The First Mistake

[Grand Moff Hissa]

((Enter BB Gunnerson))

It was always a little hard for BB to come back to school after a break, not due to school seeming harder (it didn't) or being more onerous (it wasn't) but because time off let her abandon her routines and readjusting to them took a few days. She'd woken up this morning, for example, and realized that she'd failed to pack a lunch the night before, and upon investigating the refrigerator had discovered that there wasn't anything that was tasty, filling, and portable enough to bring to school. She was thus condemned to the dubious mercies of the Cochise High School cafeteria, since she wasn't looking to blow a chunk of her Christmas money and most of her lunch hour biking around town seeking something better.

She'd been out of the classroom quickly, luckily, and since her class before lunch wasn't far from the cafeteria and had unusually let out three minutes early, she made it before the line got too long. Her mind wandered as she acquired her Styrofoam tray and saw it filled with a square of floppy pepperoni pizza, a lump of mashed potatoes and gravy, a pile of corn, and a little plastic cup of peach slices in syrup. It would be great to get the band together for lunch, but that wouldn't be a sure bet at all given that she was hanging in the cafeteria and texting them all didn't seem seem worthwhile because she wasn't about to carry the foam tray through the halls. That meant she'd probably have to entertain herself. She had a little notebook with her, one she liked to jot ideas for the band into, but today her focus wasn't great and she doubted she'd cook up much of value.

At least she was able to claim a table. It was wholly empty, and while that wouldn't last, it meant she could pick a seat at it that didn't have any mysterious pools of half-evaporated liquid or smudges of graphite just waiting to stain whatever she set on them. She faced the window and every so often a car would pass by and she'd wonder where it was headed or, if it was a decently cool car, she would imagine being inside, maybe heading to Vegas to play a gig or maybe driving out to some nowhere stage deep in the desert to do the same, because that might even be a more fitting venue.

She was peripherally aware of the cafeteria filling up, and knew that even though she'd picked one of the tables furthest to the side she would likely soon have company. It was fine. She could use something more interesting than the cars outside and the lukewarm corn she slowly chewed.

[Aura]

((Pregame Start: Barry Banks))

As Barry stood in the lunch line, he pondered over the series of events that had brought him into this situation.  First, he forgot to pack a lunch from home.  While this normally wouldn't be much of a problem, Cochise High was not exactly known for high-quality lunches.  Now, he could have gone off-campus to find somewhere else to eat, but he didn't really see the point in going through all that trouble and wasting even more of his lunch period than he already had.  So for now, he was stuck in the line.

He was still optimistic, though.  The last time he had forgotten his lunch, it wound up being taco day in the cafeteria, and the tacos were surprisingly good, especially for Cochise High's usual standard.  So Barry kept hope that there would be something really good in store for him once he reached the front of the line.

It didn't take long for his hopes to be dashed.  It looked like someone had opened a bunch of really bland TV dinners and decided to serve them to high school students for lunch.  He could have sworn that the mashed potatoes and corn looked like something he had seen from a Hungry Man dinner, and the pizza just had to be straight out of the freezer isle, since he'd never seen anything like it anywhere else.  At this point Barry was pretty sure that this wasn't going to be one of the better meals of his young life, but he pressed on.  Something was better than nothing, after all.

Barry didn't usually eat in the cafeteria, but since he was going to have to toss the tray at the end of the meal anyway, he might as well stick around.  Most of the tables were pretty full by the time he got his food, but there was one that still held only a single occupant.  However, with the state of the cafeteria being what it was, he wondered if she was saving that table for someone.  It would make sense, given the situation.  But on the other hand, he really wanted to just sit down and eat, and it was the first open table he saw.  He walked over to the near-empty table and talked to the lone girl sitting there.

"Hey, is it okay if I sit here, or are you saving this table for someone?"

[Yugikun]

Jeremy always knew his parents were good for something.

((Jeremy Frasier: Pregame Start))

Jeremy was in the cafeteria, trying to find a table. He had gotten out of his math class as quickly as possible, mostly so that he could get a spot on a cafeteria table before the place filled up. Well, that, and because he wanted to get out of that fucking math class as quickly as he could. He could have slowed down though, admittedly. He was the first person of his friends here, and rather than literally having nowhere to sit, he metaphorically had nowhere to sit.

Oh well, it wasn't his fault that he didn't fuck around. Professionalism. Walk as quickly to and from where you need to go, and don't waste time by talking to other people. It always worked for him, and the positives always outweighed the negatives.

