Entry Four

  Personality Tested

  Jan slid in next to me at the round, avocado-green cafeteria table. Over the general din of high schoolers doing more chatting than eating, she asked, “Favorite color?”

  “Red. Blood red, like the viscera of my enemies,” I replied, unwrapping my PB&J&BC. (Peanut butter and jelly and banana chip sandwiches were invented by the elder gods before recorded time, but I had only recently unearthed the long-lost recipe.) Setting the sandwich aside, I retrieved my warm Mountain Dew from my Scooby-Doo Mystery Machine lunch box (don’t judge, it was my dad’s) and popped it open.

  Jan tapped my answer into her phone and asked, “Okay, favorite video game genre?”

  I side-eyed her.

  “Okay, okay,” she said, giggling. “RPGs. Obvi.”

  “Silly, silly Chipmunk.”

  Jan smacked my shoulder, which made the two randies sitting across the lunch table from us look up. Unlike most of our illustrious senior-year peers who picked the same lunch table every day in order to remain ensconced in their chosen clique’s fiefdom, Jan and I picked a different table every time. Like in multiplayer video games, we never knew which random people, randies, we’d be spending our time with. Sometimes, the randies were funny and we’d make friends. Sometimes, they simply ignored us. Either way, it added a little bit of spice, no pun intended, to our thirty-minute lunch period.

  Jan set down her phone and retrieved her lunch before continuing the interrogation. Her meal consisted of cold meatloaf in a plastic container. At least, I hoped it was meatloaf because if it wasn’t, Jan had a dark secret that would make me very uncomfortable. “Favorite veg?”

  “Apples,” I replied quickly.

  “Those aren’t…”

  “Not in this reality. But you see, Chipmunk, there are so, so many.”

  “Types of apples?”

  “Realities.” I tilted my head back to gaze straight upward, not at the cafeteria’s dingy ceiling tiles but at The Great Beyond and all its infinite mysteries. Then I shrugged. “Okay, fine. If your little test was created by narrow-minded neophytes, then I’ll go with spinach.”

  “You hate spinach!” she protested.

  “So what? It’s just a dumb personality test. This is about the eighth one you’ve given me this month alone. Plus, you never even tell me how I rank.” Jan was always giving me personality tests that she dredged from god-knows-where.com.

  She gave me a narrow-eyed, unamused look. “Au contraire, amigo mío. Personality tests aren’t about ranks. Not everything’s a competition.”

  “To Hero, it is,” Thomas said, wheeling up next to Jan. He rammed a plastic cafeteria chair out of his way with his wheelchair. The closest randie looked at him in alarm and then scooted her chair a few more inches away from him. I couldn’t blame her.

  “What’s your favorite veg?” Jan asked Thomas.

  He thought for a bit as he unceremoniously thumped his sack lunch down on the table. Next to it, more carefully, Thomas set down a small plastic box. He opened the box and extracted a tiny model tank and a tube of model glue. He was always working on World War II models, even at school. “Tomatoes. Those little cherry tomatoes specifically.”

  Jan nodded. “And that wasn’t hard, was it, Thomas?”

  “Objection—leading the witness,” I put in.

  “Overruled,” Jan said slowly, her voice filled with faux sadness. She waved an imperious hand toward Thomas. “Proceed.”

  “Not hard at all,” Thomas continued. “Why, any idiot could do it.”

  “My thoughts exactly,” I mumbled, which scored me another shoulder smack. My shoulder probably hated me.

  “Personality tests aren’t dumb,” Jan said. I could tell she was getting a little miffed. “They tell you about you—who you are, what your strengths and weaknesses are, stuff like that.”

  “Agreed,” Thomas said, because it was Jan. I suspected he had a teenage crush on her.

  “See?” Jan said triumphantly, giving Thomas a little thank you nod.

  “I already know me. I spend a lot of time with him, existentially speaking,” I said. “Super nice guy.”

