2 Chapter 2: Mondays

Aaron stared into the screaming electronic face of the clock for a solid minute, waiting for it to tick over. He supposed that he was still reovering from the fear. Never in his life had he had a nightmare like that. He'd had some pretty bad nightmares before, but he'd always mangaed to ride it out.

The issue, he concluded, was that it felt real. He wasn't sure how he could determine that, but he could still hear the blood pumping in his head as he laid sideways on his pillow. His own body wouldn't trigger his fight or flight response, would it?

He didn't really know.

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He walked through the school doors, into the sweltering heat. It had just turned spring and the school still refused to turn the heaters off. Sure, Pennsylvania weather wasn't always the best, but chances were it wasn't going to snow in the middle of spring again this year.

Most people, Aaron saw on the way to his locker, were wearing shorts and t-shirts. Well, everyone but the people who decided that they had to wear pants and long-sleeved stuff to still fit in with their general look.

Aaron himself was happy to wear whatever worked. It's hot out? Wear shorts. Cold? Wear sweatpants. So, in accordance with the weather, he to was wearing shorts and a t-shirt.

Even though it was almost the end of the year, Aaron was still really confused by the schedule, so he checked it on his phone. The schedule, at least as far as he knew, was called a "Rotating Drop 2 Block Schedule". The way it worked is that a class rotated up in the time of day, all the way to either homeroom or lunch, and then went away for a day. The schedule was organized into A days, B days, C days, and D days, and today was an A day.

That meant he had to take that Geometry test first period. Not that he was worried about it. Geometry was easy. But Aaron had a tendency to worry about almost everything, and so he felt that little bit of worry begin to knaw at the back of his head.

He had been staring at his phone most of the walk to his locker, and didn't notice someone was waiting for him until he actuallly got there. Looking past his phone, he could see two black boots standing in front of him.

He looked up to the owner of the boots. Emma. Probably his best, maybe only, friend. Emma was average height, a whole six inches shorter than Aaron, but she could intimidate most people twice her size.

She had messy hair, dyed black (Aaron had the year book pictures to prove it), that was cut short on the sides of her head and spiked up in the middle. Black lipstick, and only a bit of dark colored make up around the eyes. Smirk on her face, sarcastic nintey percent of the time. Today, she was weaing a black leather jacket that hung open, revealing the black tank top she had on underneathe.

She was, as usual, dressed in all black, in a less gothic, more punk rock kind of way. Aaron had always wondered how she managed to stay so pale, even though she spent enough time outside.

"Hey, dumbass," she said.

"Isn't it a little bit early in the day to be calling me a dumbass?" Aaron responded.

"It would be, but you have tweleve unanswered texts from me. Do you even look at your phone?"

"I don't have..." Aaron looked down at his phone, and saw that the little green speech bubble did have a red circle with the number tweleve in it on it. "Ok, so maybe I did miss some texts. That isn't the worst thing that I've done."

"Yeah, but I kinda need an answer to those."

Aaron read through the texts quickly. "A party? You? You're throwing a party?" he questioned.

"Yes, I am. Dad's gone for the week, so I'm starting my planning early. Are you gonna help or not?"

"I guess. I'm invited though, right?"

"No," she said, rolling her eyes. "I'm such a terrible person that I would never, ever invite my best friend and the only person willing to help me set this up to my party."

Aaron just smiled. "How many people are coming?"

She shrugged. "I don't know. I invited like twelve people and said that they could bring whoever, so..."

"So half the school's gonna be there?"

"If they can find it." Emma's dad owned a huge tract of land a little ways drive outside of town. Emma, of course, could be dropped anywhere and find her way back to the house. Aaron had tried once to see if he could do the same thing. She'd blindfolded him and led him thoroughly into the middle of nowhere.

She yelled from somewhere that he could take it off, and when he did, he realised that he was hoplessly lost. He decided his best bet was to just start walking in one direction, and he'd eventually find the fence around the property. He could just follow that back to the main house.

It took him three hours to find the fence. Then another two to get back to the house. Emma was sitting in a chair on the back porch with her feet up on the railing. She told him he'd passed the house three times.

"If I can find it," Aaron said quietly. The bell rang, and Aaron went on with his day.

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Somewhere around eighth period, he got a text from his baseball coach.

-Practice is cancelled. Looks like storms. Be at tommorow's game at 5.

Aaron sighed, and wondered what he was going to do with the rest of his day. He text Emma, but got no immediate response. She probably didn't need his help today anyway. He continued to listen to the history teacher, Mr. Walters, prattle on about the War of 1812 and how it was so very important to setting up the Civil War.

His phone buzzed and he checked it. Emma.

-No help today. You can hang if you want. Ashley's gonna be there though.

He texted back:

-No thanks. Don't want to get in you guy's way.

After another couple of minutes (the clock seemed to be moving especially slow) she texted back:

-OK. Was kinda hoping u'd say that, tbh.

Aaron sighed, and let the day go on. He'd find something to do.