And So It Goes by Judy Colella (books for 9th graders .TXT) 📖

This is not my first day of school, I do not own a pair of skinny jeans, my hair isn’t thick and long, and my mother is probably still asleep. What I wash myself with or whether I use makeup or not is both irrelevant and nobody’s business. And who gives a crap if I take a shower before school every morning, or if I use perfume?

I also don’t have any powers – what a hoot that would be! – and the best-looking guy in the school doesn’t seem to notice me, much less care or have some kind of crush. I’m not abused at home, just ignored. And the bullies in my grade don’t bother me because I avoid being within twenty yards of them at all times. I do have a car, but it’s an older POS that seems to have its own ideas about how and when to run.

I don’t cut, but a couple of my friends do, and I’m constantly worried about them. Doing drugs and drinking alcohol are at the top of my list titled, “Imbecilic Crap I Wouldn’t Do If Life Itself Depended On It.”

There. That’s me. My name is Shasta (my mom is a daisy freak) and neither of us has the slightest idea who my father is. Was. Whatever. My last name is the same as my mom’s, obviously – Darby. That so doesn’t work with my first name, but hey. And just so you know, there is a boyfriend in the picture who says he’s crazy about my mother. His name is Wade Marshal, he’s a geek, and why mom doesn’t marry him and get it over with is beyond me. Maybe because her first name is Marsha. At least she isn’t dating a guy whose last name is Law. Shut up.

Yeah, so it isn’t my first day of school. It’s my twenty-third (yes, I’m counting). Why mention this? Because the first three weeks were like the first three weeks of school every year of my life and therefore not worth talking about. But today I have to give a speech for one of my classes. I never had to do that before, and I’m not happy about it.

My high school is a bit on the weird side. It’s semi-private, but not like a hospital room. I mean, there are more than two students in it. The semi-private bit means the State pays some of the bills while a moderate tuition from the parents pays the rest. So I’m not attending some totally private snob school. More than half of the kids were home-schooled for most of their lives, which is about as exclusive as any of them ever got. Not me. Nope. Regular public school from kindergarten through eleventh.

So now I’m a twelfth-grader (a senior, yay me), and I have to give a speech on social injustice. Really? Why? What does that even mean? I suppose that’s what I’m supposed to explain, but despite having wracked my brain over this topic since getting the assignment yesterday…okay, I wracked my brain for about fifteen minutes this morning…I can’t come up with a thing. Nada. Zilch. Zero. Zip. I was told to make notes and do an extemporaneous speech based on these mythical jottings. Ha! The letters “lol” are bouncing around in my head with wild abandon over that one.

Breakfast was the same as always: coffee and a toaster pastry. I should weigh about eight hundred pounds by now, but because I run a lot, I manage to burn off the junk food pretty well. Anyway, since my car had been refusing to start since the week before, I ran to the bus stop, jogged in place while I waited for it to come farting and screeching around the corner onto my street, then zoomed up the steps and into a seat three-quarters of the way toward the back.

“You ready to give that speech thing?”

I turned to my classmate and friend, realizing she’d asked the question without actually looking at me. Her attention, as usual, was riveted on her Galaxy tablet and some game that looked like a lot of fruit had been barfed up all over the screen. “Nope.”

“Oh. Okay.”

Thanks for caring, Gina. Please, don’t let me interrupt your fruit game. “Okay?”

Finger-slide…tap-tap…slide…tap. “Crap! Stupid thing refuses to let me win this level!”

“Gina. Dude. What do you mean, ‘okay’?”

“What do you mean?”

I rolled my eyes, resisting the desire to take her tablet and toss it out the window. “I answered your question and said I didn’t have my speech ready and all you said was ‘oh, okay.’ So what did you mean?”

She frowned and started re-doing her ponytail. “I said that?”

“You did. Game-brain.”

“Very funny, Shasta. I clearly wasn’t paying attention.”

“That’s why I love you – you’re so honest about yourself.” I laughed and sat back.

“Do you love me, too?”

I got up, turned, and knelt on the seat, facing the individual in the seat behind me who had uttered that idiotic question. “Yes, Dion. I love you more than life itself. I would throw myself under a mosquito for you.”

Dion Philips, a member of the football team, opened his mouth, shut it, frowned, squinted one eye, and said, “What?”

