I walk along the third floor where the goths sit pretending to be vampires except when they pretend to be invisible, like when the jocks are passing. They don’t give a damn about me. For most of my life I’ve tried to avoid unnecessary attention, with some success. Which isn’t to say that I don’t have friends, but even when I’m around them I feel like the odd man out. Never more than now.
Stan Milman is tall and thin, with a mop of brown hair and an acne-pocked battlefield of a face. Like mine. He resembles me so much that people mistake us for relatives. That I can deal with. But they also mistake us for friends, because Stan has taken to following me everywhere, like a puppy with brain damage. We somehow ended up with six classes together, and school is beginning to resemble Hell even more than usual. Even outcasts need an outcast, but unfortunately Stan simply cannot be cast out.
Don’t ask me why he follows me around. He certainly doesn’t like me or think that I like him. I’ve made that clear enough. I haven’t just dropped hints, I’ve dropped his backpack down the stairs. Still he keeps coming back for more. Now, I can’t say my social life was ever too spectacular, but it existed. No more. My friends understandably don’t want to be in my presence if it means they have to be around Stan. I was never exactly an indispensable part of ther lives.
“Hey Stan, got any funding for your Mars mission yet?” I sneer as he falls into step behind me. He started a club to convince NASA to send rockets to Mars, single handedly giving space exploration a bad name at our school.
“Shut up,” he says, and gives a sort of nervous laugh. It sounds like what you would hear if you put your ear to the door of an asylum.
“If you go away lke a good little moron I’ll make you immortal, at least relative to your estimated lifespan if you stay here.” Stan considers this. He isn’t about to win the thinker of the year award anywhere, but he has obviously figured out that I just don’t have that true killer instinct. I consider this to be a major character flaw.
“I think I’ll stay here if it’s all the same to you,” he says. Another deranged little giggle.
“I really am going to fucking kill you,” I lie. “I bet if I did kill you it would count as community service.” If that were true, he would be long dead, of course. At least, I’d like to think he would be. I wonder if I really would kill him, if there were somehow no consequences anymore. We reach the room where I have my next class, English, thankfully without Stan. He goes back in the direction we came. He’s been going in the wrong direction this whole time just to annoy me. The things we do for hate.

I sit down at my desk in English, dropping my backpack and jacket on the floor. Mr. Caprio gives me a Look for coming in late. When he moves, dust cascades off of him.
“Class, today we will be starting, uh,” he glances at the cover of the book in his hands, “Great Expectations. Ahem. Hem.” He makes a few students pass around the books. I try to guess what he paid for his toupée, which sits atop his hairless head looking as out of place as a plastic palm tree at the summit of Mount Everest. Two bucks? Maybe three.
I catch the eye of the girl who’s giving out the books. My brain throws up a name: Anna. She hands me a book. I smile and say, “Uh, thanks,” concentrating on looking at her face.
“I need your ID card to scan it in,” she says. Damn. I pull out my ID, after several failed attempts. Crap. The little photo would be bad enough with just the hair, but there’s also the shirt. And the expression. I try to keep my thumb over the picture, but she pulls it out of my hand to scan it in. She tries not to laugh.
“I know,” I say, “I look like I’m on crack.” I put the card away before anyone else can get a look at it. Anna moves down the aisle, shaking her head.

Stan has just caught up with me again as I leave the school, apparently using the same secret animal senses by which birds navigate south in the autumn.
“Why me?” I ask the buzzing fluorescent lights. They chose not to answer. I know why, anyway. I’m the perfect target. I have a vision of a nature show with some predator stalking a solitary wildebeast seprated from the herd. Stan is a bully, of course. It’s silly to think of a bully as necessarily a big strong guy who beats you up. Bureaucrats have been doing it for years, bullying with great subtlety and at long distances to thousands of people. Stan is modifying that system to concentrate on one lucky person, avoiding grievous bodily harm not by being nameless like a bureaucrat or strong like a jock, but by depending on my cowardice.
“Hi,” says Anna, walking up to me.
“Uh, hey,” I say.
“Do you like cheese?” says Stan. “I really like cheese.”
“Shut up, Stan...”
“Uh, I’ll see you around,” says Anna. I nod miserably. Stan laughs evilly. She hurries off.
It’s a cold day outside, but not quite cold enough for any decent snow. Instead the sky was breaking my will to live by pounding me with a mix of sleet and cold rain.
“What the hell are you doing here?” I ask. “Your train station is in the other direction.” He shrugs.
“What train do you take?”
“The 8 line.”
“There is no 8 train.” He continues to follow me.
“It’s a secret.” I give him a mad grin. “You have to jump off the back of the C train between Broadway and High St. to catch it.” I try to shake him along a difficult stretch of sidewalk. He catches up.
“Where does the 8 go?”
“To a secret launching pad where I transfer to a rocket that goes to my house on the moon.” I duck between a group of idly chatting girls, go into a deli, double back, cross the street, go into the subway station, come out of another entrance, and enter at the third entrance. After a moment, he comes up behind me.
“Can I go to the moon, too?” he says, chortling inanely. I sigh, and run onto the waiting C train before it pulls away. Stan strolled in behind me.
“Die,” I say, wishing I could help him. That earns me a mad giggle.
“Listen,” I say, “This isn’t your train. Why the fuck are you following me?”
“Me? I’m not following you. I just happen to be going to... where you’re going.” He sits across from me, and I try to stare him down. Several years later the door slides open at my stop. He follows me out of the train. I walk out of the station and towards my house. I’m becoming freaked out. Finally I stop in the middle of the sidewalk. So does he. I look at him. He looks back at me. Here it is, I think. I’m going to beat his face in. I’m going to rip his head off. I’m going to... fuck it. I burst into a run. I manage to make it in the door, locking every bolt before he reaches the building. I lean on the door. Well, he knows my address, I think, but not my apartment number. Oh boy.

