Destiny 4

But now everyone was looking at me, waiting for me to answer. This situation was more bizarre than being stuck in the woods with a Tarzan-like person with no teeth, chasing after me. “Repeat the question again,” I said.

“What does being a human being mean to you?” Mr. Walker asked.

I had never thought about the question before, so I didn’t really know what to say. “I don’t know,” I said.

“Let me ask it to you differently then,” Mr. Walker said, “what makes a human being different than an animal?”

“Animals are honest,” I said. I don’t know why I said that, but I did. “They don’t create illusions for themselves like people. They don’t have to question what they are, or why they are, because they already know. The only thing humans have that animals don’t is the ability to lie themselves and believe their own lies. Animals are content with how they are. They don’t try to shape and reshape their existence over and over like people do. Humans worry too much about what it means to be human that they forgot to actually be human. An animal never forgets to be animal. People do.”

I heard a few people say, “Wow”. Everyone just stared at me as though I had said something that nobody in the history of the world had ever said before. I didn’t know how to feel, so I just sat there and waited.

“Interesting,” Mr. Walker said. He moved on to talk about something else, but I completely tuned him out. Throughout the course of the class, I saw people turning around, occasionally, not trying to be too obvious, looking at me. Some looked at me like I was odd, and some like I was someone to be admired. I wasn’t used to getting so much attention. 

The bell rang and everyone quickly scrambled out of the classroom. David and I were the last ones to leave the classroom, but Mr. Walker called me back in. “Jeremy, can I talk to you for a minute?”

I was afraid that I had done something wrong. I noticed that David was standing at the doorway of the classroom, watching me, almost as if he were waiting for me. I approached Mr. Walker’s desk cautiously. “Yes?” I had never been so close to him before, to see how clear his green eyes were. He had his arms folded over his chest. I could smell him. He smelled clean, like cologne and soap, but underneath that, I could smell his real body scent. I don’t know how, but I could smell his skin. It was a sweet, but pungent odor that filled my nose and made me tingle. I love his hard, square jaw line. Mr. Walker looked so youthful and handsome. I had to force myself not to stare at him too hard. 

“Have you been reading the book?” Mr. Walker asked.

“I read the first couple of chapters.”

Mr. Walker grabbed his copy of the text from his desk and turned to one of the pages. He handed it to me. “I want you to read chapter eleven. I think you would be interested in it.” He smiled. His teeth were perfect. I wondered if he had a wife. 

“I’ll check it out,” I said to him.

“You should participate more in class,” Mr. Walker told me. “You have good things to say.”

“I really don’t know why I said that,” I admitted.

“Do you believe what you said?”

I shrugged. “Still trying to find out.” I handed the book back to him and made my way out of the classroom. David was still standing there, waiting for me. I felt confused as to why he was waiting.

“What’s your name again?” David asked as we both entered the crowded hallway.

“Jeremy. But everyone calls me James. Or Jimmy. Mostly Jimmy.” I know I sounded stupid, but I didn’t know what else to say. 

“I’m David,” said.

“I know.”

He smiled. He had a brilliant, captivating smile. “What class do you have next?” he asked. I wondered why he was asking me that, but I told him anyway.

“Math.”

“I have English,” he told me. He leaned in close to me and I could smell his lemony sweat scent just as clearly as when Troy was fucking me in front of my mirror. “What are you doin’ after school?”

“Nothing,” I said, a little confused, but a lot excited. “Why?”

David looked around to make sure that nobody was paying attention to us. “I wanna talk to you about somethin’,” he said.

“Talk to me about what?” I asked, sounding a little more anxious than I wanted to.

“The way you smell,” David whispered. 

I was speechless.

“Meet me in the boy’s locker room at five,” he said.

I didn’t hesitate to say, “Okay.”

“Good,” David smiled. Every time he smiled, my heart skipped. He turned and walked away in the other direction. I watched him until he disappeared around a corner. As I turned around to go to my next class, I saw Alexis Wraith looking at me. She was standing on the third step on the staircase, books in her hands, just looking down at me. I don’t know why. In order to get to my next class, I had to walk by her. She was one of the many people I had never talked to before. Alexis was a strange girl who believed too much in science and atheism. She was pretty, not in a conventional way. She was the kind of girl whose beauty one could only appreciate out of high school. In a school full of shallow, self-centered girls, Alexis stood out like a meat cleaver in a set of forks. As I walked by her, she asked, “Do you even know what you’re about to change into?”

I thought she was talking about someone else, but she was looking directly at me. Her eyes were really magnetic. I couldn’t look at anyone else but her. “What?” I asked.

All of a sudden, Alexis looked frightened, as if she had just revealed a government conspiracy and now she was endangered. She sprinted up the staircase, dropping a folder along the way. Before I got a chance to tell her that she dropped something, Alexis was already gone. Not thinking about it, I stuffed the folder into my backpack, figuring I would see her later on that day and give it to her then. I thought about what she had just said to me, “Do you even know what you’re about to change into?” She sounded a bit scared when she said that. 

Still standing on the fifth step of the stairway, I turned around and looked down at all the crowd of students hustling to their next classes. The hallway seemed as if it were too narrow to hold all those students. I looked at them, and all I saw were a blur of random faces—but then I saw one face that stood out more than the rest of them. At first I couldn’t really tell if it was him or not, but the more I looked, the more I was convinced that it was. Troy was standing among the dense crowd of students, looking up at me, with his piercing gray eyes. When I saw him, my heart skipped. It was the first time I had seen him with clothes on. He wore an expensive-looking black suit that fit him beautifully. He looked so incredibly perfect that it almost took my breath away. We stared at each other for what seemed like forever.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, not out loud, but in my head. I knew he would be able to hear me. But he didn’t answer me. Troy just turned around and walked away, disappearing into the crowd. I heard the bell ring for the next class to begin, but I just stood there. I don’t know why I was so shocked to see him here. I don’t know why it made me feel so uneasy. But whatever reason he had come, it couldn’t have been good. And I wondered where he got that suit. 

To be continued…