Stacey on the Lunch

Decelerated positron emissions born a thousand centuries earlier bathed her face in the warmth of a late Spring morning.  This time was ours and no aspects of cliché, of empathy, of knowing smiles could take away the fact that she was my princess. I knew she was for I had admired her for months, waiting for a suitable time to slay the dragon who held her prisoner.

That dragon, a boy named Ryan who had too much floppy hair and no personality, had fallen without my doing when he had failed to show for class on April twenty third, the first day back after Easter. I had seized upon his adenoidal distress with enthusiasm and bought her a diet coke and sausage roll meal deal at the butcher’s on the 12.15pm bell.  ‘Here, for you’, I said, smiling mysteriously and passing her the bounty as she stood in the queue – I had gotten out early by telling Mr Bates to go f*** himself, upon which he had sent me to the Deputy Head.  Stacey smiled and in that moment I knew Ryan might as well die of his stuffy glands.

I had been reading ahead in physics and told her of the process by which antimatter, created in the fusion of hydrogen atoms, produced gamma rays that bounced around inside our star for up to a million years before they slowed down to visible light and made the 500 second journey to Earth. She was my princess and no amount of detentions, of Ryans, of the shit and tackle of high school drudge was going to keep me from explaining the universe to her as I saw it: a Stacey-centred model; a model within which no other model could exist.

She ate the roll and looked at me with those big panda-black eyes, a dollop of grease congealing on her freckled lip. She told me how she was really into Magic Mike just now and offered me the earbud on her mp3 the better that we might share her current playlist. I thought about telling her how Sartre had opened my eyes to the perception of self in relation to the Other but contented myself with stealing glances at her tits, fully aware that her catching me would provide an opener to Jean Paul’s insightful writings.

We kissed on the bell and went our separate ways, she to maths me to Mr Bates to face his confused questioning.  Ryan returned the following day and it was like I’d never been, but boy did I have one over on him.

I’d shared Stacey’s earbuds. And I’d heard her soul.