Right In The Face

There are some people whom one just wants to stab in the face. Right in the face. Of course, it’s not something that one can do, just go around, stabbing people willy-nilly. People would notice, and, most likely, point and stare. And possibly call the police. And then they would arrive, and it’d be embarrassing for everyone involved. But, I digress. Unfortunately, I am forced to spend time with a particular person who I want to stab right in the face. His name? Callum.
Callum is one of those people who thinks that he is God’s gift to everyone. Well, no, he thinks he’s God, essentially. There is little that you can say to, or indeed, around, him that won’t be met with a comment or a roll of the eyes. He’s one of those people that when you discover that they like something that you like, you die inside a little. I do not want to spend time with this man. But, as is life’s wont, I have to.
Let me get things out of the way. I am a girl, I’m not sure if you’d worked that out already, and I wanted to clear up any ambiguity that could have arisen, before it arose. I am 18. My hair is nondescript coloured and hell to tame, and I have eyes that a tadpole would struggle to drown in. I’m British, not English, and I go to school.
School. I walk to school. Headphones on, Volume up to 30, no higher, and flood the abyss that is my Morning-Brain with music. I don’t have an ipod. It’s not that I’m against Apple, in fact, I have little to say about them because I own nothing of their branding, I just, don’t have an ipod.
It is March. I am optimistic and have shorts on, and my Summer Earrings went in a few days ago. My Summer earrings don’t match. I am early to school, I don’t have a lesson for another 40 minutes or so, but I am bored of doing nothing at home. I have come to do nothing at school. That is my plan, to do nothing for 40 minutes. Callum is there. Shocker. He’s there every morning, early, because he gets a lift to school. He, of course, wants conversation. I, obviously, do not. This never dissuades him.
“Hey!” He doesn’t so much speak, as reverberate through my inner ear. It is not, and never will be, pleasant.
“Hey.” I reply. The full stop is, to me, and to normal people, audible. Not to him.
“ How come you’re in early? You don’t have a lesson now do you?” He is still there. He is trying to communicate with me. I do not wish to communicate with him. I tell him so.
“I do not wish to communicate with you. Go away.”
“Bad day? Hell, that sucks.” What? Why? He is still there. I tell him to leave and he stays. I want to stab him in the face. Right in the face.
I sit, I stare at him. He stays there, smiling right back at my non-expression of joy. He talks at me for the next 38 and a half minutes. The bell goes and I escape.
* * *
The bell goes again and I return. The lesson is not worth mentioning. Callum is not either, but I feel I must. I sit. I wait for the inevitable. The inevitable, however, is not what happens. The inevitable is him coming to talk at me. This does happen but what also happens is the prelude.
He hugs me. It is not a wanted hug. It is one of those hugs where one person is standing and the other sitting, and it doesn’t work. Unless the girl is standing, and you want boobs in your face. Which some people do. I sit motionless in this hug. There is boob graze. I am not happy.
“Feeling Better?” He asks.
“No.”
He beams at me and then sits down. My friends appear, and we converse, but he remains, talking to me. I must admit that I am not entirely blameless in this ridiculous relationship that I share with him. I have flirted with him in the past. I’ve done more than flirt, but I’d rather not get into that. That doesn’t mean that he has permission to follow me around. Luckily, I don’t have all my lessons with him. In fact, I only have one lesson with him. Music.
Music is one of my favourite subjects. It is, however, marred slightly by Callum’s presence in my class. I sing. This is how normal people speak. Callum does not sing. Callum’s ‘Voice is his instrument’. When I say Callum does not sing, I do not mean only in his terminology, I mean that he cannot sing.
Today, he is asked to sing an excerpt from his Original Composition. He stands and walks to the front of the class to do so. He needn’t. No one cares. We care about our own compositions. There are no words to describe his singing. He sings with the confidence of a Tom Cat in a land where there are no others. In fact, he sings like a Tom Cat.
He finishes singing and returns to his seat. Unluckily for me, his seat is the one next to mine. I’m not sure which I would prefer. For him to sing for eternity, but never sit next to me again, or vice versa. Both are equal to the inner circles of hell. Even Lucifer himself would rather not be with Callum.
* * *
I do not understand what it is about Callum that makes him think that people like him. No. I do not understand what it is about Callum that makes him think that I like him. I have told him, to his face, that I do not like him, and yet he still continues to live in a make believe world where everyone likes him. I just want to stab him in the face. Right in the face. All of the time.
