Chapter 3

The sea of bodies in the senior's hall parted as Marilyn walked through. Ne never looked at anyone. No one looked at nem. Yet not one student so much as brushed up against that insanely handsome body. Today ne was clothed in a bright yellow sundress.

Not being one to pass up a free ride through senior's hall, I sauntered along behind Marilyn. It was easy to pick up snippets of conversation.

"Who does she think he is?"

"I'm glad he isn't in gym, it would creep me out to have him watching us in the showers."

"Where does she buy her clothes?"

Marilyn pushed open the door to her private washroom. It had a sign that said "Nirs" on it. Ne had spent some considerable effort trying to introduce a completely new pronoun to the English language in Punkie's Hounds High. Ne had no success. The girls referred to ne as her, the guys as him. Except on the days that it was the other way around.

There were two groups in the school. Marilyn, and everybody else. As the door closed behind that sundress, the hall imploded. My books were knocked from my hands and my glasses kicked down the hall when they fell off as I scrambled to pick up my school work before it was completely destroyed. Given that I was the smallest person in the hall, it was a forlorn hope. A series of size eleven, twelve and thirteen shoes left prints across the paper that I was due to hand in at my next class.

I gave up on saving the work and just perched on my scattered belongings. That forced the mob to part around me or trample me into the floor. At this particular moment I didn't have a preferred option. The bell for class rang and I stuffed the papers into my backpack. I was due in civics.

Mr. Sheldon was our civics teacher. It was rumoured that he was independently wealthy, but that he couldn't face a life of unending leisure. He became a teacher so he could interfere with our leisure with maximum effectiveness.

"Petunia, late again?" He sighed deeply and peered over his glasses at me. "I do hope you have your civics paper for me." He held out his hand. I reached into my pack and pulled out a bundle of paper covered with generous sized footprints.

"You can't possibly expect me to read this?" Mr. Sheldon refused to take the shattered remains of my paper.

"No, sir," I said, "I expect the copy I emailed to you will be much easier to follow." I dropped the mess into his garbage can and went to my seat.

"The school has a policy against email submissions."

"The school also has a policy against violence against students." I shrugged and tried to bend my glasses back into shape. I got them to the point where I could at least balance them on my nose.

"How will I know that your submission is your own work?"

"It will be intelligent, coherently written, and actually have some tangential relevance to the subject you assigned." I pulled out a cloth and tried to clean the lenses of my glasses.

Mr. Sheldon looked at the paper in the garbage and my disheveled appearance and sighed again. If it weren't for the fact that he had been sighing in this manner since I had him as my history teacher in my first year in this school, I might have thought that he regretted his choice of hobby.

Marilyn chose that moment to enter and drop a thumb drive on top of the pile of papers already on the desk. Mr. Sheldon opened his mouth to argue, but Marilyn just looked at him.

"The paper wouldn't fit in my purse."

"Very well, take your seat." Mr. Sheldon walked back around his desk. "Since you all seem to have done an extraordinary amount of work on the nature of democracy, perhaps one of you will see fit to explain what the biggest threat to democracy is."

"The Russians," someone yelled from the back.

"Gun control," John Wayne said and the riot disguised as class discussion began. I slumped in my seat and worked very hard at not appearing to have anything useful to say. Marilyn was scratching in a very unladylike way. Ne caught me looking and shrugged. For some reason I found that funny and laughed out loud.

"Petunia," Mr. Sheldon said, pouncing on me, "since you are obviously enjoying the discussion, perhaps you could share the joke with the rest of us."

I wasn't about to explain that watching someone scratch at their package was the funniest thing I'd seen all day. So I just said the next thing that came into my head.

Always a bad idea.

"Biggest threat to democracy is an ignorant and apathetic population. All the media needs to do is spout off on gun control, and suddenly nobody is wondering whether we need another war in a county that never did anything to us."

"We get rid of gun control and everything goes back to the way it should be."

"Legalize drugs." That was Ron, back after a mysterious illness brought on I suspected by chewing his neighbor's petunias. It was nice to have him back, but even the possibility of legal drugs couldn't deter the school's number one fan of the NRA and captain of the football team; John Wayne. That was actually his name.

"Give everyone guns."

"No," Chastity said, she must have broken up with him already if she was arguing with him. "Guns are evil."

I should have let them hammer it out. Civics was always enlivened by ex-couples trying to make each other look stupid, and usually succeeding beyond their wildest dreams.

"Have you ever wondered, in all the discussion about guns and gun control," I said, dooming myself, "what kind of control is never mentioned? I mean, just mention guns and every body is too busy comparing whose is bigger to think about real life. Gun control isn't about guns, it is about stupid people."

I never knew Mr. Sheldon could move so fast. He was between me and John Wayne and he said the only words ever known to bring fear to the heart of a football player.

"Touch her and you fail." Mr. Sheldon sounded more tired than threatening, but the message got through. Fail a course and there was no free ride to college, no NFL career. John Wayne sat down, but the way he was glaring at me, he wasn't going to be stopped for long.

Wonderful. I hadn't finished a month of school and already I needed a bodyguard.