Chomp
Chapter 4: Red

Kevin remained silent throughout the rest of the day—or at least, he and his friends didn’t say a word to me. English, science, and math all went by with him talking solely with Afroman, Betty Boop, and Zoë.

They whispered back and forth from their seats at the back of the room as the teacher handed out our first unit package for math.

“—thought he was, you know. Cool?”

“He was. He probably just likes her tits or something.”

My face turned a bright shade of red; I had to scream internally from being unable to defend myself. There wouldn’t be a logical explanation for me to have heard it—not that I would have been able to do much if I had.

Maybe a few squeaks, but that didn’t seem like a good enough defense. The thought alone of confronting them made me squirm in my seat.

Gym wasn’t much better. Despite the rain that had plagued the city for the past few days, we were still forced outside. I didn’t entirely mind being wet—it was more the sound that got to me. Feet pounding on pavement as they ran laps was one thing, but clearly pavement wasn’t in the budget. Instead, we ran around some soggy grass terrain, every footfall an agonizing squelch both for my ears and my poor sneakers.

I stared blandly at the soggy ground as I jogged along, allowing people to pass me through the lap.

“You’re an idiot.”

Looking over my shoulder, I saw Agnes trailing a few meters behind. She looked as content as anyone to be running and drenched. Her thick orange pigtails were plastered against her ears and down her back, and her black tee-shirt clung to her body, leaving little to the imagination.

My heart skipped a beat, and I almost missed my footing. “S-Sorry,” I mumbled, looking away from her and back to the ground.

“You’re sorry for being an idiot?” she asked, huffing. Her cheeks were rouged from the mileage.

I slowed down, allowing her to catch up. “I’m… No, I just meant—” I began, but stopped short. How do you even explain something like that to someone?

“You’re pretty pathetic for a vampire,” she scoffed, her lip curling. “Really disappointing.”

I frowned; she was on everyone about that apparently, but it still gave me an uneasy feeling when she said it aloud. “Well, I’m sorry about that, too. But you know I’m not really… Right?”

She shrugged. Whether she knew or not, she wasn’t going to say. “Know what you are for sure, though?” she asked instead. “You’re an idi—”

I knew what she was going for, even before her foot got sucked down into the giant mud puddle. It swallowed all the way to her ankle, causing her to lurch forward and dive head first into the thick mud with a lugubrious sound that could only be described as a ’splort’.

The mud flew out and spattered all over my face, shirt, and track pants, but it was nothing compared to the amount on Agnes. The only thing visible that looked remotely like her was her eyes.

“Oh god, it’s the creature from Black Lagoon!” someone shouted.

Agnes spat a mouthful of mud out with a curse word. I bent over and offered a hand to her. She snarled at it and smacked it away. “I don’t need your help!”

“What’s going on?” barked the teacher. He made his way down from the bleachers with his large, pink umbrella.

When he caught sight of Agnes, he had to stifle a giggle behind his hand. “Miss Randt, your instructions were to jog. Not swim,” he said, smiling.

Agnes slowly got to her feet as best she could. The mud dripped slowly down her body like moist, mahogany mash. She lifted her foot again, only to have it come out of her running shoe. She swore loudly as she was tipped off balanced and forced to jam a perfectly white sock into the mud.

There were snickers as the others stopped running to gather around and stare. If Agnes felt embarrassed, it was hidden under the thick mud. I bent down and yanked her running shoe out. The mud resisted more than I expected, but it eventually gave way.

“You, Mister…?”

“Who… me?” I asked. He nodded. “Sam.”

“Yes, well. You can go escort Miss Randt to the change rooms,” the teacher said, backing away from us. His lip curled as he eyed the filth. “Once you have both showered in there, I expect to see you after school.”

“W-Why?” I sputtered. Agnes’ face looked just as shocked as my own.

The teacher gestured to both of us. “For all of this… nonsense. You can write a paper about why physical education is no laughing matter to distract your classmates with.”

I swallowed hard. If only it had been him that was sucked into a mud puddle.

“Well, what are you waiting for? Off you go.”

Glumly, we walked up the hill and into the school. Other students stared, pointed, and laughed at the two muck monsters that trudged their way through the halls. We received murderous glares from some of the janitors as well.

At least they had a good reason.

For how poorly funded this school was, I didn’t expect them to even have showers, yet there they were. The shower nozzle sputtered to life—barely—as I turned the knob. A trickle of cold water fell lamely from it like someone who was just peeing not because they had to, but because they were told to. As I waited for the water to warm up, I placed Agnes’ grime-encrusted shoe on the bench meant for dry clothing or towels. My own clothes were still on me when I showered; there was no point in showering and putting dirt back on my body.

It sent shivers down my spine to use the public towels that the change room offered. I didn’t need to be anywhere near them to know that they weren’t washed as often as the sign above their shelf claimed. When I stepped out of the shower, I dried myself off as best I could with handfuls of low-grade paper towels that left fibres on my skin.

My clothes were still damp, but they would have to do. There were only a few more paper towels in the slotted machines, and I decided to use them elsewhere.

Agnes seemed to take twice as long in the showers as I had; after all, she had far more to clean off. I sat outside the girls’ change room, cross legged on the floor, ignoring the looks of disgust and perverted accusations from girls passing by. Finally, she emerged.

“Hey, Agnes?” I scrambled to my feet.

Her normally out of hand curls hung straight and wet, hitting her mid-torso. Her thick black makeup and pale foundation were faded from her face, making her freckles more apparent and her lips pinker. Despite the glare and running mascara, I couldn’t help but think she looked…

“What?” she asked, crossing her arms. There were goosebumps all over them, and her blonde arm hair stood on end. Evidently, she hadn’t had much luck with the showers either.

