7days7authors

Sunday - Opening Scene - Will

Fade in on me, on the bus, going to class. Then focus on the look of shock in my eyes.

It can’t be her. Can it? Old classmate, new body, new face. Among other marginally-cute-girl-to-drop-dead-stunning girl enhancements. Right in front of me – I’ve got only the briefest of seconds before the recognition flashes in her eyes – I’m struggling to come up with some sort of line to say to her when—

The bus comes to a screeching, unexpected almost halt, throwing me into her, rendering any line moot.

“Kurt? Is that you?”

Oh great, here we go.

“Oh…hey Vikki.”

“Wow, it’s been a while hasn’t it?”

“Well, if a couple of months is ‘a while’ then, yeah.” You can obviously see how witty I can be in the presence of females—especially really hot former dates.

“Well, a lot can happen in a few months Kurt.”

A lot indeed—good lord she must’ve gotten the whole upgrade.

“That’s true. So what have you been up to?” Damn, her plastic surgeon does GREAT work—if I’m not careful I could be “up” to an embarrassing situation right here.

“You know, classes, getting used to the heat—the usual. How ‘bout you?”

It’s a very “life imitating art” experience—all the conversations around us is reduced to background noise, but the figurants are still noisy.

“What? Oh, just, you know, going to school and stuff.” And stuff. My dad would kill me for being so non-descriptive.

“Oh.”

“…” Whether I like it or not, in my mind’s eye she’s already half naked, clothes coming off in a blur, 70s funk music playing; there’s a waterbed…

“So how’s that going for you?”

And we flash back to reality. I’m not sure how long I was out, but it doesn’t seem to have gotten to her. Better respond—quick:

“Good. I like most of my classes.” Yeah, that’s the best I could do under the circumstances. You want witty repartee, go rent My Dinner With Andre.

“I bet they seem easy after all that extra work you got from your parents.”

“Yeah, but I can’t get overconfident. Just because I wrote a full screenplay in High School is no guarantee that I can write 5 pages on some depressing Bronte Sister novel…”

What, me? Toot my own horn? Subtlety? Sure…well, maybe minus the subtle part…

“Well, you look great—”

“—You too—”

Words don’t adequately express. It’s like she’s a different—hotter—person.

“I can’t believe I bumped into you.”

You can’t believe it?

“You remember prom?” Vikki continued.

Porn? Did we videotape—oh, prom.

“How…how could I forget something like that?”

“Well, given the amount of alcohol I had in me, it’s a wonder I remember anything about that night.”

“Really? I’d hate it if I was so…forgettable.”

She moved closer.

“That’s not what I meant.”

What have you been UP to indeed.

This could be a nice moment.

But the idiot bus driver hit the brakes again, this time it’s not an almost stop, but a real stop, stopping HARD, sending me spiraling away from Vikki onto a nice-looking, but decidedly not Vikki girl, and generally sending all of us standing bus riders into a more-or-less supine pose on the aisle floor.

And it was my stop.

“This is where I get off.”

She arched a perfectly plucked (or waxed, or whatever the hell women do to keep the unibrow away) eyebrow.

“I mean, it’s my stop, gotta get, y’know, lunch.”

“Well, here, take this—” she handed what looked like a business card.

“You have a card? We’re like 19…” this way she won’t register my eagerness to get her number—and I quickly scanned the card to make sure she wasn’t just fucking with me, “this is just your number and name—shouldn’t you have a job in order to have a card?”

“Ass—they’re from the student union. Call me sometime, Ok?”

And that was that—me off the bus and once again baking in this accurséd Georgia heat. The local colloquialism “it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity,” can kiss my pale, white ass. It’s both, damnit, and they both suck.

Such pointless bitching is my body’s way of saying it’s time to eat, so I headed south, towards Snelling, the only dinning hall still serving lunch, to grab some grub. In my mind I conjured up an image of high-school Vikki—kind of large nose, uneven, thin lips, cute but not beautiful. Kind of funny how the longer adjective is the better one—a semantic correlation between the Hot 1-10 scale and words I guess. She was the kind of girl you’d call petite in a sort of derogatory tone. Next to that I imagined the Vikki I had seen on the bus—lips that could swallow my tongue whole (among other things), perfect breasts and perfect tan, perfect nose. Then I superimposed “college Vikki” over “high school Vikki.” It did not compute.

But I had “college Vikki’s” number, so I didn’t care.