Pots clank. I sit down on the dirty cast-iron garden chair with the leaky old pillow on it to prevent serious ass injury. My mom ladles some soup into my bowl, a random mix of vegetables in unfathomable broth. Soup is the only thing she ever cooks. She makes a huge pot of it, and then we eat leftover soup for a week, or until we can’t take it any more. I poke at today’s masterpiece with a slice of bread, but the creature from the brown lagoon is still resting.
“So,” I say, my usual alternative to actually starting a conversation. It really annoys my dad, but he lives about 100 miles away now, so I can only imagine him complaining.
“Why do you always say that?” he’d say.
“I don’t know. I guess just to fill in the silence.” He grunts.
“I quit my job today,” says my mom suddenly.
“Ah,” I say. My mom is an artist, trying to balance her own work and the hack-work she has to do to feed us with dad gone. She’s had a shitload of jobs: doing religious greeting cards, designing boxer shorts, working in a sort of animation sweat shop, and more. At the same time, she’s had project after project of her own, each one the thing that she’ll finally make it big with, until she abandons it for this month’s excuse.
“We should have enough money to live on until I find more work,” she says. “This time I won’t be taken advantage of. I have so much more experience, so much more confidence than when I took this job...” I gradually tune her out.

I arrive in school the next day looking around carefully for Stan. He’s nowhere to be found. In fact, there aren’t many other people here, just a few people studying like there’s no tomorrow. Maybe there won’t be, for them, if they don’t. Some people can’t take failure. I’ve always had to take a more relaxed approach to that sort of thing. I look at my watch. 7:23. Why did I come a half hour early? Oh, yeah. I realize I’m shaking. Well, that fucking freak will be here soon, and this time, I won’t chicken out. I won’t...
His face, in my peripheral vision. He hasn’t seen me yet. I crack my knuckles. And then something just takes over. It’s like I’ve been possessed. By my brain. It certainly isn’t my conscience, which is behind me all the way. But something makes me walk off to physics class. Fear, that’s it. The glue that holds society together. I sigh. But next time. Next time I’ll do it. I really will. Next chance I get. Really.

I consider sitting down on the filthy platform at Grand Central, and decide I’d rather stand. It’s really hot down here, despite the cold outside. You’d think there’d be somewhere to sit, but there are just these huge bins for people getting off to dump their newspapers in, and a few inches of dirt and fossilized chewing gum. Finally the train pulls in, and blank-faced people spill out of each door like cows going into the slaughterhouse. I go into the train and toss my bag on the seat. It’ll be a long ride, with nothing but this week’s crappy novel and a back-ache from the seats, which were apparently designed for the Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Finally, mercifully, the trains pulls to a stop at my station, where I am picked up every Saturday by dad. He lives near Poughkeepsie, which likes to consider itself a city. They have a wall with graffiti on it somewhere, if it hasn’t been washed off.
I drag my ass out of the station. After a few minutes, dad’s car pulls up. It was designed during the Awkward Phase of car manufacture, with such wonderful features as automatic seatbelts that work only during the full moon and a special compartment for putting things in that you don’t mind falling out repeatedly.
“Hi,” I say, for no very compelling reason.
“Hi,” says dad. He shifts the car into gear. He has curly greying hair like steel wool, and is almost never clean-shaven. He doesn’t look a whole lot like me, which is generally a nice thing. “So how’s school?” I consider it my duty not to give him a straight answer to such an annoying question.
“Spiffy.” This is the most powerful profanity in my arsenal. He gives me a slightly annoyed look.

I sit at dad’s computer, my willing refuge from thought. I load up my latest game, Death Arena. The object is to shoot things until they stop moving. This game’s twist is that all of those things are other semi-conscious teenagers at the other end of the worldwide communication network, which will indeed be of great benefit to civilization if we ever find anything useful to say to one another. For now, we can use it to virtually kill one another. Some people think that this makes kids violent. I will say this: it doesn’t make us less violent. Kids have always played violent games to get out their aggression, but computer games don’t really work. The problem is they’re replacing the old games that did work. Pseudodeath rages around me, yet I’m incapable of just giving Stan a good beatdown and forgetting about it. I sigh and quit the game.
I go outside and toss a ball to myself for a few minutes, but am driven back indoors by the return of the slushstorm. I find dad watching TV. For some reason he compulsively watches The X-Files.