“You asked, I answered.” Smiling, I turned around and sat back again. The guy was probably nice on some level, but not all that bright. He kept trying to freak me out, kept failing, and then would ignore me for hours at a time. Ours was a genuine what-the-hell-was-that relationship. Like me, he’d gone to public school, so I had the dubious joy of being aware of him for most of my life. I don’t think he knew I even existed until about six months ago. Or something.

Gina, I now noticed, had turned purple. Were this anyone else, I’d have been alarmed. But it was Gina, the girl who never wanted anyone to know she was laughing hysterically, so would contain the sound by not breathing until her face was the color of an anemic eggplant. I smacked her on the arm. “Inhale, please.”

She did, amazing me that her loud, deep intake of air didn’t suck the seat in front of us off its floor bolts. That would have been awkward. Then she made a tiny noise that sounded like “skeeto!” and doubled over, laughing again.

I gave up. “If you pass out, I refuse to carry you off this bus.”

The rest of the ride was boring. Gina eventually got herself under control, but didn’t have anything to say. Neither did I. What was I going to do about that stupid speech? Social injustice? Wait – what would be the opposite? Social justice? What does that mean? How did any of this work? I began to contemplate the word “justice” without the “social” and by the time the bus dropped us off, I knew what I was going to say.

My grandfather used to indulge in what I like to call dangling quotes. I think they’re meant to convey warnings of some kind. Not sure. One of them came with rolled eyes and a sigh, and I was thinking about it just then. I’d given my speech, you see. Thought I’d done a great job, too, considering I had no idea what I was talking about. Still, it seemed logical based on the conclusions I’d reached somewhere between getting off the bus and making it to class without tripping over anything.

Anyway, the quote was “….the best laid plans of mice and men…” Call me crazy, but I can’t imagine mice go around planning things with well-thought-out details. I have a feeling the ‘mice’ part was meant as sarcasm, or irony, or some such device, but it’s still a weird quote.

So, okay. The speech. I ranted on for a good ten minutes about the difference between “social” and “societal,” explaining that there was a vast difference between the two, and because of their meanings when coupled with the word “justice,” it seemed to me that when people stomped around waving signs and screaming against “social injustice,” what they really wanted to see fixed was “societal injustice.” We humans don’t treat each other nicely all the time, I said, because we’re often too busy being selfish and needy. So we step on other people’s dreams and lawns, all because we feel we’re entitled to more than we actually are (notice how I managed to get a whole lot of different subjects into that one statement?), and the steppees want justice against the steppers. Wait. Yeah. But because we’re also lousy with lawyers and politicians, that concept got twisted and “social” was substituted for “societal” – ignoring the fact that the kind of society we live in determines how free we are or aren’t to strive for what we want. Once the substitution was made, individual responsibility and accountability were eliminated, encouraging people to become sheeple (another of my grandfather’s terms I’m not so sure about).

By the end of my speech, everyone was staring at me with that glazed look you often seen in the eyes of one member of a blind-date couple. The teacher, on the other hand, was tapping her foot, her lower jaw thrust outward, and was glaring at me. No glaze present in those eyes. Nope. Great. What had I said to deserve that kind of look? Could it have been because I hadn’t quoted some lame source or other, like a famous newspaper or magazine? I had no idea. Still don’t. Thus the sinking feeling that I was royally screwed and the dangling quote zipping across my inner movie screen. Crap. Looked like I had no choice, and the only thing left for me was to clear my throat, tell her I was done, and ask if I could go to the ladies’ room.

She crossed her arms, pointed at the door and nodded, saying nothing. Try crossing your arms and pointing – it’s not easy, but she managed. Or maybe she was pointing with her face. I didn’t stick around to try and figure it out.

And now I’m standing at the sink, smirking at my reflection as I try to come up with some kind of self-insult that describes how I feel.

“Loser,” I told me. “That’s what you get for not doing your homework! Now the teacher is going to fail you, you big dummy!” I’m not big, but the dummy part of me apparently is.

“OMG! Are you talking to yourself?”

Yes, she used the initials and didn’t say the words they represented. Wow. Her name, Lacy Moore, sounded to me like the name of someone with nothing on who spent a lot of time spinning around poles.

“I am,” I admitted. I had no desire to talk to this person. She was one of the people I’d spent so much time and effort avoiding.

“You’re nuts.” She came to stand at the sink next to me, and had addressed my reflection.

“Probably,” my reflection told hers.

She made a snorty noise and flipped golden hair over one shoulder as she leaned forward to turn on the faucet. Was she going to splash me