So yeah, goddammit Joshua, goddammit Harold, goddammit Irene. Why couldn't they be as fast as him? They were so rude, bothering to talk to others instead of moving quickly. God fucking damm.

Oh well. It didn't matter to him. It just meant that he'd have to sit with someone who he didn't talk with normally. He looked around, and Jesus Christ those school lunches looked awful. Again, it seemed his parents were good for something after all. Wait, focus Jeremy. Look for a table.

Soon enough, he found one.

He walked to it, and there were... two people there? One he knew, Barbara Gunnerson. Smart person, had a band, and was a sort of academic rival for Jeremy. She had weird tastes in music, though. What the fuck is drone?

The other person he didn't quite know as well. He knew his name though! Barry Banks, soccer dude, spent all his spare time playing sports. Eh, he could be a good guy.

"Hey, Ba-"

Wait a moment, she prefers to be called by her nickname, right? That's what most other people thought her name was.

"BB, sorry. It okay if I sit here?"

[Grand Moff Hissa]

The first guy who turned up was Barry, who BB mostly knew because of his initials and how they evoked her hated name, but that wasn't his fault. So she turned away from the windows and smiled at Barry and said, "Yeah, be my guest."

And then before too long, there was Jeremy too, who was pretty cool except every so often he tended towards using the name and when he slipped up and did that he could just go get fucked. And today there was very nearly an incident, and BB let her hands slip below the table so nobody would see them balling up—because, really? A one-two of Mr. BB and Jeremy having a moment?—but he dialed it back in time and had the grace to apologize. BB brought her hands back up and took a big bite of potatoes and gravy to keep herself from frowning, because he'd at least put the effort in. The potatoes weren't bad, but that wasn't saying much since it was hard to screw up mashed potatoes without failing to mash them properly or something and BB was almost positive these came from powder in a bag. Still, the salt pushed her worries temporarily away.

"Yeah, Jeremy, have at," she said, gesturing towards one of the empty chairs.

So Jeremy and Barry were pretty okay lunch companions, she guessed, in that she had nothing really against either of them with the exception of Jeremy's tendency towards unfortunate lapses in basic fucking courtesy. He was even decently smart and into music, which won him some points. So maybe these two could be the hour's entertainment in lieu of the band.

"What brings you both here?" she asked. This was really more of a question for Jeremy because Barry was saddled with the same school-provided meal she was, but it felt better to pitch it to both of them. She nodded at her own Styrofoam tray. "I forgot my lunch," she said, before taking another bite of potatoes.

[Aura]

"Thank you."  Barry nodded as he sat down at the table.  He couldn't remember the last time had had eaten in the cafeteria, so it was a pretty new experience for him.  The table felt sort of like something that he would find at a fast food restaurant, to be perfectly honest.  He wasn't totally sure how to feel about that, though.

Barry decided to take his mind of that by joining in the conversation.  "Well, I sorta forgot to pack a lunch today, and I didn't really have time between classes to pick up anything else.  Plus, I was sorta hoping that it would be taco day in the cafeteria again."  He then held up his pizza, which limply hung from his hand like a wilted flower.  "As I'm sure you can see, that wasn't the case."

He chuckled to himself a little bit as he put the pizza back on his tray.  However, despite joking about it, he knew that he would have to start eating his food at some point if he didn't want to go hungry.  Unfortunately, as all of it was equally uninviting, he had no idea where to start.  He hovered his fork around the plate, considering each piece of food before committing to it.  Finally, he stopped over the pizza and looked up at his lunch companions.

"Hey, is the pizza any good?"

[Yugikun]

"Thanks." Jeremy sat down in a chair on the table, allowing his backpack to slide off his arm as he placed it below the table. He almost called her by her real name, which could have been a problem. He knew that she hated it, he wasn't sure why though. He had called her Barbara once out of normal habit at one point and then she treated him like he was the fucking antichrist for the rest of the period. It was a good thing that he actually remembered to call her by her real name this time, or else he probably would have had to find another table. Eh, it didn't matter anyway. He probably could have found another random table with seniors on it that he didn't find detestable, it wouldn't have been too great of a loss.

He opened his bag, so that he could get his lunchbox out. It was a TARDIS lunchbox, which his parents gave him for Christmas because they assumed that he still gave a shit about Doctor Who. Well, that wasn't entirely correct. He liked the last season, despite half the internet not sharing his opinion. But still, his parents were trying to appeal to one of the things they thought he was interested in because they wanted to pretend that they cared about him. They weren't doing a good job though, with them shouting at him to constantly revise when he wasn't doing anything else and not even fucking bothering to pronounce the things he liked right. Maybe that was how BB felt about her real name; maybe he should actually call her by her nickname from now on.

