RE: Ayo, real quick
Dopey > 10-22-2018, 06:48 PM
Alrighty, I finished the first chapter. I've decided to share it with you lot before it goes on FF.net and before I start writing the follow-up. Please give me your honest opinion, 'cuz it'll help me to gauge what I could do better/can do well. Beware, there is some cussing, and any censoring made to this was not done by me. Hope that doesn't break too many rules ^_^*
It was early. As I recall, around half-seven. As I awakened from my sleeping state, my eyes opened, presenting a blank, white ceiling. I’ll have to pin something to it, I thought, its empty appearance making the rest of the room feel cold, as if it lacked character. I sat up, stretching my arms and torso before lowering my hands to rub the sleep from my bleary eyes. Never before had I truly realised how good stretching felt after a good eight hours’ sleep, but it was there, in the quiet, that it struck me.
At once I stood up, letting my long arms fall limply to the side and sighing deeply. I traipsed across the room to the window, from which I drew back the curtains before opening it and letting a gradual flow of fresh air whisper its way into the room.
At this point I had noticed that I smelled… not exactly awful, but a little stale, so I decided to take a quick shower, after which I dressed, donning my new school uniform (which I had bought during the holidays) with a wink in the mirror, before brushing the currently tangled mess that sagged limply from my forehead, wincing slightly every time the comb got stuck. Following all of this I returned to the bathroom, cleaned my teeth, then left it again to pack my bag, filling it with nothing but all the coursework I’d done over the holidays and the same, tatty old pencil case I’d had since I was ten. Once this was done I left my bedroom.
“Something smells good,” I said as I sloped into the new dorm’s tiny kithen and took a large green apple from the fruit basket.
“Shame you’re not having any then, huh?” came a snarky response. Banjo set the now empty skillet into the sink, grabbing his plate of food and immediately shoveling forkfuls of scrambled egg into his mouth. I merely shrugged at his remark, polishing the apple on the sleeve of my blazer and taking a bite of its crisp, tart flesh.
“So,” began the honeybear, “You ready for Year 11?” I shrugged again and he took a sizable sip from his coffee mug before shuddering violently.
Banjo hated coffee.
His grimace quickly turned into a smirk, however, as he next said:
“Six whole weeks without your favourite person musta’ been tough on you, eh?” I rolled my eyes, tutting.
We both knew he was talking about Stu Netter, the pudgy little man who called himself our Form Tutor, and somebody I considered to be as close to the definition of ‘mobian error’ as was possible. Sure, Mr. Netter could be cool sometimes, but these moments were few and far between, and I honestly I felt awful for anybody who’d picked CSE Music, because he and his wife, who, as it happened, was even worse, were the only two teachers our school had for the subject (I mean really, why anybody would make the conscious decision to be so unpleasant was totally beyond me). At the end of Year 10, on Sports Day, in fact, we received our timetables for Year 11, and boy, let me tell you, nobody (not even Banjo, who rarely complained about anything, really) was happy to learn that homeroom would still be with good ol’ Stuart.
Banjo looked at his watch as I turned away to place my apple core into the bin. When I looked up, he was aghast.
“Shnikies, Cinos, it’s damn near eight o’clock! We’re gonna be late if we don’t get a move on.”
“Calm down, y’idiot,” I shot back, wiping my mouth with the back of a gloved hand and smirking a little, “we’ve got around an hour until registration starts, yet.” Banjo looked up at me, then back at his watch. Finally, he looked back at me, grinning and laughing sheepishly. I just raised my eyebrows coyly, folding my arms as I did so. “Still,” I continued, glancing at my own watch, “if we get there early we can actually get some decent seats this year.” This was, of course, the idea, on the proviso that somebody in the class didn’t fudge it up on the first day and “force” Mr. Netter to formulate a seating plan.
“You’ve given me no choice, guys,” he was guaranteed to say for the umpteenth time, “After telling you to stop countless times you still choose not to listen, so this is how we’ll do it.” Or, something like:
“I mean, I don’t really know what to say to you, guys. Of course, at the end of the day, something’s got to give.”
I’d say as far as the different Forms in our Year went, we were actually one of the better ones, but there was no way in Hell or high water that was going to stop Big Stu from complaining about how much we talked every day, or having a hissy fit every time somebody was one minute late to registration.
