—short—with long black hair and dark eyes. She wore skirts over pants with billions of words on them, and could usually be found wearing a band t-shirt and a lot of black and blue eye makeup. Ryan felt out of place wearing his jeans and plain black t-shirt. Blonde hair and blue eyes hardly fit in with these three, but he liked them, so he hung out with them anyway.

Eric pulled out a pack of cigarettes, and started handing them around. When he got to him, Ryan shook his head. “I don’t smoke,” he said.

“Oh, come on. What’s one cigarette gonna do to ya? Besides, it’s fun,” Caleb said.

“Nah.” Ryan waved his hand and pushed the pack away. Eric shrugged and put them back before taking out a lighter and passing it around.

“We’ll get you to try one some day, and believe me, you’ll love it.” Caleb put the cancer stick to his mouth and inhaled the smoke.

“Whatever.”

For the rest of lunch they stood along the back wall of the building. Eric, Caleb, and Jesse were smoking while they and Ryan talked about nothing in particular. When lunch ended, they threw their cigarettes to the ground and stepped on them, leaving the ashes as they walked away. Ryan looked over his shoulder at where they just were, and watched the wind blow the cigarette butts and ashes into a pile in the corner. He sighed and walked back into the school with his new friends, smelling of cement and cigarette smoke. He would have to remember to take a shower right as he got home.

After school, Ryan walked home, even though his new friends had asked him to stay and hang out. What he really wanted to do was hang out with Val, and exchange stories from first days. He would tell her all about Eric, and the kind of people he was hanging out with now. He was sure that she wouldn’t approve of them, but who else was he going to share this information with? He and Val never really had any other good friends. They hung out with a bunch of different people, but they never got close enough to be real friends with anyone else.

Ryan stared at the plants growing out of the cracks in the sidewalk as he put one foot in front of the other. He thought about everything that had happened that day and how he would sum it up for Val. Ryan liked to think about what he said before he said it, because otherwise all his words came out in a jumbled mess, making him sound like an idiot. He figured this out when he tried to talk to his first real crush, Leann, in sixth grade. He got dared to ask her out, but when he tried all he ended up doing was scaring her off by babbling like an idiot about the weather and how funny the clowns at the carnival were. She later asked Val if he was a special education student. He was ridiculed about it ever since.

Ryan looked up as he came to his block. The trees were still changing colors, making the neighborhood look like Halloween, which was in a month and a half still. While there were piles upon piles of leaves on the next block over, the lawns in Ryan’s neighborhood were leaf free and beautifully trimmed. He and Val decided long ago that the adults fed the trees some sort of chemical to make it so they keep there leaves for forever, and then drop them all at once.

Ryan’s house was one of the larger ones on the block, with a garage to the right side and a cute little garden that no one ever watered, but it somehow stayed alive anyway. He went around the back and stood looking at the lake for a moment before taking out his key and letting himself in through the basement door, where he pretty much lived. He threw his backpack on the couch and he made his way to the bedroom, where a phone was located. He planned on calling Val’s house and seeing if she was home. Ryan grabbed the phone from its cradle and jumped backwards onto the bed as he hit redial.

It rang twice before someone picked up. “Hello?” said Val’s mom.

“Hey, is Val there?” Val would surely be there if her mom was.

“Yeah. Let me get her.” The line went silent for a few seconds. There was some shuffling around in the background, and then Val came on.

“Hello?”

“Hey. Just got home from school and I thought we could hang out,” he said.

“Sure. I’ll meet you outside.” The phone clicked off, and Ryan put it back in it’s cradle. He ran though the basement and out the door, where Val was waiting patiently for him.

“How do you always beat me here?”

Val smiled. “That’s for me to know and for you to never find out.”

Ryan snapped his fingers. “Damn.”

Val slunk down on the downstairs porch with her back against the brick house. “So, how was your first day?”