  Jan gave me a Spock eyebrow to express her doubt, although I wasn’t sure which of my statements she doubted. “Anyway, only once you know yourself can you improve.”

  I held up the hand not lovingly cradling my precious PB&J&BC in a universal sign of surrender. “Okay, Confucius,” I said, “your convincing customer testimonial has now convincingly convinced me.”

  Her warm, sincere look melted into molten lava.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  “I’m a believer,” I assured her, nodding very, very sincerely.

  Jan hmphed, but before she could discipline me further, Thomas looked past me and said, “And there goes the neighborhood.”

  I looked over my shoulder and saw Bradley R. Hayes III, super jock extraordinaire and resident, snobby rich kid, strut into the cafeteria. His supervillain gaze swept the lunchroom and target-locked on Jan.

  She pinched the back of my elbow and leaned in closer. “I need you to do me a solid,” she whispered. “Come to the game tonight.”

  I looked a question at her. She was referring to our school’s basketball game. That much was obvious. Jan had made the varsity cheer squad this year, and Bradley, in addition to being Jan’s boyfriend, was also the basketball team captain. Of course, he was.

  “Um, why?” I asked.

  “Post-game rescue. He… just, please?” She was giving me her big, amber-eyed, pleading puppy dog look—a devastatingly effective weapon that I was pretty sure had been outlawed by the Geneva Convention.

  Now utterly defenseless, I nodded. “Done,” I said, keeping my voice low. “I promise.”

  That was all I could get in before Bradley arrived. His gaze slithered over Thomas and me, and he flashed an imperious scowl that would no doubt have made Mummy and Father beam with pride.

  “Sup, geek squad,” he said as he reached down and cupped Jan’s chin, angling her face upward toward him as he kissed her. The whole display had a blatant “Property of Bradley R. Hayes III” feel to it that made my skin crawl.

  “Hello, Bradley,” Thomas said, slathering on the mock sweetness like verbal frosting. Our mutual, soul-deep disdain for Jan’s boyfriend was one of those rare things my pseudo-bro and I had in common.

  Instead of unleashing his merely imperious scowl, Bradley cast his up-gunned “annoyed that you exist” scowl at Thomas. He went by Brad, not Bradley, and everyone knew it. But if someone got insulted when a classmate used their actual full name, they technically had only their parents to blame, didn’t they?

  “What’s up, Wheels?” Bradley replied.

  Jan cast her own glare attack at her boyfriend. “Um, excuse you?”

  He must have made his saving throw because Bradley gave her a placating gesture and then looked back to Thomas. “Geez, I’m sorry, Wheels.”

  Thomas smiled. It was one of his evil mastermind smiles, and I knew them well. “Don’t worry, Jan. This is Bradley being clever,” Thomas said. “Given the very limited capacity of his creative energy, it was going to be either ‘Wheels’ or ‘Chair Boy,’ and I think he went with the better of the two options.”

  “Wheels has a certain ring to it,” I put in, not wanting to be left out of the action.

  Putting his hand on Jan’s shoulder, Bradley decided to shift tactics and simply forget about our existence. “Come on. Let’s go to my table.”

  “I just sat down,” Jan protested.

  “Then un-sit down. God, why are you always so damned lazy, babe?” Bradley reached over and snatched up Jan’s lunch. She looked down at where her meatloaf container had been and froze, staring at the empty spot on the table.

  “Um,” I said, already feeling an angry, red flush creep up my neck. “I don’t think…”

  Jan kicked my foot under the table, cutting me off. She looked up at Bradley, and she was smiling prettily again as if nothing totally crappy had happened. “Thanks,” she said, “Let’s go.”

  Jan grabbed her purse, gave us a peppy, “See you guys later,” and walked away with Bradley. My stomach clenched as I watched him slip his hand into the back pocket of her jeans. Jan swatted at it, making him yank it back, but she laughed as she did it.