After a minute or two of joking about the man, Banjo and I had left the dorm and were currently situated on the bridge that connected the residential buildings from the rest of the school. It had only just come to light that neither of us actually knew where the homeroom was, but as I looked to the honeybear with an inkling of hope, he seemed completely prepared. The instant we locked eyes, Banjo’s hand was in and out of his pocket, taking out with it his phone. He sort of sat against the shallow wall of the bridge, tapping lightly yet swiftly on the hard, glass screen, and within a minute, without raising his head, he finally said “C16”. I knew right away exactly what he meant, so we set off to the left, towards the main buildings.
It wasn’t far up the colonnade where we encountered a certain familiar red echidna. Knuckles was leaning against one of the granite pillars outside D-Block, slowly working his way through one of the cafeteria’s trademark bacon rolls. As Banjo and I approached him we could see that small flecks of tomato ketchup had stained the corners of his stern, thin mouth, which grew very quickly from an expression of stoic duty to one of warm friendship as we drew near.
“Hey guys,” he managed through a mouthful of bread and cured pork, “Long time no see.”
“Yo, Knux,” replied Banjo, lifting a hand flaccidly in greeting, “How was your summer?”
“Oh,” he said, swallowing the bolus of food in his mouth, “Same old, same old. Spent most of my time guarding the emerald, and the other rough thirty percent of it training. How was the Isle ‘o’ Hags, Cinos?” Knuckles turned to me, taking a large swig from his bottle of water.
“Alright, I s’pose,” I said, shrugging lightly and starting down the colonnade again, “Sh’we get these seats then?” The other two nodded, following me closely into C-Block.
C16 was a Religious Studies classroom, and as such, a faint aroma of worn paper and old projects permeated our nostrils as we entered it. On the door side of the room was the teacher’s desk, behind which hung a whiteboard on the wall (a few feet in front of the whiteboard, dangling from the ceiling was a projector). The left wall as you entered bore another door, this one leading to a supply cupboard. The rest of the wall was emblazoned with various displays showcasing exemplary pieces of work previous RS students had conjured up; the opposite wall featured yet more displays, these ones designed to offer revision tips and sentence starters, as well as some points for Year 8 students to convince them to choose RS for their CSEs. It was kind of daunting that I would be taking mine in around nine months, and moving onto whatever life held next this time next year.
The back wall was completely bare save for a clock, and the low sunlight drifting through its windows gave it a very unfinished vibe when stacked against the other three.
The tables and chairs were arranged very strangely, each set-up forming some kind of malfunctioning Tetris piece. Banjo, Knuckles and I decided to settle for the front-left one, because it was far enough from the teacher’s desk not to attract too much heat from Stu during conversations, but was conversely close enough to the door that we were guaranteed to be let out before every other group at the end of registrations or Homeroom lessons.
We spent the next ten to fifteen minutes talking about mundane topics; things that had happened in the news recently, or which teachers we liked/disliked the most, until we eventually looped back around to bowl of poo-talking our Form Tutor. It was by this point that some of our classmates had started to filter into the room. Silver hardblinked a few times as he took his seat on the middle island, curling his top lip. Espio grabbed the seat next to Knuckles, immediately taking out his phone and leafing through Instagram, and then, Amy came into the room.
“Hey you gu~uys!” She trilled, sitting cross-legged on the table in front of me. “Miss me at all?” I exchanged exasperated looks with Banjo before turning to face the pink hedgehog.
“Hi, Amy, how was your summer?”
“I’m so glad you asked, Cinos! I had an excellent summer!”
“Great. Glad to hea--”
“You’ll never guess what happened to me while I was in Central City! There was this bird, see, and he’d lost his family, and so I helped him find them again, but this bird, see, he was special, right? Because his family were both robots under Eggman’s control--” my ears pricked and my blood began to boil at the sound of that name.
“Did you say Eggman?” I asked, concerned.
“That’s right!” Beamed Amy, although her smile faltered a little.
I flinched.
She continued, “Anyways, yeah, so I was kidnapped by these robots, see, and they took me onto the Egg Carrier--”
“Holy bowl of poo,” said Banjo, his eyes widening, “Were you alright, Amy?”
“Yeah, no sweat!” Amy was only smiling a mobian amount at this point.
I started to sweat a little.
“Anyway, this nice robot came and bailed me out, but I just didn’t know how to get off the ship, right? But then, who should show up, but Sonic?!” And just like that, Amy’s smile was completely renewed, and I heaved a sigh of relief.
“So, what,” I asked, thinking back to what Sonic had said about the stuff that went down in Central City over the holidays, “Did he swoop in and save you or whatever?”
