Two weeks before Lindsey's birthday, Pamela started sitting at a different table at lunch. She did it so that she had a front row seat to the play she had organized: Lindsey and her friends sat at a table perpendicular and to the right of the one Pamela took up temporary residence at. She was worried that its usual sophomore residents would question her being there and kick her out, but they didn't seem too bothered by it. They left her alone, and she left them alone. If Pamela had more relationships like that, she could have gone through life happy as can be.
The one thing that would make Pamela even happier was for Josh to show up and give Lindsey the gift of a lifetime. She kept an anxious eye on the clock. Lunch started almost fifteen minutes ago, yet Josh wasn't anywhere to be found in the cafeteria. Pamela found him in one of the classrooms reciting their script with James and Greg, who reprised their roles from last year. The silver gift bag hovered in the corner of Josh's vision, which was a good sign. It looked undisturbed as well.
Pamela couldn't help, however, the anxiety swirling in her chest as she worried that someone might ask about what Josh had bought Lindsey this year. He'd tell them, but some people were inclined to ask. And Josh was the sort of person to show them his gift to Lindsey, to say without words, “See what I got her? Aren't I such a great boyfriend? In fact, aren't I such a great person in general?” Pamela doubted James or Greg was interested in seeing a piece of jewelry, but that didn't buy her faith in them.
Josh finished discussing the routine and grabbed the gift off the table. He led James and Greg out of the room and towards the cafeteria. The halls were void of any students and teachers, but now was the most vulnerable part of the plan. One inquiring person asking for a preview of Josh's gift was all it took. Sure, Josh might still get in trouble, but it wouldn't supply Pamela with the same level of satisfaction she expected for the last month. One stray student heading to the bathroom, one teacher heading to the teacher's lounge was all it took. A curious mind didn't need to ruin the plan, either. A student could burn popcorn in one of the microwaves and set off the fire alarm—it's happened before. That might not ruin her plan, but it'd certainly delay it. She watched with her heart ready to explode in her chest. If Josh didn't hasten his pace, Pamela thought she might have her first heart attack before her first boyfriend.
She flung herself back into her own body to see if that would bring any calm to her pounding heart. When its pulse seemed to race faster from her blindness to Josh's situation, she returned to his mind. Closing in on him were the double doors that opened up to the cafeteria. They marked the finish line, but it was so close yet so far. There were doors to classrooms on either side of the double doors, and Pamela's gut twisted in fear that a random teacher or student would pop out of either classroom and ask to see what was in the bag. Or a freshmen would leap out while shouting, “Surprise, bitch!” and then snatch the bag out of Josh's hand before running off with it. As if either character was a worker sent by some supernatural agent who decided that Pamela's plan was worth dealing with instead of larger more pressing issues. Both situations, Pamela knew, were nothing but improbable and the latter ridiculous. Still, she feared that the universe would turn against her at the last possible second, as if to trample her ambitions and then spit on them. It happened before when her neighborhood had a power outage before she could print an essay the night before it was due, so why not happen now?
Pamela felt a dryness in her mouth as she watched the floor slip beneath Josh as he reached out to push the door open. The dryness reminded her of how her mouth sometimes felt when she woke up in the morning. She imagined her tongue paling in color and shriveling in her mouth, and she often downed two bottles of water before she felt some sense of satisfaction. She chugged her water bottle now, thin streams spilling down the corners of her lips, and gasped for breath. Some relief, but Pamela didn't want to drink from the water fountain. Not as Josh and his crew entered the cafeteria, present, cake, and party horn in their hands. She didn't want to miss a thing, no matter how uneventful the first few minutes would be. She wanted to bear witness to the entire ordeal, say that she watched as the glow surrounding Lindsey dimmed for the first time since that day in Spanish class; say that she watched as the celebrity-white teeth of Josh were exposed with a gap of disbelief and not a photo-worthy smile for the first time. She wanted to savor every last second of the scene and was willing to put up with a partially parched mouth for it.
Eyes around the cafeteria turned to Josh and his lackies as they started singing Happy Birthday to Lindsey. They surrounded her as other people in the cafeteria joined in with the singing. The scene was like a move sequel where everything done had to be done on a grander scale. James lay the cake before Lindsey before the song ended, the same as last year. When the song ended, Greg blew his horn, and a good portion of the cafeteria clapped and cheered for Lindsey, whose face glowed red from her own blush.
Lindsey and Josh exchanged a few words, both with huge smiles on their faces. Pamela didn't care enough about what they were saying to wear her Looking Glass. Besides, she resolved to watch the scene through her eyes only. She wanted to see the reaction on Josh's face when Lindsey opened her present.
