Jim - Two

Jim

 

Apparently, I was the last one to realize that we had slept too late and woke to the blinding slap of clothes to my face and a rush of activity on the floor below. It occurred to me a split-second later and, after nearly tumbling off the bunk, chased them out the door wearing only the shirt that had blinded me a minute before and trying frantically to get into my pants.

            We raced up the stairs and through the halls as I tried to avoid dropping the rest of my clothes. There was no one left in the corridors. Everyone else had obviously made it class on time. But now the problem wasn’t that we were late, but that none of us actually knew where we were going. What no one had bothered to tell us was that the damn building had about two hundred rooms and three floors. We had the room number on our schedules, but we had no idea where it was.

            After a few minutes of running and a hell of a lot of stairs, Gabe yelled something in Italian which no one else understood until we saw that he had found the class we were looking for. Unfortunately, Hersch was about to turn the wrong way and stopped short when he saw the room. I hadn’t seen him stop and ended up toppling over him. Hersch slipped on his socks and skidded into Gabe, who flew ahead into Erich’s back just as he opened the door.

            We collapsed in a heap, swearing and yelling at each other until someone cleared his throat. We looked up together to see a furious professor and a gawking class of boys in front of us. The four of us stood up, dusting ourselves off while we looked at the ground. “Well,” said the professor after a good long minute, “I see our new students need no introduction.” The class sniggered and he �" the professor �" hardened his tone. “Have a seat.”

            We kept our eyes down and slunk to our seats, which were unfortunately all next to each other. Erich, seeming uncharacteristically kind for a second, took a tissue from his pocket and handed it to Gabe, whose nose had started to bleed. But when the three of us gave him confused looks, he returned to his distinctive hunch-shouldered scowl, an attitude that we all soon reflected.

            That was how we spent the remainder of first period, ignoring the patronizing glances from the rest of the class and glaring at the short, annoying professor while he rambled about the monarchy. When we were finally released, the four of us got up and went our separate ways without a word. Second period turned out to be the only class of the day I didn’t have with any of them, something about classic literature, and I managed to catch a few minutes of sleep while the professor droned on.

            It was noon by the time class got out and I was starving. We were marched to the dining hall, a huge, high-ceilinged room with dozens of tables full of guys. Despite the extravagant setting, though, we were all given just a bowl of cabbage soup. I eventually figured out that the rations in England were even sparser than the ones at home. I sat at a deserted end of one of the long tables, close to some of the guys I’d seen in the other classes but nowhere near any of my roommates, who I noticed were sitting in equally isolated areas.

My next class, Geography of Africa, was further away from the dining hall than I thought it would be. By the time I got to the room, seconds before class started, the last seat was next to Hersch. We didn’t say anything to each other but exchanged skeptical looks while the tall, nasally professor assured us that the entire continent was demonic and completely uncontrollable. I realized it was the first time I had seen Hersch look even a little bit pleasant. He walked out of class a step behind me and totally silent, though, letting me know I hadn’t made such a great impression on him after all.

We all had the last period of the day together, which turned out to be some kind of biology. Fortunately, or unfortunately (whichever way you want to put it, I guess), everyone else was already in their lab groups of four, and we were stuck together.

Reviews

[Dakota]

You're doing a great job of wrapping the descriptions into the narrative and not just giving us the whole picture all at once. These poor guys hate that they only really have each other now.


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[Coyote Poetry]

I like how Jim looked at the school. His detail thoughts of the food to the classes is very good. I like the way you are writing the story. Making each event important. Thank you for the excellent chapter.
Coyote