Some Other Way to Continue

That night I flew through homework and peeled carrots in the kitchen with my mom. We throw insults back and forth at dad’s Lola. We use words that if I ever used them normally I’d be killed.
“And she wears make up all the time.”
“Probably to hide her ugliness.”
“Definitely, the ugly bitch.”
After dinner I wash the dishes and mom muses over how missed I was. I nod along but I’m not really listening. My mind is miles away, with Gee in a closet, him grinding into me as I accidentally drop three staplers on us.
I leave the kitchen with my mom smiling at the table with a cheap bottle of wine and chocolates I bought her as an “I missed you mummy, happy Christmas” present. She was so overwhelmed she wasn’t even angry that I bought alcohol.
I skate over to Mikey and Gerard’s. Their mom answers the door and smiles at me. We make irrationally awkward small talk about my trip to New Jersey and how I’m liking Pencey. “I’m liking it very well.”
At last Mikey appears at the top of the stairs. He shouts something across the landing and then runs down the steps, taking them two at a time. As soon as he jumps onto the floor he runs up to me and nudges me out of the doorway grinning. Seconds later Gerard appears at the top of the stairs and descends in the exact same way as Mikey.
“Mom I don’t want to share a room with Mikey anymore. I try keep my shit together and Mikey just fucks it all up!” he has a hopeless expression and one hand on his hip. His mom rolls her eyes.
“Get out of here Gerard,” she says standing behind him, positioned to close the door. Gerard sighs dramatically and stomps the three paces out of the house and onto the front step where I’m still standing. He and Mikey fish their boards out from behind a lawn chair. Gee kicks his board to the gate and then jogs over to it. Mikey and I follow.
“Last one to the library… is something shitty!” Gerard declares pushing off quickly toward the main road. Mikey and I race after him. In the end I’m the “something shitty” because Mikey’s long legs send him almost twice as far as my short ass ones.
Only Gabe is at the car park when we get there. He’s sitting on the wheelchair ramp with headphones on, humming and sliding his board side to side under his feet. He puts up a finger indicating “wait till this song is over before I can talk to you”. He begins to take his headphones off when his face lights up and he shoves them back on.
Gerard rolls his eyes and starts skating, trying a 180 twist but failing. I laugh and decide to try show him how it’s done but end up landing on my knees, dazed. I have no idea how that failed. Gerard and Mikey grin at me and Gabe laughs really loudly, his headphones increasing his volume.
Pete and Bert arrive while Gabe is still head banging to himself. It takes Pete skating up the rant and kicking him as he skates off the edge to make Gabe stand up. We laugh and talk and give out as we skate and everything feels so normal. It’s this sort of thing that makes me thankful I don’t live in Jersey anymore.

French isn’t at all as awkward as I assumed. The teacher told Gerard that if he wanted to pass this class. He then welcomed me and asked me my standard of French. When I said “bad,” he asked me to say that in French. “Je suis nul en Français.”
“No you’re not, you just spoke French,” he booms and then starts dishing out advice on learning off the future tense. I scribble down notes. Every time I look up the teacher has something new on the board. To my right Gabe is staring out the window as in every class and Gerard is sketching a comic book character in different expressions.
Gerard was right about chemistry. Yesterday after lunch it was okay because the teacher was gone for most of the class. Today though Gee drops me off at the chemistry lab door and the teacher spots him and winks to us. The rest of the class he makes low quality, high quantity, gay jokes. Sometimes the students laugh but most of the time these very obvious “pain in the butt” remarks.
Then he tries to describe protons and electrons. “Okay so say electrons are all guys and protons are all girls. The guys hate each other but love the girls, wait, bad example, a lot of guys love guys too- say all the protons are fish and all the electrons are cats…” everyone grins but I feel myself sinking deeper into my chair. The class doesn’t know these are aimed at me but I do and so does the teacher.
And then finally I go to math. Yesterday the teacher was sick so I spent the class talking to Bert, Gabe and Gerard. We managed to agree that we would all do Johnny Depp.
Today the teacher strides into the room on extremely high heels and dumps massive set squares on her desk. Dear god no I think as she writes those faithful words on the board Geometry chapter 2.
I think I’m going to cry. The teacher begins straight away by explaining the chapter of geometry I know all too well. She explains how an exam question would be done on this chapter and then handed out a pop quiz on the last one. I spend the class answering questions on triangles. I think I might get the word isosceles tattooed on me. With a equilateral triangle above it just to piss off the gods of those three sided shapes who seem to think I need to know more about them.
I hand up my test first.
“Are you finished already, Mr. uh…. Iero, yes?” the teacher says as I placed the pages on her desk. It took me twelve minutes and we had twenty.
I nod. “And you looked over it?” I nod again. Her eyebrows raise.
“We completely covered geometry in my last school,” I whisper, everyone else is still working.
The teacher nods slowly, “so you haven’t done any of this?” she opens her math book and flicks through two chapters of difficult looking algebra. I shake my head. “Okay,” she whispers, “I’ll correct this possibly by the end of class, I’ll see if you need extra geometry work anyway,” my face falls, “and if you don’t ill set you to work on the other two chapters.”
A short slightly chubby blond guy with glasses walks up and places his exam on the desk. Before he can go back to his seat the teacher calls quietly, “Patrick, come here. Would you be happy to help Frank here catch up? He’s missed the first two chapters we did this year and we’re already behind so I can’t reteach it.” The guy looks at me and nods, then walks back awkwardly quickly to his seat in the front. “Patrick will help you if you want and if you have any questions I’ll probably be in this room most lunch times and after school.” At that the teacher sighs and uncaps her red pen, a sign for me to take my seat.
The rest of the class I spend staring out the window beside Gabe’s head. I really don’t get what he finds so interesting to stare at every class.

