Perfectly Flawed (4 page)

“Dude, I’m definitely telling her that you
said that,” I joke.

“Man, I’ll tell her for you.” Harley tugs on
the hem of her cropped black t-shirt. The shirt rises when she
raises her arms, or moves, or breathes, revealing the sterling
silver barbell pierced in her navel. “I don’t want to run today,”
she whines loudly as she ties the purple laces on her black
sneakers.

The thought of running the miles irks me but
there is no avoiding it. I have grown to accept it, it’s
Monday—Mile Monday
,
yay
alliteration. The coaches
like to believe that running the mile weekly will make us faster.
In retrospect, it should, but it doesn’t, not in the way they want.
I
could
run a fast mile; I
could
also enter a chicken
wing-eating contest in a dive bar in the middle of nowhere,
Washington. I just choose not to.

“Well, suck it up, Harley,” I tell her,
patting her on the back, and forcing humor into my voice. There
isn’t anything funny about this; I hate it as much as she does. We
walk into the large gym, the thick scent of floor polish,
chlorine—which is weird because the school doesn’t have a pool—and
sweat wafts through the air. It’s enough to make you gag, which I
do whenever I am lucky enough to walk through the double doors. I’m
graced with this every single day of school.
Yay me!

People are scattered around the gym in
groups; some stretching, most talking, all annoyed to be in this
class. We check in with one of the four coaches in charge, the one
that leads the juniors, and start stretching near the bleachers.
Well, I attempt to stretch—cramps are a bitch—Harley just mumbles
to herself while leaning against the lower bleacher as her eyes
scan our gabbing classmates.

Well, she’s not mumbling in the crazy way
that usually means someone’s hearing voices and replying to a
conversation in their head, more like the angry way because it is
helping them from standing up and straight punching someone square
in the nose.

“Hey.” I look up and spot Zephyr running
toward us. He’s wearing a sleeveless gray shirt and black
basketball shorts with a red stripe running up the side, his long
hair is tied back away from his face, as he does during gym every
day. He smiles at me briefly before turning his attention to the
grumbling girl next to me and saying, “Harley, how are you this
lovely morning?” I’m not sure if I got my sarcastic quality from
him, or he got it from me. He leans into a leg stretch. He’s
usually one of the first people in class done running the mile.

Harley just stares at him, her pale, freckled
face expressionless as she waits for him to do… something, before
she huffs with annoyance and looks away. Something she learned from
me in our many years of friendship. I guess that I rub off on
people after a while.

“Okay,” Zephyr says to himself, his chocolate
eyes set to me. His lips try not to crack into a smile but it
slowly does, his lips pulling to reveal genuine happiness.

“Kalivas!” someone yells from the other side
of the gym. Jackson Ray, one of Zephyr’s friends, and tallest,
towering over Zephyr by a good eight inches, catches his attention
across the gym and waves him over.

“Just wanted to stop by, you know,” he tells
me with a small shrug. He straightens up and reaches his arms above
his head in one final long stretch that leaves a lazy smile on his
face.
That good, huh?

“Whatever, dude.” I stop stretching, dropping
my arms down to my side, my hands to the shiny, hardwood floor, and
follow Zephyr with my eyes as he walks to his usual group of
friends—the stereotypical jocks. Jackson claps him on the back—you
know, that really random thing guys do when they see each other,
like they’re joining forces or something before they attempt to
save the world… or act like complete douches—before his head falls
back in laughter at something someone in the group I can’t see from
where I sit said.

“What’s up with him?” Harley nearly whines;
her eyebrows raised in speculation and wonder, her eyes set on
Zephyr. Her voice shocks me. She’s never been nice to Zephyr and I
have never understood why. He’s tried to be friendly—he
is
friendly—oftentimes trying to include her in any conversation he
and I are having but she usually says something snarky and mean or
just outright ignores him. There are only so many times that you
can pretend someone is furniture before they start to question it
and begin to believe that
you
are furniture. I’ve always
wondered, always wanted to ask why she acted that way, but I just
normally forgot.

I’m easily distracted.