Josh held out a hand to Lindsey to help her up from her seat, then he handed the gift bag to her. She set it on her spot on the bench and lifted the card from the top of the tissue. She tore the flap off with a single finger and pulled the card out to read.
“What does it say?” one student shouted as Lindsey read the card. Pamela recognized the voice as a freshmen with no connections to Lindsey.
“Yeah, read it out loud!” another shouted from the opposite side of the cafeteria. This student sounded like one of the more popular, if rowdier, boys from Lindsey's grade.
Lindsey looked up from the card and shook her head in the general direction of the latter student. The cafeteria remained silent, waiting, as if Lindsey received a letter from a college and everybody was waiting to see if she got accepted. Lindsey melted at the knees and turned to hug Josh as she said, “Aww!” The two hugged and exchanged a quick peck on the lips. The cafeteria roused briefly from this display of affection.
Josh pointed to the bag, and Lindsey shuffled the tissue paper out and onto the table. When she held up the carnelian-colored case, Pamela thought, Here we go: the moment of truth. The moment Pamela waited a month for, though that wasn't entirely true—she had waited for this moment the day her hatred for Lindsey matured.
Lindsey's face flourished with a smile as she placed her fingers on the lid, building the suspense of what was inside. Josh stood behind her, his smile more tame; it was the smile of someone happy for another. The smile washed away after Lindsey opened the case.
A glass-shattering scream pierced the cafeteria as Lindsey and threw the jewelry case and backpedaled away from it. She hid behind Josh, who gasped and jumped backwards himself. The case fell in one arc, and it vomited its content in another arc. The cafeteria joined Lindsey in the form of a choir of screams as students caught sight of and fled from the snake. Pamela had seen videos of people running from tanks and crumbling buildings, but those people moved in slow motion compared to the crowd of students who retreated from the snake. They knocked and shoved one another, leaping onto tables and clinging to each other as the small snake slithered off of the table and made its way in Pamela's direction. The kids surrounding Pamela erupted with shrieks and pleas that somebody do something. They also cleared a path, opening up a gap in the ring that had surrounded Lindsey's table previously.
“What's going on?” Pamela heard a teacher yell from the other side of the cafeteria.
“Everybody please calm down,” yelled what sounded like the English teacher from somewhere behind Pamela. The students ignored her and continued with their maddened chorus.
Pamela lifted her feet as the snake wormed its way beneath her table and emerged out the other side, continuing to clear a path for itself with its existence alone, which was something Pamela admired about the creature. She turned and watched the snake beeline for the hall that led to another set of double doors, these exiting outside.
Invisible fingers seized Pamela's heart as a brave sophomore stepped forward to stomp the baby garter snake Pamela bought from the store last night with the last of her allowance for the month. The fingers eased as the student missed his stomp, the snake too fast for him.
“Get back!” shouted the English teacher.
“Kill it!” shrieked a girl from the crowd, just one of many similar pleas.
“No!” shouted a different student. The voice's owner lanced through the crowd and sprinted towards the sophomore with the atrocious aim. The sprinter was another sophomore named Arthur. He tackled the other sophomore and said to him, “Leave it alone! I'll handle it.”
“Arthur, get away from that thing!” shouted the English teacher. “We don't know if it's poisonous or not!”
“It's a garter snake,” he said while pursuing the serpent. “It's not dangerous. Trust me: I know how to handle snakes.”
“Be careful!” the teacher shouted at him as he vanished into the hall.
A crowd of students gathered at the start of the hall, clogging it and, in theory, blocking the snake's only escape. “Go, Arthur!” one boy shouted. “Yeah, go Arthur!” shouted another. “Get that snake!” one bellowed in a rough-sounding voice.
Pamela expected the crowd to start cheering at any second when Arthur captured the juvenile serpent, but shouting at Lindsey's table distracted her. Her heart fluttered as she realized that this was the real moment she had been waiting for but got caught up in the chaos of the snake's escape.
“What the hell is your problem?!” It was Lindsey shouting at Josh. “Was that supposed to be some kind of joke?”
Eyes turned to watch the climatic argument, and Pamela prided herself with being one of, if not, the first pair to witness this glorious moment go down in school history.
“I didn't put the snake in there!” Josh said. “I got you a diamond pendant: that's what was in the case.”
“If you got me a pendant, then where is it?” Lindsey held out her arms in an all-encompassing pose.
“I don't know,” Josh said with shrugged shoulders.
“How the hell are you going to tell me that you got me a pendant for my birthday when there was a snake in that box?!” Lindsey threw a sharp fingernail at the box laying wide open on the table. Pamela hoped Lindsey would use her talon-like nails as weapons.
