Read Online Do You Think This Is Strange? by Aaron Cully Drake - Free Book Online Page A

said. Then she kissed me on my cheek and was gone. I sat on a bench, lay on my back, and it rained.
    I never saw her again.
    At suppertime, our third chair is always empty, and my father fills the vacant space with questions, while I fill the vacant space with abridged answers.

SASKIA AT THE TABLE AGAIN
    The next day, Saskia Stiles sat at my lunch table in the cafeteria again.
    She wore the same pink coat, the same knitted wool cap, the same Bose headphones. But she didn’t have her notepad in front of her. She had her iPhone, and she clutched it to her chest like it was trying to leap from her grasp. She bent over, praying into it; her thumbs tapping away in bursts of frantic activity, then frozen in moments of thought assembly. She worked feverishly.
    I didn’t expect her to be at my table. I expected her to find somewhere else to eat. Somewhere less crowded. Somewhere uncrowded. That’s what I would have done.
    But there she was.
    I sat down, at the opposite end. She squeaked.
    We ate in silence, the only thing between us the empty space of a lunch table.
    When Saskia Stiles squeaked for a second time, she put her sandwich down, brought her hands up, and flapped them.
    Just then, a Tater bomb fell.
    â€œHeads up, fucknuts!” Danny Hardwick called out to me.
    â€”
    Six days after I arrived at Hampton Park, Jim Worley asked me how I was getting by.
    â€œGetting by what?” I asked him. His nostrils flared. Our relationship had progressed to the point where he was no longer certain I was as simple as he thought, and he suspected that I often baited him. His smile tightened a little more each time we talked. Although I understood what it means to “get by,” I also knew that with Jim Worley a literal response was the best response, because it annoyed him. The more annoyed he was with me, the fewer questions he asked.
    â€œI see you’re eating lunch in the cafeteria,” he said after my first month at Hampton Park. “Have you made any friends?”
    â€œNo,” I replied.
    â€œYou don’t talk to anyone at the lunch table?”
    I shook my head. “No one sits at my table.”
    â€œWhy do you think that is?” he asked.
    â€œPeople throw Tater Tots at this table.”
    Jim Worley paused to absorb this. “Do you mean,” he said after a moment, “that they throw Tater Tots at you?”
    Don’t tell him , a thread advised. He’ll just ask more questions.
    â€œNo,” I said.
    Jim Worley waited for more. Told you , shrugged the thread.
    â€œSometimes they throw them at the janitors’ lunchroom. I think they’re trying to annoy the janitors.”
    Jim Worley nodded his head thoughtfully. “That stands to reason, I guess.”
    He leaned back and put his feet up on his desk. “It seems odd that they sell Tater Tots in the cafeteria. People buy them to throw them. Not to eat them, you know. Little Tater Bombs, we called them when I was a student here.” He looked at me and smiled, as if he was sharing an inside secret. “Yes, Frederick,” he said. “I was once a student, too. And they had invented Tater Tots by then, too.”
    â€œThat’s not what I was wondering,” I told him.
    â€œNo?”
    â€œNo,” I said. “I was wondering if they threw them at you or if you threw Tater Tots at them.”
    His smile tightened.
    â€”
    In the cafeteria, Tater Tots fell.
    I sat, eating my lunch in silence, and wondered if I should advise Saskia Stiles to eat somewhere else, not because I didn’t want her at my table, but because I believed that eating at my table may cause her distress.
    Another Tater Tot arced across the cafeteria and bounced off our table. I gave no reaction. She jumped slightly, and I found myself compelled to say something reassuring. Which I have never felt compelled to do before.
    â€œIt’s a stochastic event,” I said and looked down at the table like it