“You weren’t exactly inviting,” is what I say
instead. There’s exasperation in my voice and I censor my words as
a coach walks by.

“He took offense to that?” Her black-nailed
hand rises to point to Zephyr across the gym as he jokes around
with his friends. “Zephyr should know me by now”—how
can
he
when you don’t talk to him unless it’s to sling an insult—“I’m a
bitch and damned proud of it.”

“Trust me, Harley,” I say as I lean back from
my stance, resting myself on my arms. “I think the entire school
knows that.” The coach long since passed to the other side of the
gym.

“Damn straight,” Harley replies, as if we’ve
come upon something new and profound. There’s a sly smile tugging
at the corners of her lips, slowly spreading and growing until
she’s grinning mischievously.

It abruptly falls from her face when a shrill
screech sounds through the air.

Stupid whistles!

Coach Monk, the varsity football coach,
called class to attention, making sure that we’ve all checked in
for attendance, before sending us out to the track for our damned
weekly mile.

I start at a leisurely pace, not wishing to
put in any real effort, and finish in just under ten minutes.
Harley has another lap and a half to run before she’s sitting next
to me on the bleachers, panting like an overheated dog in July
that’s trapped in a car with all the windows rolled up. Sweat pours
down her freckled forehead, her hair is wet and matted to her skin,
her chest heaves, and her skin is the same shade of pink as a
Sharpie highlighter. I only needed a drink from the water fountain
on the wall and I was good to go. It looks like Harley might need
intravenous fluids or she’ll pass out right here.

Finally, class ends after we suffer through a
few rounds of basketball. Some girl, that doesn’t understand the
concept of
keep your eyes on the ball
, got hit in the face
by the basketball. Hard. She screamed about her nose job. I rolled
my eyes. It was a typical day in gym for us. Soon, I’m in my normal
clothes coating myself in Victoria’s Secret cherry blossom body
spray that matches my lotion, then I’m sitting in AP Chemistry
boiling things over a Bunsen burner. Finally, it’s time for lunch
and I’m entering the cafeteria, avoiding eye contact with, uh,
everyone.

It’s been a few years since anyone attempted
to bully me. Back in the day, they’d be able to get away with it
easy. I was tiny and scared of everything. I never told anyone how
the other kids at school treated me. Not even my aunt. Zephyr and
Jamie never witnessed any of it but they weren’t stupid. One day, I
discovered that Zephyr was suspended from school for a week. I
later discovered that he punched Bobby Logan in the face for
bullying me. While his parents grounded him for that, they also
praised him for standing up for me during my
difficult time
.
Jamie, later that same week, kicked Angelica Boston in the shins—a
sixth grader when Jamie was in fourth grade—for pushing me into the
dirt during recess for being a
freak
. She wasn’t suspended
but Angelica Boston never bothered me again. Neither did Bobby
Logan, another sixth grader. They didn’t even look at me before
they graduated at the end of my freshman year.

I know that I have nothing to worry about
when I walk through the halls anymore. People have long since
forgotten about me and my
mysterious
past. Okay, not really.
But it’s old news. They still talk about me and what happened but
they aren’t mean to me. Not openly, anyway. Now that I have Harley
and Kennie on my side, who knows what might happen. And with Zephyr
and Jamie bigger and stronger, I wouldn’t want to press it. Plus,
I’m not so little and scared anymore, I sure as hell stand up for
myself now and I throw a mean right hook.

I snag an apple from the lunch line before
the lunch lady can notice that I didn’t pay for it. Cleaning the
skin with a napkin, I quickly make my way to the back of the
cafeteria and take my usual seat at our normal table. It’s a half
table that sits directly in front of the large windows that
overlook the quad and baseball and soccer fields. The sky today is
a hazy gray with the sun trying to force its way through the clouds
in a few places. It was supposed to rain today, the normal
Washington weather forecast, but we got cloud cover, overcast,
instead.

Meteorology is a lost art if you ask me.

Especially here.

