I looked out the classroom window, helpless. The sky was gray.
Turning back, that sound was in my ears again. A thick, rotten sound reverberating. I couldn’t settle; I turned my pen restlessly.
He was chewing gum — sticky, filthy gum sticking to the gaps between his teeth. Maybe only the scraps my heart already despised could mix with gum and make a sound like that.
The geography I’d memorized last night was being chewed to pieces by him, mercilessly. He still hadn’t stopped. My pen left no mark on the exam paper. I stared at it, trying to recall what I’d studied, but when I blinked, the black text turned into his bite marks, grinning at me. I couldn’t breathe.
Yesterday’s scene surfaced in my mind and wouldn’t leave.
I turned my head, looking with something like pity at the remains of a caterpillar in the corner of the wall. Its delicate little body seemed almost sweet.
I was starting to feel that insects weren’t ugly things at all — because when one bothered me, I could brush it from my world with two fingers.
An unusual sound pulled my gaze back. I watched him wrap his hand around a desk leg and start stroking it up and down. The horrible smile on his face was still there; I thought it was the image burned into my mind two minutes ago, but looking more carefully I realized his expression hadn’t changed at all. Done with the desk leg, he cast a covetous eye at my iced coffee.
I had never seen any wild creature with a look that grubby.
I was about to say something — my mouth had just begun to open — when his hand closed around my coffee. His hand moved and twisted along the bottle; I watched my coffee being handled in his grip. I couldn’t get any words out.
Afterward, I touched the coffee bottle. A visible layer of grease coated the plastic.
The grease shimmered with the most garish colors in the world. I felt something rising from inside me toward my throat.
I pulled out a sheet of paper.
I handed in a sheet of paper, made myself focus on the geography teacher’s face, and held on until class ended.
The bell for PE sharpened the sting in my ears. I stepped out of the building and saw that only the western sky was a murky gray.
The sky was so hollow it held not a single cloud, and offered not a drop of rain. Maybe the rain didn’t want to fall on him either.
I looked back. Class 16’s windows faced west.
By the time school ended, his sound still hadn’t faded. I opened my earphone case in a panic and jammed them in, but they wouldn’t connect. I looked up at the sky; the sky visible through the gray slices of the overpass looked as though something had been draped over it — neither black nor white.
I realized, suddenly, that this was the first time in my life I had ever seen a gray sky.
