Lucky Stars
“You see, Sarah, It’s kind of like a colony of ants. You know how a colony of ants works?” Joe hesitated a brief moment, but mostly for a dramatic effect. He knew that Sarah didn’t know anything about ant colonies, and neither did he. But he had just failed a test on ant colonies in biology class, so he felt like he could probably fake some knowledge, and he therefore continued.
“You see, in a colony of ants, especially red ants, there is one ant that tries to give all of the other ants orders to carry out, and well, sometimes these ants get sidetracked, and fail in their mission, which is really, uh, bad, for the colony as a whole.”
Joe felt more rattled than he normally did during a big game. He had no idea as to what in the hell he was talking about, let alone how it was going to somehow safely lead him through a successful break up with Sarah.
“Are you breaking up with me?” Sarah hid her face in her hands.
Joe was shocked. He didn’t think that Sarah was going to cry in front of the entire cafeteria, the last week before graduation.
“Well, I’m just saying, we’re both going away to college, and like a colony of ants, I gotta do what I gotta do for the team. And the team, uh, America, well, it needs me to do my work.” Joe felt pretty good about his analogy now, but Sarah’s face was still buried in her hands. It wasn’t that Sarah was a bad girlfriend, Joe was just tired of having sex with her, and wanted to expand his horizons with other girls. Plus, he’d had sex with Sarah’s best friend at a party last weekend, and he knew that he had to tell her this fact before one of the other cheerleaders broke the news.
Sarah, meanwhile, was trying her hardest not to laugh. Did Joe really think that he needed to break up with her? She hadn’t been faithful to him for the last six months, and she had just figured that they would officially break up over the summer, before leaving for college. She peaked through her fingers at a few of the other tables in the cafeteria.
To her left was a table full of jocks. She had recently had sex with two of them: Tommy and Bill, both of whom were good friends with Joe. And she had also made out with each of them behind Joe’s back (literally) at different times, but at the same party, while drunk. How could Joe not have realized this?
Tommy, Bill, and the other football players at their table were pretending to talk about sexual conquests, but really secretly eyeing Joe and Sarah’s table, to see what was going on between them.
“Yeah, man, the whole nine yards. We went all the way. And her parents were like two rooms away!” Gregory hadn’t actually had sex yet. But a really drunk girl at a party had promised to go down on him once; only she’d passed out before she could fulfill her promise. At any rate, Gregory was pretty sure that he was gay, since he was often aroused by the sight of the other football players when they were changing in the locker room before games. The truth of the matter was that he had no idea as to how sex really worked, and he was afraid of finding out, because he wasn’t sure if he’d know how to properly insert himself into a woman if the opportunity arose. “Yeah, I plowed her, man. Like three times!” Gregory added.
Nicky, one of the biggest dorks in the school passed by the jocks’ table carrying a full tray of food. As he passed them by, he stepped as far away from the table as he could, in order to prevent one of the jocks from trying to trip him. Billy tried to stick his leg out anyway, and Nicky jumped in fright, causing the entire table to laugh at him.
Nicky blushed, and counted his lucky stars that there was only one more week of high school left, and that he had copious quantities of pot awaiting him at home, along with a new first person shoot ‘em up video game that allowed him to vicariously pretend that instead of space aliens, he was actually shooting at all of the high school jocks who had tormented him for the last four years of his life.
Nicky safely passed by the table of jocks and located a table in the back corner of the cafeteria that seemed safe, due to its vicinity to the table of art students, which was adjacent to a table full of kids who only wore black clothing.
Nicky sat down and begin to eat his food amidst the obnoxiously pretentious conversation from the table of art kids. The art snobs were complaining about a lack of NEA funding, and trying to trump one another in a battle of “whose attitude is more morose”. Today’s winner was Johan, who’s real name was John, a self-obsessed, spoiled malcontent who had recently been rejected by the Tish School of the Arts at New York University, because they felt his photography portfolio, entitled “pissing on graves” was not up to their standards of admission.
“I mean, Chloe, you, of all people, you are going to tell me that I crossed a line by getting drunk and photographing myself pissing on old tombstones? Don’t you see the ART in that? ART! With a capital A! Andy Warhol, Willem De Kooning, even Cézanne; you don’t think these men ever actually allowed socially conceived morals to dictate their passion, do you? No, of course not. And that’s why I am an artist. And I don’t need N Y Fucking U to tell me whether or not I am great. The world will someday acknowledge my works as a formidable challenge to all of the greats. You all just wait and see.”
Chloe rolled her eyes at Johan, and in doing so, accidentally made eye contact with Steve Mandini, who was sitting at a table with a bunch of regular looking kids—the boring kids. She felt a pang of guilt at the moment of eye contact, because she hadn’t spoken a word to him since she had faked an illness to stand him up at the prom. But she hated proms, she hated normal kids, and she had finally decided that she wasn’t prepared to go through all of the hoopla, just to appease a nice guy like Steve.
Besides, she would have ended up crushing his spirits, after she had ended the evening by making an awkward excuse to go to her own friends’ party, post-prom, without Steve, in order to avoid attending the big high school party that she knew Steve was going to ask her to accompany him to.
“Steve…Steve…you listening, man?” Steve looked over at Harry, and tried to remember what Harry had been talking about. But he’d been distracted by Chloe and her unparalleled persona. He tried to refocus, but all he could think about was how many times he had masturbated to various fantasies involving Chloe and her pencil thin, long black hair.
“Steve, did you get the fake I.D.?” Harry asked the question with a sense of desperation that should only really be involved with questions like; “Did you remember to pay this month’s rent?” or “Do you have any condoms?”
