The Misadventures of Owen Bonner

Chapter Five

        There was this really annoying girl in my Pottery class. Our teacher likes to be ostentatious and call it Ceramics 101, but it’s just Pottery. But there was an annoying girl in that class, and really, she was just one of those people who were annoying by their biological structure. Her voice was excruciating, even more frustrating than Cliff’s, she talked and bragged about her boyfriend Jeremy all the goddamn time, and she was always griping about how sad she gets at two in the morning. She makes herself sound all deep and shit, and then talks about how Jeremy drives 40 minutes at midnight to come over and cheer her up.

            Bullshit. I call bullshit.

            And I wouldn’t mind if she wasn’t so goddamn loud, but she is, and Jesus Christ, does she piss me off. And the boy she’s telling this all to, Sean, is also as depressing as she is, but on a deeper level. He gripes about how he got suspended back in middle school, how his father cooked pot in their oven and now he has asthma, and how his only passion now is wood-working and metals. And the Pottery teacher, Mrs. Gremms, loves that broken-soul, artsy kind of aura, so she eats all that childhood trauma up like chicken noodle soup. It’s annoying, really.

            But anyways, this girl, named Annie or Anna, gets on my nerves. Despite the annoying, depressing people at my table, I actually do like pottery. It’s relaxing, in a way. Mainly because the teacher gives us so much creative freedom that you could sit and mold your grandma’s saggy boobs and you’d be okay. But Annie, or Anna, wouldn’t let me enjoy it. I swear she wouldn’t.

            “Sean,” She said one day with her very high-pitched, giggly voice, “Jeremy’s picking me up after school. He says he misses me a lot! Do you know what he did yesterday?”

            Sean, with his annoyingly long hair and deadbeat voice replied, “No, what?”

            “I was texting him last night and I was feeling kinda, like, sad and he drove, like, forty minutes to come to my house and cheer me up,” She said. Her eyes were wide and full of light, in the bad way. I just remember thinking what a fucking pain that would be. To have your everyday sadness, something everyone would get too if they were stupid enough to listen to sad music until two a.m., be such a fucking burden that someone had to drive an hour at night just to rub your back and tell you everything’s fine.

            Jesus Christ, to be so helpless that people have to worry about you at two in the morning. What a pain, really. To have people who care too much that they’d come running to you at the drop of a hat; wouldn’t that just make you mad? It’d make me mad, hell yeah it would. Making others worry all the time over trivial things, making people drive long distances to tell you something they could say over the phone; it would drive me mad. I swear it would.

            Annie, or Anna, is a goddamn moron. Really, she is.

            And Jeremy is a moron, whoever the hell he is.

            And Cliff, who’s sculpting a steam-punk heart, is a moron too, because he knows goddamn well he doesn’t like to get dirty, but he chose Pottery as an elective anyways.

            And you know what? My Pottery teacher is a moron too, for calling this Ceramics 101, when it’s clearly just pottery. She’s almost as pretentious as Cliff, I swear.

            People were just such goddamn morons and they wouldn’t let me mold my Mexican Alien in piece, and yeah, that is a goddamn immigrant joke. But people just wouldn’t let me sculpt in peace; their idiocy was just too distracting.

            “Hey, does this look like a heart to you?” Cliff asked as he blew a strand of pink hair out of his eyes. I inspected his rattle project closely, and then leaned back in my chair.

            “If my heart looked like that, I’d be seriously worried,” I muttered, truthfully.

            Cliff frowned and continued to smooth out the seams where he attacked the two pinch-pots. Cliff was a music person, not an art person.

            “What’s that?” He asked while he pointed at one of my pieces. I picked it up and put it on my alien’s head.

            “It’s a sombrero,” I told him in an obvious tone.

            Cliff squinted, “It looks like a beret.”

            “Well it’s not. It’s a Mexican sombrero.”

            “Yeah, but it looks like a beret, and that mustache looks French too.”

            “Well it’s not.”

            “Yeah, but it looks like it.”

            I sighed. Yeah, it did look like it the more I thought about it. Goddammit, Cliff. I felt a little sad now that my immigrant joke wouldn’t make sense if people thought the alien was French. Maybe I should call Jeremy tonight. Yeah, maybe I should.  

A/N: Short chapter, oh well. - Parker