“Hurry up, Ash!” Laurie said from outside the bathroom. I woulda said something back, but whatever I had eaten the night before had given me a diarrhea fit something awful. I wasn’t outright groaning, but nothing about this was comfortable.

When I was done, I almost wanted to step on the scale and weigh myself to see if I’d lost a visible amount of weight. It felt like I had, that was for sure. I decided against it, though. I had to get ready for school and Laurie needed her shower. I just splashed a little water on my face and then left the bathroom.

I walked into my room and grabbed my phone. There was a text from Grant.

Sck, wont be at scool, he said. He was probably shitting himself stupid, just like I was. Made me wonder what he’d eaten last night. Great, now I had scripts to get to him and no way to get them to him until I type them up after school. Maybe I could get them typed up in a free period.

I pulled off my sleep shorts and got busy getting dressed. As I was pulling on my socks, something seemed… Off. It took me a minute to place it, but then I spotted the bright yellow nail polish bottle on my desk.

I picked it up and wondered what it was doing there. Laurie liked bright yellow, so I imagined it was hers… But that didn't feel right. It wasn’t hers, it couldn't be. It wouldn't be in my room, and neither of us had gone into the other's room since we got up. That… That meant it had to be mine.

But I didn't remember buying it or having it the night before, or even when I got out of bed for my shit fit, so where the hell had it come from? The rational part of me knew I should take it to Laurie and let her have it.

A different part of me wanted to paint my nails.

Should I really listen to that part? It's not like I hadn't been the subject of schoolyard teasing before, and I was the star quarterback, so that might mitigate some of the bullshit. Or it could exponentially enhance it and I’d be the laughing stock of the school for a day or two before something else happened with someone else.

Neither Dad nor Laurie made any sort of remarks when I walked downstairs with yellow fingernails. With any luck, nobody at school would notice either, and I’d be free of any teasing. I didn't expect my day to be that easy.

Later…

Wheeler tossed me a football the second he spotted me walking through the school doors. I fumbled it a little, but didn’t drop it. He was standing next to Kathy, who was standing at my locker with her arms folded under her breasts and a look on her face that suggest I needed to be worried. I juggled the football a little then tossed it back to Wheeler and took a deep breath. This was not going to be good.

Well, at least I thought it wasn’t going to be good. She didn’t actually say anything to me as I opened my locker and pulled my books out. She instead kept staring at me, like she was trying to gaze into my soul, or some shit. Wheeler just looked like he wanted to burst into laughter.

“Okay, whaddya want, Kat?” I asked as I brushed my hair away from my eyes. I didn’t think my hair was that long. Huh.

“Your article, the one I’ve been waiting for, the ‘School Life’ one?!”

I shut my locker. “You mean the one you pulled me away from last night to go shopping?”

Her face turned red, and not just from the shade of blush she’d picked that morning. “Well, I…”

Wheeler finally broke. Almost everyone in the hallway turned to watch him fall on his ass. When he eventually stood up and composed himself, he said, “Oh… Oh man… That was worth it.”

Kat rolled her eyes. “Okay, fine, I deserved that. The point is, I need it in by this afternoon.”

I smirked. “Yeah, I’ll get on that. Probably get it through lunch.”

She nodded. “Great, that works for me.” She sighed. “Sorry for treating this like it’s your fault.”

I slapped my hand on her shoulder. “Don’t sweat it.” I ruffled her hair a bit. “You’re cute when you try to be intimidating.”

Her eyes turned pure steel. “Don’t do that again, missy.” For some reason, that passed me by. “See you at lunch.” She pushed my hand away from her shoulder and sauntered off, swinging her ass side to side. I just chuckled. Kat did love the attention, even if she looked embarrassed because of it.

Wheeler leaned against the locker beside me and whistled. “You could do worse,” he said.

“Shut it.”

“Coach ain’t gonna bench you again today, is he?”

I shrugged. “Beats the hell outta me. I hope not, I don’t wanna lose my game, y’know.”

He reached into his bag and pulled out a bottle of Pepsi. “Not like you’re not the best player on the team or anything, so losing your game probably shouldn’t be too much of a concern.”

I took the bottle from him and took a long gulp. “It’ll always be a concern,” I said.

“And that, my friend, is why you’re the best player on the team.” He grabbed his Pepsi back and gulped down the rest of it. “Remember, you promised to give my little sister a manicuring lesson after school today.”

I nodded as he slung his book bag over his shoulder and headed off for his class. I laughed, then opened my locker again. Of course, I’d forgotten that I’d help Kelsey after practice. I had too much on my mind.

Later…

The library was mostly empty during lunch. There were maybe three other people, not including the librarians. Not much chatter, everybody was in different parts of the library. Stephan Wolffe was over by the graphic novels, poking around the manga; Emily Forsythe was on one of the other computers on the other side of the room; and Kevin Daly was sitting at a table flipping pages in what looked like a medical textbook. It couldn’t sound more empty in there if we were all dead.

