Der Prozeß

Senior Spring

Across the room, she looked amazing. Her brown hair, partially covering her face and hazel eyes, was brushed aside as she contemplated the chemistry problem. Connor snapped out of it. He glanced down at the doodles on his half finished Chemistry test and sighed. He completed the problems in a daze, constantly glancing back to the corner of the room where Francesca sat. When she stood up with the paper in hand, he immediately decided that the last two problems were only solvable by nuclear physicists and he left them blank. He jumped up off his seat and strutted to the teachers desk, looking forward to the post test conversation which he would soon be having with the beautiful Francesca. He placed his test face down on the desk, looked toward the teacher and noticed that Francesca was just asking a question. Connor had no choice but to leave the classroom alone, gaining only a dirty look from Ms. Skotko who knew that her test could not be completed in the 25 minutes used by Connor. Lacking a test to actually finish, Connor was forced to report to study hall and contemplate the two failures of the day: the test and the girl.
How do you do this problem? Is the molecule multiplied by two and squared or just squared? Francesca brushed aside her hair so she could clear her mind. Shoot, I should’ve reviewed this last night. Maybe if I phrase it just right, Ms. Skotko will give me a hint. Francesca then proceeded to stand and saunter over to the teacher. As she began to delicately phrase her quandary, she noticed out of the corner of her eye that Connor also seemed to have a question. After hearing her answer in the stream of jumbled consciousness exiting from Ms. Skotko’s mouth, Francesca cast sideways glances at Connor as he awkwardly approached the desk. She loved the way he shifted from foot to foot before finally placing his test on the desk and quickly departing. She was amazed that he finished so quickly, assuming that he must’ve studied all night. Francesca sat back down and proceeded to ace that question.
Back in study hall with 10 minutes until the next class, Connor was drooling. He had been up the entire previous night, not studying but instead playing Call of Duty. His caffeine boost had just skidded to a stop and the 4 hours of sleep hit him like a brick. As his eyes flickered up and down, Connor barely noticed a feminine figure sit down at the other end of the table. In an attempt to show kindness, Connor faintly raised his hand in a gesture which could be barely called a wave. However, the girl took the gesture to heart and immediately used it as an opportunity to speak up.
“I noticed you left the test early” Francesca brightly quipped. At the sound of her voice, Connor’s head immediately jumped upward on his hinged neck. He quickly attempted to wipe the drool off the desk and desperately attempted to brush down his hair.
“Oh, yea” he coolly responded “I mean, I guess I knew I wasn’t gonna get any better score so I just turned it in. Whatever”
“Well, you better watch out for Ms. Skotko, she gave a 3 minute lecture afterwards detailing the importance of checking your work” Connor immediately knew that a D+ was in his future, if he was lucky.
“Well I checked my work, the answer to the last question was two and a half puppies, right?” he joked.
“Well, I’m sorry to say it, but I was pretty sure it was 3 puppies and a siamese cat” she quickly responded, stifling a laugh.
“Of course, I’m such an idiot, I forgot to factor in the universal answer to everything. I always forget to divide 42”. The bell rang, signaling the impending stampede of students. The classmates, laughing, both stood up to depart for their respective classes.
“I’ve got French” she revealed.
“Shoot, I’ve got AP Euro the other way” he responded, pointing at an indeterminate location somewhere behind him.
“Well I guess I see you next Chem class then?”
“Yep, I’ll be the one crying in the corner after getting my test back”. She laughed and he was just about to leave when she said one last little statement.
“Hey, just so you know, you’ve got a little drool on your cheek”. And she walked away with a smile while Connor wiped his entire face as quickly as possible.
The next day they talked after Chemistry class. They talked about his D+ grade (he was a lucky man) and they discussed the finer points of pencil sharpening and they contemplated just why their high school had so many locked doors. The conversation just came so naturally that moments turned into minutes and minutes into hours. When pressed by their respective parents to come home, they both promised to continue the conversation via text. On weekends they would hang out in the park and talk about memories from childhood and hopes for the future. They would swing on the swings and challenge each other for how far they could jump. They regretted not truly meeting until senior year and they both pretended they were “just friends”
It was the last exam of their last year. Francesca had just finished a problem involving equilibriums and enthalpy. She was dismayed to find that yet another page was attached to the already hefty test. She glanced up at the time, noticed she only had 5 minutes left, and prayed that it was just a multiple choice question. It was.
“Francesca, will you go to prom with me? -Connor.” Francesca received a perfect score on that page.