Speaking of BB, she asked him why he was here. Well, she asked Barry as well, but he was likely the odd one out here so the question was probably directed towards him. It was probably a good idea if he responded.

"Place I normally go is closed. Exams or renovations or something like that. I needed somewhere to sit and have my lunch and this was the closest place to my last class. Don't expect me to stay here for too long, though." He probably wasn't going to stay here for too long once he finished his lunch. He didn't find the cafeteria to be a very pleasant place, and when certain people arrived it apparently could turn into a madhouse, which probably wouldn't entertain him.

Barry then asked if the pizza was any good. Jeremy shrugged, and then showed everyone his lunchbox.

"I dunno. Don't need to know though, since I have this." He looked at both of their trays, what they had wasn't really appetising. Thank god that his mom actually made lunch for him every morning.

[Grand Moff Hissa]

"It's alright," BB said, after Jeremy got in his say. "Edible. I've had worse."

She was half tempted to act like it was really delicious and maybe give Jeremy the old Tom Sawyer routine, not even really out of dislike for the food but because he'd gone ahead and pointed out his comparative fortune. But she bit back the impulse and bit into the pizza. No reason to go and make trouble where there was none, especially since Jeremy was still mostly on her good side for catching himself earlier.

"A little salty and a little bland besides that," she clarified. It also featured probably the lamest pepperoni she'd ever encountered, just these sad little circles of meat. It was likely the same ultra-processed pig/chicken/cow intestines that they sold at Target—the sort of meat so chemically altered it didn't even require refrigeration. But she'd eaten worse, or at least certainly worse-tasting, things. And besides, she'd worked up an appetite throughout the school day. What was a little pulverized meat product against that?

She took another bite, chewed and swallowed. It really wasn't that awful. It was like those pizzas she'd loved when she was eight, Tony's or whatever, the frozen ones her parents had always told her were only for special occasions so she'd figured they must be really expensive and then when she was a teenager and actually started paying attention in the grocery store she figured out they usually ran about three bucks. This lunch was a lot more palatable framed as a nostalgic experience.

She could still do with some external distraction, though.

"And what's new in the rest of the world?" she asked, gesturing vaguely at her lunch companions.

[Aura]

After hearing what he could best describe as a partial recommendation, Barry took a bite of his pizza.  As he expected, it was floppy and felt like it had been sitting out for a while.  It was also bizarrely bland.  He honestly didn't know that it was possible for marinara sauce to have such little bite to it.  It was almost disappointing, actually.  He'd give it about... a 90% chance that it was frozen twenty minutes ago.  Hopefully the rest of the food would be better.

Barry swirled the potatoes around his tray with his fork, still a bit apprehensive about eating them.  He figured that there was about an equal chance of them either being blander than the pizza or oversalted beyond belief.  Either way, it didn't really translate to something good, so he decided to stall for some more time.  Fortunately, there was still a conversation going on for that purpose.

"Eh, not really much happening for me."  He said, still twirling his fork.  "I've got soccer practice this afternoon, but that's about it for now."

[Yugikun]

Huh, apparently the pizza wasn't that bad. That was a surprise for him. Wasn't cafeteria food generally inedible, the prehistoric gunk that kids dreaded every day? That was what he had been told by the media, anyway. Still, he was still probably pretty fortunate that he had the homemade stuff, considering what the cafeteria stuff looked like. He checked out BB's tray, and he still couldn't really call it appetising. He swung his lunchbox around his finger and placed it onto the table.

It was now time for lunch.

He opened his lunchbox, putting two fingers on the zipper and allowing it to drag as he moved the lid open. Looking at it, there were two sandwiches, a couple of cherry tomatoes, jelly snakes, and two bottles of water. Not bad, although he was probably going to skip the tomatoes, as yesterday's turned out to be wrinkled and inedible. He unwrapped the tinfoil around the sandwiches, and was about to eat the crusts of the chicken sandwich when BB asked him what was up with the world.

Well, she probably meant the world as in him, but he decided to humour himself a bit.

"Depends on what you mean by "the world". If you're talking about the planet, well…" He decided to take a little breath before he continued; this was going to be a long one.

"Global warming is happening, ISIS is killing anyone who doesn't want to become a Muslim, the WBC excommunicated it's founder after he showed kindness to the gay people across the street, the government is searching for AT and has still provided any fruit, Ebola is raging across Kenya and some other third world countries, and I don't think PETA's done anything to stir shit up lately, so kudos to them.

