Chapter 5: Chapter Five

Friday, October 15th

Publication day

“Is everybody fired up about publication day?” Mr. Jakes, our journalism teacher, asks. Only Charlotte Lee answers ‘yes’. Charlotte was my main secret crush, but now she’s Josh’s squeeze. She sits across from me but it feels like a thousand miles. I’ve lusted after her for three years, but it took only a few days for Josh to turn my fantasies into his reality. She’s small everywhere, even wears tiny round granny glasses, but my fantasies about her were huge.

Kirk Usher, the editor, starts talking, and talking, and talking, like he’s afraid if sounds stop coming from his mouth, his vocal chords will dry up. If I believed in prayer, that miracle would be on my shortlist, along with rescuing Caitlin, nailing Charlotte and landing a job.

Kirk finally shuts up long enough for Mr. Jakes to speak. “How many of you are in the new creative writing club? How about you, Carson?” Mr. Jakes asks.

I try to hide my anger by looking away. For three years, I tried to get Mr. Jakes to start a creative writing class or at least a club, but he was always too busy. So we ended up with a sponsor—Dr. Stephanie Draper—a retired English professor who happens to be friends with Josh Brown’s physician parents. At the first meeting, Josh was the only one she called by name.

“I heard Josh Brown was elected president,” Mr. Jakes says.

I realize that no matter how good I am with words, I can’t find one to describe the maelstrom of anger, happiness and frustration I feel about this club. Instead of creating stories, I should try to create words for all these mixed emotions that wreck my heart and rack my head. I’m feeling frushappanger.

“Josh is so hot,” some freshman girl behind me says.

“But he’s also cool,” another girl adds, almost breathless.

I turn. “Maybe his porn name could be Luke Warm,” I joke. They don’t laugh.

“Jealous much?” the blonde one almost hisses. Truth is, I was jealous at the first meeting of the creative writing club. Josh presented something he wrote, while I sat in stone silence. I’ve dreamed so long of being a writer that I’m choking at the chance. Show off or shut up, I guess.

“Don’t get your hopes up. Josh has a girlfriend already.” I slap them down. I don’t add that the girlfriend happens to be Charlotte. She’d been mine many times in my head and hand.

The girlfriend thing is so perplexing. I don’t have a love life. I have a lust life. I can’t figure how to move from the vertical world to the horizontal realm. My few so-called girlfriends have been interested more in the friend part than my interest in their girl parts. My exes are not just the opposite sex, they’re opposed to sex with me. Unlike the girls on my screen, Thien was a prude mute. No matter how I touched her, which wasn’t much, the only sound she made was to say “No”. If I get another chance, I hope I’ll think with my head, not just my horny.

“Banks, listen up,” Kirk says. He’s dressed to kill, which is good, since I want him dead.

“What is it, Kirk?” I overdramatically pronounce the ‘k’s in his name.

“Banks, your stories didn’t suck, but only two? Normally what you lack in quality you make up for in quantity.” Kirk laughs at his own words. He’s his own—and only—best audience.

“Thanks for the input, Kirk,” I say, which is Carson-speak for Shut up, asshole.

“The all-state story is good,” Kirk says. It’s killing him to compliment me. I’m getting the soft part of the palm. I’m flinching for the hard heel shot. “But my headline made it great.”

“‘All-State Ambition’,” I say. “You’re right, Kirk. Nobody wants to read about all-state athletes like Randall Martin or Gabrielle Gibson. It’s all about your headline.” I wrote a story about them last year, so Kirk wanted me to update their status. A running story, he calls it.

“I’m glad you see it my way,” Kirk says, then leaves my sight like I flushed. I’d like to hate Kirk because he treats me like crap, but he is a good editor. I hate that fact even more.

I’m six days away from another chance to share my creative writing—my real writing, not fact regurgitation—and I’ve got nothing as good as what Josh shared. His story, called ‘Reconsider Me’ involved a smart, sensitive-type boy moving from best friend to boyfriend with a beautiful, mysterious girl. His story, according to Dr. Draper, “yearned to answer the questions of the human heart”.

Questions of the human heart? The pen clicks in my head as I rush to grab the yearbook from Caitlin’s senior year, then grab an open computer. I open the yearbook page to ‘Homecoming’. Caitlin’s staring at the camera with a stoned expression, the same expression I saw so many times in our house, on her Facebook, in her vids, but not in those online photos I’ve found. With the yearbook in front of me, I click away on the keys. I’ll change the names, but not the story, or at least what I know about Caitlin Autumn Banks’—or should I say Autumn’s—fall.