  Thomas was staring vorpal +2 daggers at Bradley’s back. “One word,” he said. “Why? Just why?”

  Bradley was the most popular guy in school. He was nauseatingly good-looking in a tennis-playing yuppy sort of way. He wasn’t super muscular, but he was toned and tanned from year-round basketball, tennis, and track workouts. It also didn’t hurt that he drove a brand-new Beemer convertible. That was why. I hated to admit it, but I could understand why Jan liked him.

  As for the converse, that “why” was a little harder to pin down. Jan wasn’t a card-carrying member of Bradley’s PKC—the Popular Kids Club (my label, not his.) What she lacked in popularity though, she more than made up for in every other area. She was compassionate and kind, and behind a front of initial shyness, she hid an odd, adorable charm. She made you hunt for it, too, and when you discovered it, you knew you were one of the very few people in the world who she had let in.

  Then, ironically, once you’d unearthed that buried treasure, you started to see it everywhere: in the way she dressed, in her quirky hand gestures and funny mannerisms, in her chipmunkian giggles, and sometimes hilariously terrible make-up choices. She became the kind of girl who made you smile simply by walking into the room because, when everyone else thought she was trying to get attention, you knew she wasn’t trying at all. In computer programmer parlance, Jan was WYSIWYG—What You See Is What You Get.

  Like all of Bradley’s exes, Jan was pretty. Unlike his exes, her beauty wasn’t over-the-top, make-up-slathered glamour queen nonsense. Jan’s attractiveness was more subdued. It came from her graceful demeanor and inherent honesty as much as from the delicate, beautiful curves of her face and magic-infused, elven eyes. So, which of Jan’s traits was the “why” for Bradley? Don’t know. There were too many possibilities.

  I left Thomas’s question unanswered as I watched her. She looked back and gave me a short, stealthy glance as she and Bradley sat at his table in the corner of the room. I tried to go back to my sandwich and quickly found that I’d lost my appetite. I didn’t make it halfway through my lunch before I packed it up again and returned it to the Mystery Machine for later consumption.

  Thomas had been quiet, so I looked over at him. He’d scarfed his lunch and was staring at his plastic model tank. The tube of glue and various tiny tank parts were untouched on the table.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  Thomas glared at me, then looked down at his chocolate milk carton and did his, “I don’t want to talk about it” shrug.

  “The ‘Wheels’ thing?”

  He scoffed. “The assessments of Neanderthals don’t bother me.”

  I wasn’t so sure about that, but I let it drop. “Grimchar? His continued defiance of the forces of lawful goodness is getting you down?”

  “Um, no. Also, stop asking me. You don’t care.”

  Typically, he’d be correct, but hey, Thomas was my pseudo-brother after all. “Jan, then,” I said, looking over at Bradley’s table. Jan was seated to his left, talking to a girl, another cheerleader, next to her. The rest of the table was occupied by half of the shway popular varsity b-ball squad.

  Thomas scooped up his lunch detritus, stuffed the glue and model tank back into the box, and reversed his wheelchair. Rolling past me, he stopped and skewered me with a critical hit glare. “Why do you let him talk to her like that? Jan’s our friend,” he hissed.

  “Dude, I’m not my Jan’s keeper,” I said, sounding as defensive as I was suddenly feeling. “And I was about to say something, but she waved me off. What was I supposed to do?”

  “I don’t know, something? Something helpful for someone other than yourself. Bradley needs to learn a lesson,” he shot back.

  “Okay, so it’s on me to teach Bradley a lesson?” I asked. Even without brittle bone disease, Thomas was only fifteen and was half Bradley’s size. So, as per typical Thomas, he was expecting me to solve his problems. “Jan isn’t a child. She makes her own choices.”

  “Fine,” he said, “I knew that was what you were going to say.” He was already rolling toward the door.

  “Just drop it, dude,” I called after him.

  He ignored me. Because Thomas.