He bit some of the crust off his sandwich, it wasn't his favourite part of it, but it allowed him to eat the dough and the chicken without any problems. He always seemed to separate his food before he ate it, it was a pattern that he had picked up when he was four years old.

"If "the world" refers to me, then I can very easily say nothing much." He shrugged. "I have homework, piano practice, social things, that kind of stuff."

He took out the rest of the crust with one bite. Mmm, delicious.

[Grand Moff Hissa]

When Jeremy took her to task in a sarcastic and roundabout manner for her phrasing, BB stopped focusing on her food. She still chewed and swallowed and was loosely aware of it, but the process was more mechanical, the taste fading into the back of her mind. When she wasn't chewing, she was smiling. There really was a lot of pretty awful stuff going on when you laid it all out like that, and it was certainly a more interesting response than the more grounded explanation of the mundane realities of school that followed, one which largely echoed the total lack of interesting things going on for Barry as well.

"Sounds like a blast," BB said. She made sure to keep her tone pretty level, something she'd worked on a lot over the years. It helped to be able to camouflage sarcasm under a layer of normalcy. She wished she wasn't here, wished she had swapped the linoleum tiles and fluorescent lights for some other environment. She could have skipped lunch and gone for a walk, but then she'd've been hungry all through her afternoon classes.

BB looked out the windows again, saw an old brown van rumbling past, assigned Vegas as its destination. It was probably big enough to carry the band and all of its equipment, if it wasn't full of junk.

"I've been planning some stuff myself lately," she said, keeping that same conversational tone. She paused for a few seconds to polish off her pizza, stuffing the last bite—which should probably have been the last two bites, really—into her mouth, then chewing it and swallowing it down a bit more quickly than was quite pleasant. She wiped her lips with the fingers of her left hand, then smiled straight at Jeremy, seeking eye contact.

"There's this, like, orgy going on this weekend outside of town that my dealer hooked me up with. He said I could bring some friends if I wanted. I think he was mostly talking about girls, but he didn't specify, so whatever." She shrugged. "Either of you interested?"

[Aura]

Barry continued to move his potatoes around the plate, still trying to calculate the odds of whether they would be bland or salty.  At this point, he had started doodling little pictures in the potatoes for his own amusement.  First a smiley face, then a stickman.  He then started working on making a crescent moon, sort of starting to fall out of the conversation.  He missed what Jeremy had said, so he didn't really have the time to come up with a response to it.

Once the crescent moon was finished, Barry finally bit the bullet and scooped up a bite.  His face shifted through a few expressions as he chewed.  First curiosity, then disappointment, then relief.  As he had half-expected, the potatoes were bland, almost to the level of TV dinner mashed potatoes.  But still, at least being bland wasn't as bad as being inedibly salty, so that was a plus.  With that in mind, he kept on eating.  Hey, might as well finish it now that he knows it's not completely horrible.

As Barry continued, he started to clue into the conversation again at the most awkward possible time.  BB had started talking about some apparent plans of hers, seemingly involving orgies and a drug dealer.  Barry choked on his potatoes briefly at the mention of that.  As he coughed his lunch out of his windpipe, he began to wonder if he had just walked into something that he'd rather not have known about.  Once his throat was clear, he responded in a rather unsure voice.

"I, uh... what did you say?"

[Yugikun]

Jeremy couldn't help but stifle a little grin. She was smiling at what he said. He started chewing into the dough and chicken, to hide it. If this was going to turn into a battle of wits, he had to keep a straight face, or else that would mean that he'd lose. Jesus, if he lost to his own joke that would be embarrassing.  Hmm, maybe he should actually work on keeping a poker face, it'd mean that he wouldn't have to keep his face behind something every time someone replied to him. Yeah, that'd help.

He noted BB's response to him, joking around about the shit going on in the world. Admittedly, while it was something he joked about with friends, he did know that the world was fucked in its current state. The things he mentioned earlier? They were problems (well, maybe the peta thing wasn't, but still), and he wanted to fix them. The problem was, he couldn't really do anything about it. He felt like he had no voice, being just a young man in a small town. Not somebody with a lot of power.

That was another reason he felt that he had to get the fuck out of here as soon as possible. Go to Vegas or Phoenix or Washington or somewhere like that, become a writer. That'd carry some voice, probably.

He noticed BB look up at him with a smile on her face, was she trying for eye contact?

He grinned, allowing his teeth to show for a bit.

It was on.

She went on about going to an orgy. She wasn't being serious, of course, but somehow she got Barry to take her seriously? He briefly questioned whether Barry would take him seriously as well. It'd make the whole thing funnier to him, but he decided to make what he said next sound as sarcastic as possible so that nobody would actually take him seriously.

