The Journey Prize Stories 24 Read Free

will pause, turning away from the blackboard to face me, holding a piece of chalk in his hand. Sometimes, in my most recklessmoments of imagination, I see him dropping the piece of chalk in amazement.
    I am not sure yet exactly which passages I will quote, because I am only on page four. I reached page four this morning, as I sat in the hallway of the school with my best friend, Amy. Every day we have our mothers drop us off exactly forty-five minutes before the bell rings, and we sit on the ground outside the English office. I’m usually reading and Amy is usually peeling the varnish off the floor. The varnish lies in a loose coat over the hardwood and cracks as we step over it. Our school building deteriorates at an exponential rate; it seems like every day another part of it breaks off. One time I bicycled by and looked at the school and thought to myself, with fierce affection, “That is my high school,” relishing the still-newness of ninth grade, and just at that moment, a piece of one of the window frames creaked loose and fell from its hinge to the pavement.
    Amy regularly peels the floor in patches all over the school. We eat lunch in stairwells, our backs against the concrete walls and legs crossed in front of us, sandwich bags in our laps, cackling at each other over inside jokes we’ve had since second grade, and she’ll take a break from peeling the floor to peel her tangerine, trying to remove each peel in one long strip. She peels the floor in the gymnasium during stretches, and then leaves the waxy scraps in small piles here and there so that later, when we’re made to do push-ups, people’s hands and shoes accidentally land on these piles and their limbs go sliding sideways.
    I keep telling her not to do this, but lately she’s sort of been turning on me. I do think it’s natural to get irritated with your best friend, with whom you spend so many hours, encountering so many opportunities for disagreement – over whichmovie to see or whether to eat at Subway or Tim Hortons or whether Americans have the right idea about making the drinking age twenty-one or whether moustaches worn ironically can ever look really handsome – but once you have invested so many years in a friendship, such things should cease to matter. I’m not sure Amy recognizes this. Although our lives have run parallel since age eight, when, in Mrs. Hollifriend’s class, we both agreed that dinosaurs were not as fascinating as everybody else seemed to think, lately I’ve been thinking that Amy might easily drop me, like a jacket with a hole in it, like a hair elastic that’s lost its stretch. So today, we’re sitting there outside the English office and I go, without really thinking, “Amy, what’s wrong with you? Why do you always have to peel the floor and deface our school?” and she turns to me and goes, “At least I haven’t memorized every article of clothing owned by my English teacher.” It’s sort of a joke of hers that I spend so much time gazing at Mr. Sears that I must have his clothes memorized by now, except that it’s not really a joke, because I know that he owns six button-downs (three different shades of blue, one white pin-striped, one yellow, and one grey) and white athletic socks that show when he sits down, and four pairs of pants that are all sort of beige-ish brown. Only once did I see him wear a pair of jeans, at the English Club fundraiser, which was a car wash to raise funds and awareness for literature from the Augustan period. We used the money we made to buy used copies of
Gulliver’s Travels
on Amazon.com and then we just handed them out to people on the street. Mr. Sears called it “Spreading the Word.” He smiled when he said it, his mouth an open oval. It took me the first half of the car wash to adjust myself to that new jeans-wearing version of myEnglish teacher, but then I found something beautiful in his effortlessness, and decided that his casual style did not take away in the