Harley takes the seat across from me, the
flushed pink tint to her skin has diminished quite a bit since I
last saw her but she still glows and glistens in her dark clothing;
her Ramones t-shirt and dark jeans. She tugs her brown-bag lunch
from her backpack and drops it on the table before her. Something
inside knocks against the hard wood top of the table. Kennie soon
joins the group in her pink cardigan too bright for my tired eyes
to handle and short jean skirt that reveals slightly too much when
she leans forward—or any direction for that matter.

My friends are the only two that don’t judge
me. They don’t talk about the scars they
claim
they see,
they don’t turn up their noses when they pass me in the hall, they
don’t act like I don’t exist—these are the only two people that I
trust outside of Zephyr and Jamie.

Harley is shorter than I am with light brown
hair, almost blonde, and a lip piercing… among others. She wears
primarily black—the reason why we got along in the first
place—primarily band t-shirts and dark jeans with her hair
flat-ironed straight to combat against the unruly frizz that always
wins. When I met her in the seventh grade, she was dark and sullen
with a facial expression that screamed
Forget You World!
She
was perfect for me and my issues. I quickly claimed her as my
friend when we partnered together to dissect a cow heart in science
class. Well, she dissected the cow heart; I passed out halfway
through.

I didn’t meet Kennie—full name Kensington—the
British-born pretty girl, until high school, middle of our freshman
year to be precise. She was assigned the seat next to me in frosh
study hall. With her long blonde hair perfectly coiffed, her pink
cardigans and short skirts snug tightly to her curvy body, she was
the complete opposite of Harley and me. Or so we thought. One day
during a boring study hall session when we both ran out of
homework, we started discussing music—Slipknot, Otep, Static-X—and
we just knew that we could get along. Before, I was judging the
book by the bright and colorful cover. Kennie preferred to hang
with us after that than the beautiful people that constantly tried
to steal her back to their side of the lunchroom. She constantly
complained about their self-righteous attitudes.

Now when she slides onto our bench, a smile
brightening her perfect features, people don’t look at her like
she’s crazy. They just think that she’s plain insane. It’s the only
way they can begin to comprehend why she’s friends with me. That
doesn’t stop them from trying to learn my dark secrets and probing
Kennie until she tells them, very spiritedly, ‘Screw off!’

“I heard something today,” Kennie begins in
singsong, her French manicured fingers plucking away at a poppy
seed muffin she brought from home. Her eyes scream,
I have
gossip! It’s juicy! You should ask about it and listen to me! Now!
Right now!

It seems appropriate to indulge her; the only
thing Kennie loves more than stories about popular people I don’t
care about is
magazines
with stories about celebrities I
don’t care about. But Harley cuts me off before the question leaves
my lips.

“Oh, before I forget,” Harley starts proudly
and loudly. Her mouth is full of a sandwich I can no longer
identify. “I said that you have bigger balls than me, Ken.”

Kennie raises a pristinely sculpted eyebrow,
the left one to be exact, and, after a few moments of her
pondering, she giggles her little girly giggle. She covers her
mouth politely with her hand. “Well, it’s true,” she states
confidently with a flip of her hair. “Right, Joey?” Both of them
turn their attention to me, as if I am the deciding vote in this
situation. They both agreed, why ask me?

“Well, yeah…” I drag out before I swallow the
piece of apple I was chewing. “But you wouldn’t really want that
getting around, would you?” Kennie likes people to think that she’s
weak and worried about breaking nails when she can lift more than
some of the football players. Okay, most of the freshmen team, but
it’s still something. And they still have time to bulk up and build
some muscle.

She waves an arm through the air as if she’s
done with the conversation and ready to move on to more important
things—like pointless hallway gossip. “That’s irrelevant; I still
have this knowledge stuck in my head, waiting to erupt and you, my
friends, are going to listen.”

“Gossip, Kennie?” Harley asks, rolling her
sky-colored eyes. She hates gossip. “When did you join the Dark
Side?” It sounds like a joke but I know Harley. She isn’t joking.
Like me, she doesn’t care about the goings-on of anyone else in the
school. She doesn’t care who broke up with who, who cheated on who,
who started dating who, who punched who… wait; she’d care about
that one.