Michael stared at her for a second, and then looked back down at the paper bag that held his lunch.
“I’m not interested.”
“I promise I’m not trying to ask you anything for a paper or for anybody. I just want to ask you something.” Sarah looked undeterred, even though Michael was barely giving her any attention. “It’s closer to a few somethings, but I’d like your opinion on it more than anyone.”
“Why do you care about my opinion?” He knew a few people were looking over now, either because of how late he was or something he was forgetting about Sarah. Whichever one was irrelevant. He just wanted to get to the sandwich in the bag.
“Because you know Ravenville better than most, and I want your opinion on it. How it is, how it isn’t, what you like about it.” She tried for a knowing smile, and only ended up with an annoying smirk. “Anything that might make you think it’s not worth it.”
“It’s not worth it,” he grunted past a bite of the sandwich. “I don’t know why you’re asking me. I don’t have any secrets that you can’t hear from other people.”
“But they’re not you, and I want to know what you, Michael Jay, think.”
Michael paused, for a second, chewing, and then shrugged. “No.”
Sarah’s smile was starting to falter a bit. “Oh, come on, there’s got to be something that grinds your gears?”
“Why would I?” The sandwich was done, and he got started on the granola bar inside the bag. “I don’t care enough for it to annoy me.”
Her smile disappeared, replaced with a much more skeptical expression. “You have more kills than most of the upperclassmen combined, nobody’s ever found any of your bodies, and you’re the go-to person for sorting out the payback rule. How do you not care about any of this?”
The granola bar crunched very loudly in his mouth, giving a bit of a pause before he answered. “The payback rule was not something I was actually trying for. It just happened, and I ended up in this position. I’m just here because I’m here. That’s really it.”
“That’s anticlimactic.”
He shrugged again, limp and without energy. Her reaction to his answers was written all over his face, but the confusion and disappointment didn’t both him much.
“Do you not…care about Ravenville?” She asked. “If you don’t care then why are you still here? Don’t you want to try to understand why this place is why it is?”
Her voice had grown a little more hushed, a little less confident, and Michael snuck a look around. More people were watching now, trying to look like they weren’t, and the handful that could pay attention all snapped their heads away to pretend like they weren’t looking. It was far from a silent cafeteria all staring at one point, but he could tell people were expecting something for some reason.
“What’s the point in that?” He replied, once he was looking at Sarah again. “It isn’t going to make anything in here more interesting.”
“You’re not going to go looking for anything?”
“I doubt there’s anything that could make this,” he gestured lazily around himself, “any less boring.”
Sarah looked at him with dismay, and he crushed up the bag, waiting to see if she was going to say anything else. She didn’t, and he waited a moment for the bell to ring, a sharp metal rattling that echoed through the cafeteria even above the sounds of everybody standing up and moving out the doors. He threw the backpack back over his shoulder and followed the crowd, tossing the crumpled bag into the trash can by the door as he went along.
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She certainly had some sort of plan that she wanted his input on. Perhaps she was planning an especially dramatic kill, on somebody in administration. Clearly she didn’t care for popularity, but it really didn’t matter. Hopefully, she would leave him alone now that she’d gotten answers that she didn’t appreciate. He didn’t want his lunch being interrupted again.
He wouldn’t kill her, obviously, but she would only be getting stonewalled until she just finally let him be.
There was a decent amount of time that he had before the next class really started, even after the bell rang, and that was time he could afford for an actual bathroom break. The knocked-out man was already gone, but the blood still lingered as a dark stain on the tiles, already crusty and dried. A few flakes snapped off as he stepped towards the stall, and a few minutes later he was right back out of the bathroom, crushed powder gone and falling off onto the linoleum.
It wasn’t his problem. He didn’t care about what she wanted. Honestly, today, he just wanted to be out. He was already done with this school for today. Nothing interesting had happened, just the same as usual. A fight shed blood for no real reason, he was assumed to be involved for an arbitrary cause, and he had to waste time cleaning himself up. Some parts were less common, but it was more of the same, more of what every day was like. He wasn’t a fan of it at all.
Hopefully something new, or at least less boring, would happen after school. Maybe he’d find something while going shopping for snacks. He knew it wouldn’t be in school, just going by the air from when he’d walked in the classroom. Half of the kids in here were already beginning to fall asleep, and the rest had looks of concentration like they were planning out their events for tonight, using the map of the world pinned to the wall as a stand-in for whatever maps of Ravenville were drawn in the backs of notebooks or tucked into binders. They couldn’t take them out to check now, just because of the teacher standing at the front of the room, reciting what was on her clipboard.
“I know not all of you want to go to college,” she said. “And that’s okay. There are many very good reasons that one might not want to go to college, whether that’s to go into trade work or to return to a family business. If you don’t want to do that, then remember, there’s plenty of places in Ravenville that you can use to keep yourself career ready…”
Michael quietly checked out, thinking about nothing in particular besides the shopping list he had written back at home. Everybody else was bored. He was bored. Clearly, Sarah hadn’t been bored, but she’d been too excited for something she must have known was never coming. He wasn’t going to indulge random questions that assumed he was the lord of everything bloody in Ravenville.
So there he sat, in a classroom with white walls dappled with little specks of black paint and gaps in the material, a handful of maps of the world and posters about history pinned or taped to the walls while the teacher spoke on under harsh lights about a college most people in here weren’t giving any thought to, thinking about something completely disconnected.
It was so, so boring in here. He hoped there would be something, anything to make things even a bit more interesting. Maybe there wouldn’t be. He didn’t quite know what would do it, but he knew things were reaching a terminal point of boredom.
He looked over the side of the desk, double-checking that there wasn’t any blood left on his boots. There was a small speck of dried blood stuck to the side of one, and he rubbed it off with the other, turning it all to a little pile of powder that fell to the carpeted floor.
It took five seconds of trying to pick out tiny grails of red-brown powder from the carpet the color of twilight approaching midnight for Michael to realize it was a fruitless endeavor at entertainment, resigning himself to listening to the rest of this class talking about the distant future of college applications and perhaps judging the reactions of others. There wouldn’t be much point to it, but he could practice picking out facial tics, or testing his ability to see where people kept their weapons. One girl’s brass knuckles were nearly falling out of her purse, it was so painfully obvious.
He didn’t really need to know what people thought from their reactions. Nobody was giving the teacher much attention, nobody was giving college much attention. They weren’t planning for it anyway.
Just the same, every day.