The article went smoother than I thought it would, considering I also couldn’t keep the comic out of my mind. Hand in hand, I’d type up a sentence of the article, then write down some of the comic. Productive, but almost too productive. It worried me that I would eventually lose the inspiration.

Another couple paragraphs down on the article, another page written for the comic. At some point, I’d need to type those up and get them to Grant before the end of the day. I wondered how he was doing.

How you doing? I texted him.

He sent back, Puking my guts out.

The fuck did you eat?

Crappy burrito. My mom can’t cook for shit.

I chuckled. Any pages done?

Nah, too shitty today. You?

A few. Should have em typed up before the end of school today.

Don’t rush.

No problem.

I slipped my phone back into my pocket and wondered for a second why I had so much room in that pocket. Anybody with fast fingers could reach in there and grab my phone and I’d never notice. Or maybe I needed something else to carry my phone in. I dunno, the thought was a stray and I shouldn’t have let it take up so much of my time.

I got back to the article and realized I was just shy of Kathy’s appointed word count. I either had to chop some off to finish how I wanted or throw in a semi-hasty ending. Or, I could take a third option and ask Kat to make it a two part piece. She liked me, the odds were good she’d be fine with it. At that point, I wouldn’t need too much more time.

“Are you done yet?” Kat asked, surprising me. Then I remembered she’d said she’d be here.

“Just about. You averse to this being across a couple papers?”

Her hands were on her hips and her face was extremely unpleased. “You’re kidding? First I give you extra time and now you wanna split it?”

“Please?” I asked, putting on a look of false innocence and clasping my hands together like I was praying.

She took on a look of extreme annoyance, now. “Fine, but it better be done in time for next month’s.”

I snapped my fingers. “You got it.”

She smacked me on the back of the head. “For a jock, you’re such a dork.”

“Most secretly are.”

She sat down on the table beside the computer. “So, I’ve been meaning to ask you…”

I looked up from the computer. “What?”

“What are you writing in your notebook?”

“Oh, a comic Grant and I are gonna put online.”

She raised an eyebrow. “You two write comics?”

“No, I write, he draws.” I quickly wrote a note on the side of the page about a character based on Kat. An inquisitive, semi-nagging character who would probably be a character’s friend or maybe even the main character’s potential lesbian love interest prior to discovering her sexuality.

“Aw, that’s so cute.”

I felt myself blush, somehow. Why was us doing a webcomic “cute”? Except that it almost kinda sounded like it was. Why was I thinking that?

I ignored those thoughts and instead returned my focus on both the article and the comic. Just a few more words and I could wrap up part 1 of the article and the current chapter of the comic. The comic was the most difficult. Sometimes it felt as though I was writing myself into a corner, and needed to find a way to keep going.

At least I had Grant’s art to look forward to when he got the pages.

Later…

I poked around on my phone as I sat on the toilet. I mostly looked at webcomics, primarily TG webcomics, trying to make sure I wasn’t writing too many cliche scenes into ours. It wasn’t an easy thing to do, as so many TG tropes existed in every webcomic out there. El Goonish Shive in particular played pretty much all of them with every character it could, sometimes multiple times. We obviously had the easy ones, like the main character being dragged along to buy clothes or the obligatory beach episode (who doesn’t like seeing their gorgeous female characters in bikinis?), but we were also straying away from a few of them. Brenda wasn’t the hottest girl in the comic, nor was she completely disgusted by what was happening to her.

The main thing I wanted to avoid was Misfile Syndrome, as I called it. That was a good comic, but it dragged something fierce. We weren’t going to make ours any longer than it needed to be.

I sighed. Researching webcomics to write a webcomic could be exhausting at times, especially when you’re trying to avoid their cliches, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Grant and I were gonna make the best damn webcomic that we could, and even if we didn’t hit it big, we were gonna have our foot in the door with it. Though, personally, I wanted to hit it big.

I took a moment away from my phone and glanced at my fingernails, inspected them. The polish was still spotless, a very pretty looking yellow. For some reason, I felt like I should have been worried about something, but I didn’t know what. It was no secret that I wore nail polish, it never had been. Maybe that wasn’t it at all. Maybe I didn’t have any on my toenails. That must have been it. I had forgotten to paint my toenails.

I flushed, pulled my underwear back up, then my pants, then slipped my phone back into my pocket. I only had a few minutes left before football practice started, and I was eager to get out there. Hopefully, Coach wouldn’t bench me three days in a row.

Of course, he did just that.

Instead of being on the field running plays with the rest of the team, I sat on the bleachers with Coach. He had me running the stopwatch on the team, timing how well they did. They weren’t exactly doing great, but that didn’t mean much yet, as they’d only learned the plays five minutes before. I realized with a chuckle that we’d never really be good college players.

