Ridiculous/Hilarious/Terrible/Cool by Elisha Cooper

do anything for a while,” he says with a shrug, “we end up doing something.”
    Afterward The Girl was crying but would not tell Anthony why. Her silence made him angry so he threw a sneaker at the wall, which is what his father heard from downstairs. His father came up and searched the place but didn’t find anything (The Girl was in the closet behind some coats), though this was small relief as, in the most significant development from that afternoon, The Girl got pregnant.
    Or so The Girl says. That’s the reason she gives for slapping Anthony on the train. And though she tells Anthony he won’t have to do anything with her and the baby, that she’s relieving him of all responsibility, Anthony feels stuck. He feels he should do the right thing, whatever that is. The crazy part of all this is that Anthony is not even The Girl’s boyfriend anymore. She’s going out with The Dude.
    â€œI don’t know what’s going on!” Anthony calls out, eyes bugging even larger than normal. “You want to know. But do you really want to know?”
    He slaps the table.
    â€œUntil she get a fat stomach or another dude, it’s the wait-and -find-out-method.”
    Adding to his problems, as he and The Girl were riding the train back to Payton, someone robbed him. Or, someone robbed Anthony’s cousin, taking the cash out of her wallet in Anthony’s backpack. Now Anthony has to pay his cousin ten dollars. His reward, he says, for being a good guy.
    Anthony stops telling his side of the story. The girls at the table are long gone, leaving him staring into space. There’s little left to say.
    â€œThat was my yesterday.”
    AP biology has a higher percentage of gawky students than the rest of high school. It’s scientifically provable. More skinny kids, more squat kids, more pimples, more unintended mustaches, more striped sweaters (more sweaters, period). One lab group is particularly ungainly: a girl with too-tight jeans and limp hair, a boy whose unshowered hair looks as if it doesn’t want to be in the room but can’t decide which door to exit through, a lanky boy in dress shoes one size too big.

    The lab group is running an experiment on DNA sequencing. As they squirt blue marking dye on micropipettes and slide them into trays, they make small talk:
    â€œYou using the electrophysylater ?”
    â€œAfter we electro paracify .”
    Then the trays are placed into a humming centrifuge, where the particles are separated into their various elements, in much the same way that the centrifuge of high school has separated these students into AP biology.
    After biology class is over, Daniel Patton walks through the halls, dress shoes squeaking. He’s holding to his ear the Palm Treo 650 smartphone he got for Christmas. After checking his messages (none), he puts the Treo back into his new leather shoulder bag. With the new bag and the new phone, Daniel looks less like a young politician, and more like a young Wall Street banker.
    Daniel doesn’t know it, but the Harvard admissions office has been calling his guidance counselor. They’re inquiring about Daniel’s scores and his grades, wondering if they have improved. Daniel took his ACT again and his score went up slightly. His grades are the same. The word is that if there is any way for Harvard to admit him, they will.
    Phys ed has moved indoors to the gym. They’re playing badminton. Not badminton, really, but a game best described as Hit the Ceiling with the Birdie. The gym is alive with parabolas, everyone swinging their rackets and singing along to the R. Kelly song blasting from a boom box. If the point of phys ed is to exercise, though, then Hit the Ceiling with the Birdie serves its purpose.
    After ten minutes, even this exertion proves too much. Some girls get the idea of playing badminton prone. The developing philosophy for phys ed seems to be Why do something standing up when