Lady Liberty’s Runner Up

The balding, shirtless man was face down dead in the ball pit. It should be expected that he was dead, as a grown man who is still breathing should not lie face down without clothes in a ball pit. Such childlike activities usually attract lawsuits and restraining orders. The child who had found the fast decomposing body in said ball pit was currently crying with his mother behind police lines. It was, for the family therapist, a dream come true. As the police scoured the cheaply built and maintained child wonderland called Fun n’ Stuff, they found yet another smelly, silent, and still body. Luckily for the investigative team, this hunk of meat was alive. Dangling from a loft in the always malfunctioning laser tag arena, a hungover George Simmers was quite upset after he was awoken by the police.

“Will you shut the fuck up and just let me go home?”

“Sir, if you answer our questions thoroughly you may have that opportunity. If not, I’m afraid I would have to add a charge of police interference to what seems like an already extensive list”

“Whaddya mean, ‘extensive list’? Just let me leave for Christs sake”

“Sir, why did you break into here? Why did you just wake up in a Fun n’ Stuff?”

“Because, if I remember correctly,” George said with a smile, “Me and my friend were looking for some fun. And stuff.”

11:30 pm the night before at the Simmers home seemed typical. The house was dark, the cat was slinking around and there was an annoying beeping sound. Beep. The fridge had been left open. Beep. George Simmers had, up until earlier that week, worked for a moderately successful software company. Beep. They provided the tools necessary to track and maintain the thousands of foreclosed homes on the market. Beep. George had traveled the country selling to banks. Beep. George had just been replaced by the power of Skype. Beep. And George didn’t turn off that alarm, because George was traveling 80 mph on Ohio Route 8 in his Honda Civic.

George was with Michael, a childhood friend who played High School football with “Big Simmer” back in the 80’s. In a curious turn of events, Michael had also been fired that week. A less sympathetic and more interesting fact about the termination of Michael is that he was fired after showing up drunk to the office and attempting to propose to the receptionist. While the kindly 60 year old lady gave Michael the courtesy of letting him down easy, his boss did not. Michael immediately drove over to George’s house to vent and fall asleep on the couch. George, who had very recently taken up a monk like devotion to sleeping until noon, wasn’t even awake for his friend’s initial drunken ramblings.

Awakened at 3 pm, they both concurred that a trip to a bar was the only feasible option in the face of such blatant discrimination against expressing one’s true feelings to a co-worker. And then they became caught in the vicious trap of daytime television. Finally, after a truly touching episode of Oprah, they managed to drive to the bar with only a few lonely tears appearing. They walked in the bar and proceeded to drink the tears away. They ordered their first beer. They ordered their second. They ordered their third. The barman, concerned over the high achohol intake of the two crying men, placed a limit on 5 drinks and firmly encouraged them to “head on home boys and sleep it off”. They stumbled out of the bar, walked to the car and proceeded to drive in direction of home, all while yelling obscenities about the barman, his bar and for some reason the Statue of Liberty.

“ And you tell her that you like her green skin” Michael sobbed, “but she just walks away anyway!”

“Yea! Thinking she’s so important and shit. She means nothing! I bet I could hold a torch better than her!” George bragged.

‘“I bet I could hold two torches! I, I bet that I could hold a torch and go fast! I bet I could hold  torch and, like, I could skate. Roller Skate!”

“Don’t fuck with me. Everybody knows the flame would go out.”

“No!”

“Yes!”

“No!”

“Yes!”

“No!”

They parked in the parking lot of Fun n’ Stuff at 2 am. They climbed through a window at 2:05. They stole roller skates at 2:08. They grabbed some stale popcorn at 2:11. At 2:15 they tied a shirt to a stolen ninja sword and set it on fire.

“Ok, you gotta go, go like 20 mph until… until the flame goes poof” George ever so eloquently explained.

“Eat my dust flame!” screamed Michael as he began to speed up while simultaneously traveling sideways. Michael narrowly avoided walls and turned the corners with the grace of a giraffe on ice and the ninja sword began to melt. As Michael straightened out and was his velocity increased, , the cheap but still awesome (except in this moment) plastic sword folded over in a melted conglomerate of colored liquid plastic. As the fire on the sword began to ignite the hairs on his shirtless arm, Michael screamed in pain and promptly forgot about the wall. The wall, like Michael’s boss, did not let him down easily. The momentum from the upper body, combined with the unpleasant mixture of legs and wall sent Michael flying through the air into a ball pit. He hit his head on the way into the disease ridden collection of plastic, ending his life in an instant. George, convinced that Michael was simply not going fast enough, attempted to wake the lifeless body so he could try again. Upset that Michael was just being “lazy”, George decided to depart to the near pitch black laser tag arena for a quick nap. George, while falling asleep, attempted to make a mental note to check on Michael in the morning. George did not remember

that note.