“Harry, relax, man. My brother promised me that he’d give me his I.D. for the night; I’ll be sure to get us some booze. Relax. You’re so stiff sometimes. It’s not like anyone is actually gonna show up to our lame ass party.”
Harry hunched forward, and broke his voice down into a whisper, one that was just barely audible to the ears of the seven friends sitting at Harry and Steve’s table, “Yeah, but I hear that Joe and Sarah are breaking up, and if they are, I’m going to personally ask Sarah to come. I mean, our parents are like best friends, and we used to hang out all the time—”
“Used to hang out all the time? Yeah, like when you guys were like six years old. Forget it, man, since the last time the two of you played house, Sarah has actually grown up, fucked half the football team, and moreover, she is entirely out of your league!”
Steve felt bad, but only because he was in the same league as Harry, and it was depressing to face the truth; until he was in his thirties, and making six figures, he’d never be able to convince a girl like Sarah to date a guy like him. He based this inconvenient truth on the many recent conversations he had had with his older brother, who was about to graduate from college. According to his older brother, the high school social caste system continued on in college, it was just a little less intense, was all.
Nicky enjoyed sitting alone at his own table in the cafeteria. Despite the fact that he didn’t have any close confidantes, he didn’t feel alone. He felt different—because he was different—but being different meant that he wasn’t the same as the rest of his peers, and Nick’s peers’ depressed him.
He likened his peers to a colony of ants. Yes, America was like a giant ant colony. He recalled a recent biology test on ant colonies and an answer he had given on it: “The ant colony is built and maintained by legions of worker ants that carry tiny bits of dirt in their mandibles and deposit them near the exit of the colony, forming an ant-hill.” He was pleased with his own mental acumen; his analogy was cunning, precise, and apt.
“In the ant colony, there are rooms for nurseries, food storage, and mating.” Yes! So this cafeteria was like the nursery in an ant colony. It was full of a bunch of pre-pubescent ants that were about to be given high school diplomas, which meant that they were about become members of the legions of worker ants, and they were now going to disperse across the country in order to deposit tiny bits of dirt in order to form a greater hill.
Nicky’s thoughts were distracted by some ado at the table near the jocks. Nicky looked up just in time to see Sarah McGellan throw an entire cup of soda at Joe “QB One” Nealey. As she did this, she also yelled, loud enough for everyone in the cafeteria to hear, “You fucking asshole! I can’t believe you would do that! I don’t ever want to see you or your small prick again!”
Harry elbowed Steve from across the table and then produced a lecherous “see I told you so” wink.
This same scene made Chloe smile, but she quickly forced her smile back into her normal expression, which was a carefully practiced attempt to convey the emotion of ‘ennui.’ Johan, catching Chloe’s brief smile, forgot all about pissing on graves, and made a mental note to try and get her to make out with him the next time they were both drunk.
Meanwhile, Tommy, Bill, Gregory, and the rest of the jocks exploded in a chorus of as many jeering and “I’m so shocked” noises as they could invent, in order to convey to the rest of the cafeteria the fact that Sarah had just emasculated Joe, and perhaps now they were next in line to receive the alpha-male trophy that a girl like Sarah represented.
Joe attempted to look as stunned as possible, even though he thought that he’d gotten off quite easily, given the fact that he had just admitted to Sarah that he’d cheated on her with her own best friend, Cathy Jean.
Sarah had only erupted in public in order to arm herself with the power of being a faithful cheerleader who had been cuckolded by the high school quarterback and her own best friend. She reasoned that this would absolve her from receiving any animosity from her female peers, who already resented her for her good looks. She also figured that it would ensure that her cheerleading squad would take her side in making Cathy Jean’s last few months in the town a living hell.
Cathy Jean didn’t really care about her meaningless friendship with Sarah, and was more interested in the social status that would accompany an official relationship with Joe, so she had immediately come over to his table and was now seductively pressing Joe’s soda-stained lap with a handful of napkins and mouthing, but not speaking the shapes of words used to express shock, abhorrence, and betrayal.
Most of the men in the cafeteria secretly acknowledged the fact that Cathy Jean looked like a better lay than Sarah, but due to Cathy Jean’s public status as “easy” she was far less of a trophy than Sarah, and so Joe was to be henceforth considered a lesser man, for having traded in all the social prestige that Sarah offered him for the casual, sex filled pseudo-relationship that came along with a girl like Cathy Jean.
Nicky, meanwhile, couldn’t differentiate between the ant that was Sarah, and the ant that was Cathy Jean. After all, both of them were obviously common ants, since they had chosen to procreate with a common ant like Joe.
Nicky had no interest in procreating with any of the common ants, for he was special. Nicky was going to graduate from this hell, move far away, and then he was going to start an underground magazine that would make Fredrick Nietzsche blush.
Nicky was going to admonish all of the social classes that he so despised. He was going to fight against the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, and everyone else that played any part in this reprehensible society. He was going to change the world, by changing people’s minds with his uncanny social observations. All he had to do was make it through one more godforsaken week of this bullshit, and he was on his way!
Of course, Nicky had never actually written any of his ideas down onto paper. But this was mostly due to the fact that he never felt up to the task by the time he had finished school, gotten high, and played his favorite video game. Nicky wasn’t worried, for time was on his side. He was young. No one did anything productive in high school anyway. He would make his mark on the world later on. In the meantime, Nicky thanked his lucky stars for pot and video games, because for the time being, they were his only saving grace in a world full of mindless ants. He couldn’t wait to get home and kill off a legion of assholes. Someday, maybe, he would get tired of smoking pot, and then he would change the world. Yes, that was the plan. Change—someday. There was a lot of power in that one word: change.
