Before following Oliver through the door of the school's front office I stopped at the water fountain and pulled out the plastic bottle full of pain medication. I dumped a handful out then put
all but two of the little white pain reducers back into the bottle. I popped them into my mouth before taking a long drink of the cool water.
A wet trail extended from the entrance all the way to where I now stood. The steady dripping stopped suddenly once I stepped through the office entrance as the carpet began eagerly soaking up each drop.
The office looked the same as it had on the first day of school. A student stood facing away from the entrance, leaning his elbows on the front desk and looking down at his phone. The secretary that usually sat at that desk was nowhere to be seen and it appeared as if the Principal's office was empty as well. The kid turned at our entrance and nodded his head before resuming his surfing of the internet. It felt odd that no one else was there.
Maybe they're getting breakfast…
The desk, which was really more of a countertop, ran from wall to wall, with a swinging, waist-high door right in the middle. At one end of the room was a long, wide table with foldable legs. It stretched from the front desk to where the wall turned ninety degrees into the opening of a short, dimly lit hallway. On it sat several large, plastic bins. There appeared to be one bin for each type of item, shirts on the left end, followed by pants, shoes, school supplies and books, electronics, jewelry, and miscellaneous all the way to the right.
It didn't make sense to me that so many people would just leave their things here. The lost & found table would be the first place I would check if something of mine went missing. Shaking my head I walked toward the table, a squelching sound coming from my feet, while Oliver waited quietly by the door. He had never liked being in the school's office. He had been traumatized by Principal Simpson's Halloween costume last year. Simpson had looked like a very convincing vampire. I had tried to tell him that vampires weren't real, but for some reason, he held on to that delusion.
The shirt bin was overflowing, with some long-sleeves reaching into the next bin over as if they were trying to create an outfit all on their own. I grabbed the shirt on top. It was a black, short-sleeved shirt that, upon shaking it out, revealed a bright, pink unicorn on a rainbow field. I rolled my eyes and threw it back in the bin. The next shirt I pulled out of the pile looked good to me. It was a dark gray colored t shirt with no logos or embroidery. Simple. I wouldn't even need a shirt had I been a little more thoughtful and actually zipped up the zipper on my rain jacket.
Looking at the next bin was depressing. There were so many usable pairs of pants and shorts in there. It was a waste. I grabbed a pair of tan cargo shorts that looked to be my size. Out of the next bin, I took a pair of clean, white sneakers. Fortunately Angel Grove High was rather large, so there were two single person restrooms right in the office. Thankfully I had put my phone in the zippered pocket of my rain jacket, otherwise, it would be just as soaked as my boxer-briefs and everywhere else.
With everything in hand, I walked down the short hallway to the first restroom door. The room was small. A toilet sat in the corner directly across from the door and next to it were a sink, mirror, and trashcan. A white, automatic hand dryer complemented the rest of the room, which was completely white. The only bit of color was the silver lining around the mirror and the slightly off-white cracks between the floor tiles.
I placed the dry clothes in the sink and the sneakers on top of the toilet tank. With difficulty I managed to undress, only to realize that I didn't have any dry underwear or socks.
Damn it, I thought.
With only one choice I hurriedly stepped closer to the hand dryer. It was surprisingly quiet, yet the air blowing out of it was quite warm. I held my boxer briefs up in the flow of air, hoping that it wouldn't take too long to dry them. It didn't help that the dryer shut off every thirty seconds, causing me to move my one good hand around under it until it began blowing again. It was probably to keep the thing from getting too hot – or something.
A few minutes had passed, and I was just switching to drying off my socks when a loud knock came at the door.
"Hey bro, the bell's about to ring. I gotta get goin'."
It was Oliver, though his voice sounded muffled through the door between us.
"No worries, you go on ahead; I'll catch up later."
"Alright, bro, see ya!"
Ten seconds later the second bell of the morning rang, letting students know that they had five minutes to get to first period. The thought of going to first period just did not sit well with me right then.
I'd have to skip it this time so as to preserve my dignity and sanity for another day. First period was Spanish with the always inscrutable Mr. Puffer. The man had a polite and congenial demeanor toward everyone - everyone except me, of course. Puffer had made his disdain for the military very obvious.
He'd singled me out on the very first day of class. He hadn't even waited for the class to begin introductions before tearing into me.
"Is there a Jamie Anderson here?" he asked with a tinge of annoyance in his voice.
"That's me, sir." I was sitting toward the back of the class of 34 students, so I raised my hand to let him know where I was. "Oh we have an arrogant one, do we?" His words confused me. How was I being arrogant?
"Mr. Anderson, I want to make something very clear to you. There will be no talk of the military or of any 'heroics' in my class, do you understand?" A sneer stretched across his pudgy face as he spoke the word 'heroics.'
I stared at him with a dumbfounded look on my face. "This is Spanish class. The only reason I'd be talking about the military would be if you were teaching us vocabulary relating to the military," I said.
Puffer jumped to his feet, his dumpy body jiggling with the effort. "Don't get fresh with me young man!" His face was getting redder by the second.
I tried to hold in the retort, but I couldn't. "Mr. Puffer, why don't you stick with teaching Spanish and leave the "cool-kid" slang to me? No one says "fresh" anymore." The class had erupted in laughter then, forever cementing Puffer's hatred of me.
The sudden quiet in the restroom brought me back to the present. The hand dryer had shut off again. I pulled a long breath in
through my mouth, realizing right away what I was doing. I snapped my mouth closed, jarring my teeth together painfully. Remembering that incident on the first day of class had swiftly brought my mood to a new low. That had been my first visit to the principal's office.
My socks and underwear were still slightly damp, but it didn't bother me too much. I slipped on the boxer briefs and painstakingly got fully dressed. Looking at the ensemble in the mirror it seemed that someone had just put a brand new outfit in the lost & found. In fact, nearly all of the clothes out there looked like they just had just been pulled off of the rack.
An odd feeling crept over me, causing a shiver to run up my spine as I fit my casted arm back into its sling. I began to feel as if the room was closing in around me, as if the walls were slowly but steadily edging in on all sides, hungering to crush me back into the nothingness from which I was created. One moment more and I grabbed my rain jacket, placing it in my right hand, and slipped my phone and my meds ach into one of the front pockets of the cargo shorts that I supposed were now mine.
There was still the matter of my wet clothes. There was a roll of small, plastic trash bags sitting on the back of the toilet, and my wet clothes and shoes all fit into one of them. I put that bag into another bag, just in case. As the bathroom walls continued their slow march toward my destruction I hurriedly, and clumsily, opened the bathroom door and left.