I stopped the watch after the fourteenth run, and Coach blew the whistle. “You’re the sorriest maggots I’ve ever seen running this field! How you get your asses out of bed in the morning amazes me, you’re so damn lazy!”

I always got a laugh out of Coach doing his drill sergeant routine. It was never a good motivator for this team, but it usually worked good enough with repeat attempts. Maybe it would work faster this time.

“Now pull your panties up and run those plays!”

I started the stopwatch again and relaxed in my seat. I should have been out running those plays with them, but I couldn’t deny the comfort of the bleachers. Hopefully I’d be back out there tomorrow, because I was sure my game would be way off. I couldn’t sit out four days and keep my nickname honorably.

I felt my phone buzz in my pocket. I reached for it and saw a text from Laurie. heading 2 the mall dont wait up, it read. What the hell I was “waiting up” for was a question I didn’t care to ask. She had a habit of thinking I wanted to hang out with her friends when I really didn’t. I wasn’t sure if it was just some twin thing or her thinking I was more invested in her life than I really was. Hell, she’d probably try to pass it off as helping me research the comic when all she’d want me there for is carrying the bags.

ok, I replied. I then proceeded to nearly drop my phone when Coach shouted at the team again. “Kick off those high heels and move, pansies!”

I giggled, then reset the stopwatch. I was at least getting a whole lot of laughs.

Later…

“Now, remember, shaping the nails is as important as any other part of a manicure,” I said. Kelsey watched as I shaped her nails with a file. She was really paying attention, which surprised me, since I always thought she pretty much had Wheeler’s attention span, which was so short that a fire lived longer in the vacuum of space. This whole thing actually impressed me.

Wheeler looked bored but didn’t say anything. He was probably anxious for me to finish the lesson so we could hang out. We had plans to head over to Grant’s and bug the shit out of him. Part of me knew it was a stupid, juvenile thing to do, but the rest of me just wanted to have the fun of doing it.

“Okay,” I said, “you try now.”

Kelsey grabbed the file and set to work on the nails on her left hand, as I had been doing her right. I wondered for a moment why she wanted me to give her these lessons. Judging by how pretty her nails were to start with, she kept really good care of them. I couldn’t teach her much she didn’t already know, really. Then again, manicuring was a hobby of mine. Maybe it was one of hers, and she just liked talking to somebody who shared the same interest.

Wheeler leaned forward in his extremely comfortable looking armchair. “You guys done yet?”

Kelsey just smiled. “Nope.”

He groaned. “C’mon! Ash and I have shit to do!”

I giggled. This reminded me of how Wheeler and I met. Laurie and I had been arguing about something, and Wheeler just happened by and watched. Now, I was the one just watching a different brother/sister spat.

I glanced down at my watch. “Okay, Kelsey, you’re doing great. Just run me through everything I taught you, and we’ll call this lesson over and done with.”

“Right,” she said, then her bright smile was replaced by a concerned frown. “Um… Can you take me back through that?”

I sighed. Wheeler fell out of his chair. Kelsey and I both started giggling, then I asked, “What did you fall down for?”

“I! Don’t! Know!”

Later…

“What the fuck are you guys doing here?” Grant asked. He looked miserable.

“We got bored,” Charlie said. He’d met up with us on the three block walk between Wheeler’s place and Grant’s. “And besides, what are you doing that we can’t be here?”

“Damn food poisoning wiped me out, that’s what.” He downed a half a can of soda. “How was practice?”

Wheeler answered, “Coach kept Flash off the field again, for some stupid reason.”

Grant looked over at me. “What the hell?”

“Don’t ask me,” I said, “Coach does what he wants. It’s gonna screw me up when I’m back out there, though.”

Wheeler sat down on the edge of Grant’s bed. “You’re still probably better than the rest of us, though. Coach’ll bring you back when he thinks we’ve caught up.”

Charlie grunted out a laugh. “Yeah, like that’ll ever happen. We’re the shittiest team in the county.”

“Bullshit,” I said, “we’re fucking amazing with or without me. Coach is just being too hard on you guys.”

Grant laughed. “Yeah, we need it sometimes. We damn sure aren’t the best team in the county.”

Wheeler at some point grabbed a bag of pretzels that must have been laying around somewhere, because he was munching on them like there was no tomorrow. “We’re an awesome team, we just get saddled with facing off against better teams.” He almost threw a handful of pretzels in his mouth. “But let’s put that away for now and get to some Dynasty Warriors.”

Charlie groaned. “Oh, for fuck’s sake… No! Halo or no go!”

I knew I had some big dumb smile on my face when I looked over at Grant. He, too, had a big dumb smile on his face as he turned to me.

And I felt the weirdest urge, but suppressed it. Why the hell did I want to kiss him?