“I already told you: I don't know how the snake got in there. I bought you a p—”
“You bought me a pendant, but you somehow got the two mixed up, right?” Lindsey crossed her arms and leaned her torso back in a demeaning manner.
“No!” Josh's eyes darted about on the ground, and his hands moved in sporadic patterns.
Pamela covered her mouth with her hand.
“Someone must have switched them!” Josh concluded.
“Switched them when?! When you were at home sleeping?”
The English teacher approached the argument saying, “All right, all right. The two of you need to calm down.”
Lindsey ignored her: “You gonna tell me that someone broke into your house and switched the two cases?”
“I don't know, maybe,” Josh said with fleeting confidence.
“Uh-huh.” Lindsey nodded her head in a degrading fashion. “So, what? Your little sister broke into your room late at night and stole the pendant and left the snake? You gonna tell me that's what happened?”
“Hey!” The teacher said. “I told you t—”
“Please,” Lindsey exposed a palm to the teacher in a stopping motion. “Just give us a moment.”
“The two of you can't argue like this in the cafeteria.”
James walked up to the teacher and turned her around. The two of them exchanged words in the background while the argument persisted. One of Lindsey's friends did to another arriving teacher what James did to the English teacher.
“Like I said, I don't know. She could have. I'll have to talk to her when I get home,” Josh said.
Lindsey shook her head and said, “You're unbelievable, Josh, you really are. You pull a prank like this and then blame your little sister for it. I can't believe you.”
“I wasn't the one who brought her up in the first place, and I wasn't blaming her, I just said—”
“Then who did it, Josh?! Huh? Who did it? What are you going to tell me next? That your mom did it? That your dad did it? That James did it?” She held a hand up to James and promptly lowered it. “That James broke into your locker and switched the gifts? You think James would do something like that?”
Pamela pressed the heel of her palm firmer into her face in an effort to quell her growing smile.
“Then why would you think I did something like that?” Josh asked, his tone aggressive for the first time. “I've been with you for over two years, and you think I'd do something like this?” He rushed at Lindsey, who held her ground, but Greg restrained Josh. Josh struggled in his grip before breaking free and standing his own ground, but not without Greg's arms primed to latch onto Josh's body.
“As a matter of fact, yes, I do think you'd do something like this, because you just did!”
“You can't prove that!” Josh whipped his arms into the air. “You can't prove that I did anything!”
“And you can't prove that you didn't. I don't think you've realized this yet, but in case you haven't, let me spell it out for you: the evidence points to you. You've been caught red-handed. You were the one who gave me a present with a snake inside.”
“And I told you that someone must have switched them. Someone must have broken into my locker and replaced your gift with the snake.”
“Who did it, then? Who did it, Josh? Who in this school hates one of us enough to break into your locker?”
Me.
“And let me remind you of how cautious you are about exposing your locker combination to other people.” Lindsey shut her mouth for a minute, as if that was the final nail in the coffin.
Josh stammered for words for a few seconds before stuttering, “I-I don't know. I don't know, Lindsey. Someone did.” He bent down until he was eye level with Lindsey and placed his hands on her shoulders. “But believe me when I say that I didn't do it.”
Lindsey said nothing for a long minute, but her expression didn't change. Josh said something twice and rattled her gently, but the cafeteria remained silent. The silence was killed when Lindsey pulled herself free of Josh and said, “No, I won't believe you. I trusted you all these years, and you betrayed that trust.” Her voice sobbed up, but it was clear with rage for her next statement: “Until you prove to me that you didn't put that snake in the box, we're over!” She stormed away, face red with fury, and balled fists swaying at her waist. Two of Lindsey's friends followed her out of the cafeteria.
Pamela laid her head on the table to hide her face. Her snickering was still audible, so she pressed her mouth into her elbow. She peered through cracks between her arms to watch the epilogue. The look of despair on Josh's face was priceless. She wished she had a camera so that she could capture the expression and frame it. His mouth gaped, unable to close and unable to produce any words as he watched Lindsey leave him. His glazed eyes didn't move in their sockets as his head slowly fell to the floor. James and Greg patted him on the shoulder and back, saying some things, but he didn't react. He was like a person who witnessed a horrendous tragedy, like someone who just watched an entire stadium full of soccer fans explode or see the contrail of a jet airliner suddenly end in a blooming red flower. But most of all, he was someone who had died on the inside; someone who lost something precious in their life.587Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡWKK5mPkTh6
It was too much for Pamela to handle. In the unrest of the aftermath of the lunch period as students chattered where they stood, after the final curtain drew to a close, she ran to the bathroom and locked herself in a stall so that she could let out the maniacal laughter she had been holding in all this time.587Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡo7zCEgWhHu