"Sorry, but I'll have to decline your offer. I'm not really a fan of orgies. I generally prefer the one on one stuff, you know, the stuff that only appears in porn masterpieces such as Fifty Shades of Grey. Being able to do that stuff with a real life girl? That really makes my cock steam." He then winked, in a jokingly exaggerated motion, for extra measure.

[MK Kilmarnock]

"WOAH I HEARD ORGY WHAT'S UP IN THIS THREAD!?"

((Jerry Fury continued from the annals of anal history))

Jerry clacked down his tray at the table and swung a leg over, sitting next to the girl who mentioned the offending phrase. "Just sayin', the when and the where and the cover charge and I'm in!" Jerry laughed hysterically and loudly at his own joke, using the cheap plastic spork that Cochise provided them with to scoop some of the corn onto the soggy pepperoni pizza. "Fucking pizza sucks... so! BB!"

Jerry looked around to the group at the table. Jeremy, Barry, totally cool dudes. Barry was a cool dude, pretty athletic and a hell of a guy to be around. Jeremy was.... certainly a person, yup, and BB was cool if a totally weird girl who Jerry wouldn't doubt if somebody said she was on the school roof with a homemade satellite dish, trying to contact Soviet Russia. She had the double-x chromosome going for her though, so that was nice. "Orgies and cock-steam. Average conversation around Cochise at lunch thime." Jerry folded his pizza in half and took a bite. Sweet, sweet mediocrity.

"Just, ah..." Jerry said between bites, tucking unswallowed food in his cheek. "Are you actually serious? Jeremy, aren't you like, a virgin or something?"

[Grand Moff Hissa]

"That's gross, Jeremy," BB said. "I'm just there with the band. Obviously."

Jerry's arrival and Barry's confusion complicated matters a little. Poking too much at their incomprehension could be kind of bitchy, even if they'd maybe deserve it if they got all unduly interested in her joke. She also really didn't want to come off like she was flirting with Jeremy because while he was okay in her book at the moment that wasn't the same as being flirting material. Maybe if he filled out that height of his a bit better—and of course there was still that lingering memory of his past slips. And then of course Jerry was a little strange and there was a chance that he'd make this whole thing weird and awkward. He'd also just point-blank asked if she was making things up, and that sort of directness was often a signal that someone wasn't quite able to catch out sarcasm, and wouldn't appreciate more of it even if they could.

All the same, she wasn't about to give Jeremy the last laugh.

"I mean," she said, "yeah, Jerry, I'm kidding. But Jeremy sounded pretty genuine to me. I mean, can't you tell he's the freaky type?"

With the baton passed, BB leaned back a bit and started on her corn. It was sort of watery. She probably should have saved some pizza to wash it down.

[Yugikun]

((Gonna skip Aura on the posting order, seeing that he hasn't posted in nearly a month))

Nine words made Jeremy start to cringe a little. One of the few people Jeremy did not want to have heard that joke just came in.

Jerry was an okay person, most of the time. He was loud, but that could be funny, sometimes. Problem was he wasn't really the smartest of people. That would be fine normally, he didn't discriminate based off how smart someone was; but oftentimes he wouldn't get jokes that Jeremy made, which meant that he had to explain it and ruin the joke, which was never fun. It also kinda made him worry a bit. Was Jerry just not getting the joke, or was he the one who wasn't funny?  It wasn't something he often thought about, due to him not wanting to become fucking paranoid, but it came sometimes.

Nevertheless, Jerry came in and now the whole thing was super awkward. Even worse, BB didn't quite appreciate the joke, saying that it was gross. A pang of sadness hit him, and he stopped eating his jam sandwich for a bit. His joke didn't seem to be funny. That wasn't good. Maybe he probably shouldn't have made the cock steaming joke after all. He looked away. BB then passed the baton on to him.

Wait, never mind. He seemed to be okay here.

He looked at Barry and Jerry; they didn't quite seem to know that they were both just joking. They probably wouldn't appreciate it if he continued.

Eh, live in the moment, deal with the consequences later. No regrets.

"Oh, I'm really freaky, if you know what I mean."

He then did the wink again, and looked at Jerry. He may as well answer the question about his virginity.

"At least, that's what they all said after I worked them up."

Well, nobody said that he had to tell the truth, at least. He winked again, for good measure.

Maybe he shouldn't overuse that. Oh well.

"But in all seriousness, we're joking. I said something about how the world was going and it turned into a sarcasm fight, I guess."