One girl walked with me to the cafeteria for lunch. She had brown bushy hair in a ponytail that was more like a squirrel tail in the context of her beady squirrel eyes. I thought I recognized her from somewhere, but I couldn't place it.
"Hi," she said. "I think I'm in all your classes." So that's why I recognized her. She reminded me of a squirrel I hung out with in Phoenix.
"I'm Belle."
"I know. We've introduced ourselves already. Like, four times."
"Oh, sorry. I have a hard time remembering things that won't be useful to me later."
She told me her name again. Lululu? Zagraziea? It was one of those forgettable names. She asked if I wanted to eat with her. I stopped in the hallway, opened up my date book, and looked at Monday, 12:00.
"Blank!" I exclaimed. I penciled in "Lunch with classmate" then checked it off while we stood in line. This was the year I would become organized.
We sat at a table with Tom and some other ordinaries. They kept asking me probing questions about what my interests were. I gently explained that that was between me and my potential friends.
It was then that I saw him. He was sitting at a table all by himself, not even eating. He had an entire tray of baked potatoes in front of him and still he did not touch a single one. How could a human have his pick of baked potatoes and resist them all? Even odder, he hadn't noticed me, Belle Goose, future Academy Award winner.
A computer sat before him on the table. He stared intently at the screen, narrowing his eyes into slits and concentrating those slits on the screen as if the only thing that mattered to him was physically dominating that screen. He was muscular, like a man who could pin you up against the wall as easily as a poster, yet lean, like a man who would rather cradle you in his arms. He had reddish, blonde-brown hair that was groomed heterosexually. He looked older than the other boys in the room--maybe not as old as God or my father, but certainly a viable replacement. Imagine if you took every woman's idea of a hot guy and averaged it out into one man. This was that man.
"What is that?" I asked, knowing that whatever it was it wasn't avian.
"That's Edwart Mullen," Lululu said.
Edwart. I had never met a boy named Edwart before. Actually, I had never met any human named Edwart before. It was a funny sounding name. Much funnier than Edward.
As we sat there, gazing at him for what seemed like hours but couldn't have been more than the entire lunch period, his eyes suddenly flicked towards me, slithering over my face and boring into my heart like fangs. Then in a flash they went back to glowering at that screen.
"He moved here two years ago from Alaska," she said.
So not only was he pale like me, but he was also an outsider from a state that begins with an "A." I felt a surge of empathy. I had never felt a connection like this before.
"That boy's not worth your time," she said, wrongly. "Edwart doesn't date."
I smirked inwardly and snorted outwardly, tucking the soda-mucous that flew out into my pocket. So, I would be his first girlfriend.
She got up to leave. "Coming to Bio, Belle?"
"Duh, Lululu," I said.
"Lucy. My name is Lucy--As in I Love Lucy."
"All right. Lucy--As in I Love Edwart." Maybe I'm special, but I've always had a knack for remembering mnemonics. "Trash to the left," I bellowed, throwing out my leftovers--a half -eaten cake. I looked back at Edwart to see if he had noticed that I, too, am a disciplined eater. But strangely, he was gone. In the ten minutes since I had last looked at him, he had vanished into thin air.
I turned around just in time to see that I'd missed the trashcan by a lot, and my half -eaten cake was flying towardss the back of a girl sitting at a nearby table.
"HEY!" she said, as the cake made impact. "Who did that?" "Let's go," I said to Lucy, grabbing her arm and running out of the cafeteria as the food fight began.