The problem is, the teachers encourage him. They encourage him because he is a Brown Noser. In fact, if his nose was any further up our Music Teacher’s arse, then he’d be sniffing her tongue. But who am I, to argue with the authority figures of our school?
But, once again, I am digressing from the story that I’m trying to tell. This is not a tale of my struggle against Authority. This is a story of my struggle with Callum. If you think that I’m being too harsh on him, I ask you to understand that I’ve been putting up with this for several years now. I try my best to be nice to everyone, but when people ignore what you say, what’s the point? You might as well be mean. Or honest, depending on your view point.
* * *
Most days start like that one, and continue along a similar vein. Today is no different. Today I walk to school. Headphones on, volume up to 30, no higher, and drown myself in classic British goth-punk. That does make more sense if you’ve heard of The Damned. Look them up, they are incredible. I barely make it in time for my first lesson. This is a deliberate attempt to avoid Callum. Of course, I know that he will find me. I know that I will have to communicate with him.
I arrive in my school’s Sixth Form Common Room that lunchtime. The home of roughly 180 late teenaged people. It is hot. It smells. But it is where I spend a lot of my free time. Callum is not there. I am glad. A friend of mine is laughing. When she laughs, she cries. It’s just what happens. There is, to people who know her, a very obvious difference. We are laughing together.
Callum arrives. He immediately makes a complete tit of himself by getting involved.
“Oh My God!” His voice physically hurts me. I am, in no way, exaggerating. It is as bad as a car alarm on a hungover Sunday morning. “Anna!” That’s me. “What the hell are you laughing for? Can’t you see that she’s really upset?”
He puts his arm around her. I have stopped laughing. I want to stab him in the face. Right in the face. Once again, you think I’m being too harsh on him. But I’m honestly not. If he genuinely cared, I would not mind. But as it is, he is just trying to be the hero of the hour. And people who are heroes simply for Ego-boosts are not something that I can deal with.
“She’s laughing, Callum. You can get off her now.”
I am dead pan. I am not even angry. I am emotionless. His arm is still around her. She is fine now, and clearly smiling. His arm is still around her. There is a moment in which everything is motionless. His arm is still around her. Nobody moves. She laughs awkwardly and slips out of his grasp. This feels like a victory for me. He should not have got involved.
“Glad to know you’re ok!” Callum exclaims everything. His speech is dotted with question marks and exclamation marks and parenthesis so obvious I can practically see them circling his head. I imagine them wriggling back into his ears to be reused, because, after all, we all have to do our bit to recycle.
* * *
It is a little later this lunchtime. Callum is the opposite side of the room. I can hear him laughing. People in south-east asia can hear him laughing. For all I know, you, the person reading this, can hear him laughing. I do not know why he is laughing. I do know that I want him to stop. It’s not that I don’t want him to be happy, it just that I don’t him to be laughing.
That is a lie, I do not want him to be happy. In fact, I do not want him to be here. Or I do not want me to be here.
I hear a few snatched words of his conversation with his friends. His friends, like mine, are mostly impartial in this one sided war. I hear the word ‘sex’. There is rambunctious laughter. Then I hear my name. I know the two are related. I know why they are related. I know that they should not be related. I know that they should not, in the very least, be being mentioned in the same conversation.
I stand. I walk over to Callum and his friends. They all have the good grace to seem embarrassed. I do not care that they are embarrassed.
“Callum.” I say, “Would you get up?” I do not say please.
He stands and grins at me. His grin, and, indeed, his face, is unattractive. Again, there is a feeling that everything has stopped.
“Did you want something Anna?”
I consider him momentarily. I consider all the many things that I want to say to him. He looks at me expectantly. I cannot live with this constant expectation of communication with him. I cannot live with him not understanding that I do not like him.
“Callum. I do not like you. I think that I probably dislike you more than anything in the world. You are loud. You do not listen. You love the sound of your own voice, but no one else does. You cannot sing, and if your voice is an instrument, I hope you kept the receipt. You are so much of an arse-licker that I honestly do not know how you find time to be so fucking annoying.”
The room is quiet. Callum looks at me. I look at Callum. In a film, this is where we would realise our mutual love for each other, and fall to the floor, our tongues wrestling with one another. Luckily, this is not a film, for even writing that made me gag a little.
“Do you dislike me more than poverty?”
He is making a joke. He is making a JOKE. I stare at him in disbelief. My heart beats its beats in my ears. The people around me watch.
There is a Biro on the table.
I stab him in the face.
Right in the face.