I don’t go out to the guys. Gerard calls over but I say I can’t go out. I blame it on my mom who didn’t actually do anything wrong it’s just easier to say “Mom wants me in one night a week” rather than “I’m going to sit in my room trying to find x”.
I lie on my bed and flick through the algebra. I got 98% on my triangle exam so the teacher thinks I’m good at maths. Fuck. She “trusts I’ll be able to catch up fully by the time the class is finished geometry.” So I have to do class homework, triangles, and extra super-fast catch up work trying to link x and y and lines on graphs. I really wish I didn’t have to but I’m going to ask the guys how to explain it.
I catch Gee listening to music by his locker the next day. He’s humming and gently head banging. It makes me feel so important that he takes out not one but two earbuds when I talk to him.
“Um Gerard, do you know the chapter you did at the start of the month?” I ask halting in front of him.
“Uh yes. I think. I didn’t really follow it man, sorry” Gee says smiling apologetically.
In English we do lame ass group work. I’m with Gabe though and ask him too about it. He says “I have no idea I got a D in maths”… That Patrick guy is also in my group and he looks up at me from under a fedora “Uh I can show you today if you want…”
I nod and he nods and then we go back to the group work which is designing a poster explaining the characteristics of Iago. It’s one of those things where Patrick does most of the work, a girl called Lisa just sits there blatantly unaware of what we’re doing. Actually she probably doesn’t even know who Shakespeare was. I try help Patrick but only in phrasing it because his writing is much prettier. Gabe is the one who thinks he’s helping but doesn’t actually do anything but present it in the end. It was a very normal team effort.
At lunch I wander around looking for the guys. I can’t spot them at all but instead find Patrick drinking from a flask of soup at the edge of a crowded table. People speak to him and he replies but all his concentration is on that soup. I sit down on the seat opposite him. “Um, Patrick? Hi. If you have time could you maybe explain the uh first part of the chapter? I can follow the first example but not the second and I can only do one of the problems…” I say standing at the edge of the table. The guy stares up at me over the rim of his flask cup.
He smiles when I finish babbling, “Yea sure sit down. Um here I’ll get my notes…” he takes a ring binder and note book and book out of his bag and begins setting them out neatly. He has diagrams and everything.
“So lets start with the x and y axis’s…” and thus begins my being thought half a math chapter in a half by a guy in a fedora at lunch.

To be honest the only good part about a party is the drink. Pete’s parties are just everyone in high school or more, but under twenty three, getting very drunk in various downstairs rooms of his house.
I only ever went to two parties in Jersey. One was a Halloween one my friends dragged me along to despite it being my birthday. They then got very drunk and threw up everywhere.
The other one I went to I got very drunk for the first time in my life and made out with the schools resident “faggot” only to join him after on his pedestal as the only gay teenage guys in Jersey.
I would still be weary of parties if Pete hadn’t thrown that brilliant one in my name on my birthday. This one is just as good. I’m sitting, well sprawling, on a living room couch making out with Gerard after we drank a bottle of vodka between us. We had some other drinks earlier but we just drank vodka very fast. Gerard’s pupils are extremely dilated. There’s barely any iris left. Mine are probably the same, spheres of impossible black with thing rings of colour.
No one seems to care that we’re taking up the space that could fit six drunks just by making out. Pete throws a pillow shouting “get a room, but not mine” and laughing at his own hilarity. Gerard and I don’t pay any attention. I wake up the next morning with my head on his chest, lying on the couch while the floor is littered with sleeping drunken youth.

Notes

Meant to update yesterday! I was very close to being finished the chapter but i was to tired to function so i decided better to write something decent than something written when I'm on the verge of passing put... sorry and i'll try update sooner next time! :)
Oh ALSO guys, I'm Irish and our education system is very different to the USA and I'm just wondering if i got it okay..? like i don't even know how many subjects they do or how long their classes last and whatnot so sorry if all that is vague xD