She took one of the many ponytails that she had around her wrist and wrapped it around her hair in a makeshift bun. “Look, take a picture or something.”

“I—No, I’m…” I began, struggling to find the words. Why? Why did this type of thing always happen to me? Pleadingly, I held out the shoe to her. “Shoe! Your shoe…”

She examined it quizzically, her lips thin. “It’s clean,” she whispered, taking it from me. She dropped it to the floor and shoved her socked foot into it before looking back up at me. “This doesn’t change anything. You’re still a vampire and an idiot.”

I sighed; there was no winning. “Fine. Sure, I’m both. And I’m sorry about the us having to stay after class.”

She shrugged, starting off down the hall. I followed suit, the angry squealing sound from our wet shoes ringing in my ears. “It’s not your fault. It’s the teacher’s,” Agnes fumed, her strides longer than I would have thought.

“For assigning it?”

“For making us run in the fucking rain. The gym might be small and smell bad, but at least it would have only been a scraped knee or something,” she continued darkly. She stopped outside an office door which I could only imagine belonged to our gym teacher. She rapped on the door and we waited in silence.

“The paper is to be written as follows,” our teacher whispered as loudly as he could. The librarian still gave him the stink-eye and cleared her throat. “You are to write a three-page essay—together, just one essay—with at least five reputable sources and quotes, about why physical education is important, not something you mess around in.”

It didn’t sound terrible, to be honest. Essays were generally easy, and I didn’t mind doing research for them. The only thing that made me feel uncomfortable was the fact that this library lacked computers.

I cleared my throat. “I—so… umm… Are we typing them or…?”

The teacher gave a hearty laugh that was received by a lot of ’shhh’s from the various readers.

“Not a chance,” he hissed. “You both feel being physical and pushing each other in the mud is the way to go, so I’m assuming you’ll enjoy putting a physical pen to physical paper. All research you need will be found in the old-school way. Books.”

“I actually prefer the new-school way, Derek,” Agnes supplied listlessly. She sat slumped in her chair with her arms crossed, not even bothering to look him in the eyes.

“Five pages, then,” the teacher announced, turning on his heel. “I want it in my office by tomorrow morning. Have fun!”

He strutted off, head held high like a man that got off scot-free from a manslaughter charge.

“Think you could just like… Suck his blood until he dies? I’ll let that one pass, I promise.”

I sighed. “I wouldn’t—couldn’t—do that,” I replied, my stomach churning at the thought. The man smelled too floral for me. “Why do you keep saying that I’m some undead comic book creature?”

“Excuse you,” she said, sarcastically. “You’re not undead—you’re alive, just like everyone else in this school. What, you think people die to become vampires? More of an idiot than I thought.”

It was like something had grabbed my stomach and punched it down to my knees. The myths had always been standard; everyone believed them, and that kept us safe. The fact that this girl knew the truth was… unnerving.

But it was probably just an educated guess—a fan theory, really, right?

“Whatever,” I replied, looking away from her. “It’s… It’s all the same stuff anyway. Listen, did you want to brainstorm ideas for the body paragraphs?”

Agnes looked like someone had slapped her in the face. “All the same stuff?” she demanded, her voice raised. A few people in the library tried to silence her, but she didn’t seem to care. “As what, exactly? Zombies? Werewolves? Do you have any idea of what’s out there?”

I stared at her for a long time. Her chest was heaving and her jaw was set; as creative as some people were in high school, she actually believed this stuff. But whether it was because she read it in a book or actually knew the truth, I couldn’t say.

“No, I don’t,” I replied. It wasn’t a complete lie; I had never personally heard of any werewolves. “But I do know that we should do this essay, or Derek will probably do worse than any werewolf ever could.” It felt odd to use a teacher’s first name, but for the life of me, I couldn’t remember his last.

She sighed exasperatedly. “Fine.”

Working with Agnes proved to be challenging.

I didn’t mind so much that she was strongly-opinionated with how things were worded—if anything, it greatly improved the essay. Every time I wanted to say the word ’big’ or ’good,’ she would roll her eyes and scribble down the word ‘monstrous’ or ‘sizeable,’ and ‘excellent’ or ‘incomparable.’

“Those are penny words—plain, boring, and basically not worth anything more than a cent,” she explained after we had written the second body paragraph. Her eyes lit up, and there was almost a crackling or spark in her blood. “It’s acceptable to use them once in awhile, but if I see ‘good’ written in anything more than once, I want to pull my hair out.”

We were there for what felt like hours; it was hard to tell, as the library’s clock had been stuck on twelve-fifteen for the whole day. “How does this sound? ’In conclusion, physical education is a necessary part of our education. It—’”

“You can’t say education twice in one sentence,” Agnes pointed out lazily. She was laying on the table, her hair sprawled all around as she bounced one leg over the other.

I sighed and rubbed out the word with my deteriorated eraser. Two days of use, and it was already looking like it might need last rites.

“‘In conclusion, physical education is necessary. It provides excellent release methods for energy, keeps the body healthy, and allows...’ allows… I’m not sure where to go from here.”

“And it allows people like Derek to be employed when daycares and Chuck-E-Cheezes wouldn’t normally take on such a legally questionable responsibility,” Agnes finished happily.

I fought the urge to smile. “Can I ask you something?”

“If it’s another synonym question, I swear to god…”

“It’s not,” I replied, ignoring the jab. She was right, though; words were never my strong suit. “Why do… Why does everyone pick on you?”

Her lips thinned, her brows furrowed, and she didn’t respond. Instead, she rolled off of her back and to her knees so that she was sitting on the table. Her chest was now level with my eyes; I hope I averted them before she had time to notice.

“Well, I guess it’s because… People don’t like to hear the truth.”

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