On went Ash's headphones and on they stayed, the volume so loud I could hear it from the front of the class. Who was she listening to? Sabbath? No. Something more chaotic, more destructive, light on the vocals and heavy on the screams. There was a whole chasm of Metal I hadn't ventured into yet, an underworld of blood-slickened caves and breeding shadows. When the bell rang for lunch (Honaw High had a rotating lunch, and on this day ours landed right after math), she exploded out the door. I didn't bother going after her. Bitchmaster wasn't up to the task, and besides, I knew where she'd be headed.

Nip was waiting for us in our nook between the lockers. He closed his book when he saw me coming alone.

I shook my head. "It's another drum day."

Last week in Algebra, Ash had taken a break from her usual rant about Leonard Higgins to give our peers a lecture on subsidence and poisoned well water. While she was going on, Kory Yenders swiped her Nalgene bottle and hawked into the water without either of us noticing. Then she took a drink and gagged on his radioactively bright snot, at which point he'd shouted to the thrill of the class, "Oh no! The mine got her!"

Nip winced. "What happened?"

"More KY Jelly."

"Ugh." He got up and re-tied my sweatshirt around his waist. "What was it this time?"

Nip would find out anyway if I didn't tell him, and who knew how the story would have evolved by then. "He swiped a note she wrote me and did a reading of it to the class."

Nip's voice became almost unnoticeably softer. "What kind of note?"

The word heart, crossed out by one neat horizontal line, flashed inside my head. "A joke," I lied, without knowing exactly why. "Just a joke."

"Doesn't sound so bad."

"Yeah. But everyone'll take it for real." I looked at the line curling away from the lunch window. Maybe me giving Ash a few extra minutes of privacy would be a good thing. "You go on ahead. I'll grab us lunch."

And that decision, ladies and gentlemen, is how I earned my own nickname.

The cafeteria worker passed three chicken sandwiches (one not spicy because Nip was a wimp) out to me on trays. Those trays came in two colors, ugly blue and uglier green, and one size: stupidly big. I set the first pair on my thighs and balanced the third on top of them, slouching to make my body as table like as possible. The stack wobbled dangerously as I turned Bitchmaster. With slow careful pushes I steered through the lunch space, avoiding the spots where the cement had cracked and staying far away from the kids tossing around a football. Sunlight touched the long curling teeth of the bear on the gymnasium wall. I had just about made it around that wall and out of sight when guess-who spotted me from a nearby table.

"Look!" Kory shouted. "Meals on Wheels!"

KY Jelly. It's the stuff jerk-offs are made of.

♫

The band room was our getaway. The music teacher or director or whatever he was called had written us a blank check, which we cashed in on his equipment whenever we needed a fix to hold us over until the loft. He was a cool guy, Mr. Brickley. He had a little girl Maria who went to the elementary school. On minimum days she would get out early and walk to Honaw High. She liked to stretch out on her stomach and listen to us play, and she would always clap when we finished a song. One time I helped her with her math homework, only not really because I got half the answers wrong, and she wrote me a letter, I'm not kidding, she wrote me a three-page complaint letter in godawful Purple Mountain Majesty crayon, and her dad . . .

I don't want to talk about Mr. Brickley or Maria any more, if that's okay.

The band room. I hadn't ever stepped foot in any like it before Honaw High. Then again I hadn't stepped into any band room before Honaw High. There was the expected stuff: curved rows of chairs where kids would fellate their clarinets and trumpets, a piano that looked like it was from the fifties (the eighteen-fifties, that is), and a giant bronze spit depository also known as a tuba. And then there was the drum kit.

That thing might have been stolen from Lars Von Ulrich himself. It had two high toms and one floor tom, three separate cymbals, and a big whomping foot pedal for the bass. I couldn't use the foot pedal, of course, but Ash had no such problem. I could hear her hammering at it from outside.

"She won't talk to me," Nip said, helping me carry our lunches down the ramp. "Or even look at me."

"Can't blame her there."

"Dick."

"Dingleberry."

Nip opened the door, and cloudy dark blasts of sound poured out into the clear day. I saw Ash's eyes flick at me and away again just as fast. Her arms, already blurs, moved faster. The cymbals buzzed like giant golden wasps. Her drumsticks rattled machine-gun fire.

"What do we do?" said Nip.

"Leave her alone until she gets it out of her system."

"What if lunch ends before that?"

"Then we eat her sandwich ourselves. Come on. She'll join us when she's ready."

I hoped she was ready soon.

Meals on Wheels needed a turn on those drums himself.

♫

My nickname spread like Mono in a game of spin-the-bottle. By the time school ended, kids were yelling "Hey Meals on Wheels, you charge extra for delivery?" to me in passing. Speaking of time, hours aren't the only thing that stretch during a bad day. Inches turn into feet and feet turn into yards. Even solid objects become elastic.

I crossed a mile of brown football field.

I climbed the Eifel Tower to reach the loft.

Where I collapsed flat on my face and didn't move for a full thirty minutes. When I finally lifted my head, Ash was lying on the beanbag chair and Nip was sitting in the corner, his white corduroys switched out for a pair of Ash's jeans. We started moving together, slow, silent, like gears in a powering-up machine. I crawled over to the drums. Nip picked up the electric guitar. Ash shuffled to the mic.

Her parents must not have been home that day. Her neighbors must not have been home that day.

That day, we fought and won World War III up in the loft.

After the carnage was over, our bodies landed side by side on the battlefield. I gasped. "That was . . ."

". . . completely . . ." said Nip.

". . . insane," finished Ash.

My arms were as limp as my legs and my body was drenched in sweat. Dying stars exploded inside my eyelids when I blinked. I rolled my head right, to Nip. I rolled my head left, to Ash. I looked down her body. From her back pocket poked a tiny green slice of paper.

Reaching down between us, brushing her butt ever so slightly with my fingers, I pulled the flier for the talent show out of her pocket.

She didn't try to stop me. "What are you doing?"

"Stealing your innocence."

"I'm not innocent, though."

"Neither am I."

"We've got a problem then."

"We've got tons of problems." I unwrinkled the flier and held it in the air. "We've got nothing but problems."

"You're not thinking—"

"I am."

"You're not saying—"

"I am."

Ash's ghost-white face broke into a frightening grin. "Fuck it."

____ ____

Author's Note:

Thank you for reading! If you're enjoying Poor Things, please consider hitting the vote button—it will help other readers find the story. Comments are always appreciated, too. Seriously, I love them.

Coming up at the 13th Annual Talent Show, the gang puts on a performance that the whole school will remember . . .