“I’m almost home.”
“And it would be tragic to die a block from your house, wouldn’t it?”
“This from the girl who didn’t want to say abandoned child.”
“Foster wasn’t really abandoned,” I said, the smile slipping off my face. “He was just kind of … sent away.”
“Doesn’t make it any better, does it?”
“Maybe it does. She’s coming back for him.”
“Yeah,” Cas said evenly, and I wasn’t sure how much either of us believed it.
2
As far as I was concerned, physical education was evil.
You take a bunch of teenagers, make them strip down in front of each other in a locker room, have them don hideous matching uniforms, and then measure their worth based on their ability to chuck balls at a net, into a hoop, or at each other. It was just. Evil.
I dragged myself into the locker room at third period, dropped my gym bag on the floor, and ignored the gaze of anyone who might be looking at me. To be honest, some of the other girls really scared me.
When I was a freshman, I had braces and more pimples than I could count. I didn’t wear makeup. I didn’t own short-shorts. I had never tasted alcohol, and I certainly didn’t know how or why you would ever want to blow anything.
Being in this class kind of made me feel like the stereotypical old man who sits with his cane outside of the grocery store in cheesy movies, ranting “In my day…” Sodas cost a nickel. Kids respected their elders. Freshmen didn’t show cleavage. Or wear thongs. Or—my eyes widened but my mouth stayed clamped shut—tan BITE ME onto their backsides.
With no one to share in my disbelief, I kept it inside, mentally noting that maybe I should do like the Reeding application says and write it in the story of my life. Chapter One: How the TS freshman locker room has more push-up bras than a sale at Victoria’s Secret.
Most of the boys weren’t any better. They acted like the guys on teen soaps, preening and showing off, but the fact that they were as close to middle school as the senior guys were to college made calling them freshmen almost laughable. Freshboys was more like it.
If I had to be with these kids for two semesters, I wanted to surround myself with the quieter ones, the ones who looked and acted their age. The regular ones. But there were so few of them that I think the prostitots and freshboys were what was considered normal.
As for Foster, he didn’t resemble anything closely related to normal. Unfortunately, the only thing he was closely related to in this class was me.
“Hey, Devon! Dev!”
He jumped up and down, waving his arms in my direction as I left the locker room. I took a deep breath and went over to him.
He was wearing the same TS gym uniform as the rest of us, but even that couldn’t look right. All the boys ordered their shorts big so that they hung down at their knees or lower. Foster’s were well above his knees, and his shirt was crammed in unevenly around the waistline. His socks were pulled up as far as they could go, and the laces on the cross trainers my mother had insisted on buying him were tied in big fat bows.
I could tell—in my very high school roots, my senior class inner core—I could tell that no one was going to push Foster around. They wouldn’t slam his books to the ground when they saw him after class. They wouldn’t pull his chair out from under him in the cafeteria.
“Hey, Foster!” A couple of PTs nearby waved at Foster. Foster, looking mildly confused, wiggled a few fingers in their direction. They all giggled, but it sure wasn’t because they thought Foster was cute.
What these kids would do was laugh at him, and somehow that seemed just as bad to me. How do you stop people from laughing at you? How do you make them take you seriously?