“You bet! And he was so cool… You should’ve seen ‘im! And the way he carried me bridal-style to the ground and set me down softly before speeding off into the sunset…”
Espio looked up from his phone, staring at Amy with one eyebrow raised incredulously.
“By the way, Cinos,” Amy went on, slinging her bag off her shoulder, “I bought these for Sonic before I came; given that you’re his brother and all, I was wondering if maybe you could mail them to him?” From it she drew a large stuffed Sonic, a bouquet that was clearly on the out, a birthday card, and a crudely made friendship bracelet, and thrust them in front of me.
“Sure thing,” I said, “But, you think you can hold onto them until later? If you drop them off at my dorm after class, I’ll make sure they get to him in the coming month.”
Amy squealed, pulling me out of my chair into a tight, rib-cracking hug.
“Alright guys, get yourselves sorted out, please.” A voice boomed. Amy let go of me and I spluttered for oxygen as an air of light chatter entered the room. Kids scrambled into the nearest seat as Stu waddled awkwardly to his new desk then sat down before doing his own fair bit of coughing. After around thirty seconds this eased up and he was about to say something before it started up again. He hacked for another good half a minute and I heard Banjo snort next to me - a quick nudge to the ribs shut him up - I timed on my watch the seconds it took for Stu to stop coughing, and after fifty-two of them, he finally did, wiping his mouth with a plain, white handkerchief.
“Okay, so, we’re gonna take role, now, so answer your names when they’re called.” He did this, and, interestingly enough, didn’t have to stop and glare at somebody because they’d yawned or sneezed. I’d even go as far as to say it was one of the smoothest rolecalls we’d had since the beginning of last year.
Anyways, after role call finished Stu stood up again and shuffled around the room, handing out timetables to everybody. Eventually I got mine and I instantly stared at it, pouring over it hungrily. After a few seconds of analysis, I sank back in my chair and huffed. If my first lesson was any indication, it looked like Tuesday was shaping up to be the worst of them all.
“Maths... And I've got fucking Andy again.”
“Look on the bright side,” said Banjo, “At least there's Physics with Karl to look forward to. And then Languages after break, and-- ooh, I've got a new French teacher! Ms. B Bolter, whoever the Hell that is.”
“I appreciate your optimism, Banjo,” I replied, folding my timetable and placing it into my pocket before bitterly saying, “but, let me tell you, it's a little hard to look forward to anything when your first lesson taints your entire bloody day.”
“Whatever, man.” He merely shook his head, chuckling slightly.
For the remaining five minutes of registration we all went back to talking about the mundane, until we were shooed out of the classroom by Stuart, who had a Music lesson to teach, I guess. Sourly, I started off down the Colonnade's balcony after him, taking a right only a little later into B-Block, and continuing on to my first Maths lesson of Year 11, only hoping that my time wouldn't be as carelessly wasted as it was last year.
It was about halfway down the stairs that I heard a shrill, nasally voice behind me say, “Excuse me, Mr. Porter.” I froze in place, already beginning to seethe. Slowly, I turned around to face my perpetrator, and, as sweetly as I could muster, asked, “Is there anything wrong, Miss?” In front of me stood her. Mrs. Donna Pearce. For what had seemed like an eternity this woman had been on me like a tonne of bricks and it felt like I was entirely powerless to muscle her off my back. Every time I passed her in the corridor, she always made a point to complain regarding something about my person, be it an untucked shirt (which was fair enough), whether I had earphones in (or, rather, that I shouldn't, which was a little less rational) or even the colour of my socks (which, if you couldn't already tell, was absolutely ridiculous).
We liked to call her “The Crow”, for the simple reasons that she always wore black, and that whenever she entered a room you could guarantee somebody had fucked up.
Anyway, I looked her straight in the eye as I waited for her answer. Before she had even opened her mouth I recognised the sneer she wore; so classic of her, I thought, and when she actually did say something, I wasn't in the least surprised.
“Your hair is too long,” She leered, “You need to get it cut today or you'll be joining me after class tomorrow evening.”
“Sorry, Miss,” I returned, showing her an empty wallet. “I can't get it cut today.”
“Your financial instabilities are nothing to do with me, Cinos. You either find a way to get that mess cut or you'll find yourself sitting in silence with some work.”
a“Yes, Miss.” I nodded, starting back down the stairs. Vile, corrupt *****, I muttered, glaring daggers at a group of Year 9s who shook with laughter as I passed them.
