.Chapter 7- What's a Bara?
Disclaimer: MysteryBen27 owns all of these fabulous cuties. I own nothing but my laptop, ideas, and a Ciel Phantomhive keychain ^v^
Ever since I hung out with Vivi that Saturday, things took a turn for the better. We turned in our road trip project on Monday and we got extra credit for being the first group that finished. I was actually talking at school. To Vivi, at least. On Tuesday, we spent a good two hours emailing each other, debating over the ending of Ghost Whisperer. I was extremely unsatisfied with the ending while my blue haired friend was perfectly fine with it. I actually got in trouble on Wednesday for not bothering to stop my conversation about creepypasta with Vivi. I was only given a warning from Mrs. Tiemann because she claimed she wanted me to be more social. Now it was Thursday and I actually woke up in a good mood. I felt that Vivi had actually done the impossible and brought out my outgoing side. And somehow, it made me feel a little happier inside.
I was making my way to my free period in the cafeteria when a voice, definitely belonging to my cotton candy blue friend chased after me, calling out, "Lewis! Lewis! Wait for me, man! I have tiny legs!"
Vivi caught up to me, panting, "Dude, why is it that tall people like you always walk so fast? It's crazy!"
"I dunno, I take big steps, I guess." I shrugged. "Anyway, do you have any homework so far?"
"Too much," Vivi let out a sigh of exhaustion as we walked quickly down the stair corridor. "I have a Biology packet and an essay for Honors English as of now. It's not that difficult, but there's no way I'll get it done in free period."
Oh yeah, I also forgot to mention. Vivi and I figured out that we had our free period in the cafeteria together. That means we had an hour each day to goof off and procrastinate with each other. I didn't have any homework yet, but whether Vivi had homework or not, there was no way she was actually going to work on it. We entered the gigantic cafeteria and headed straight for the abandoned round table in the left corner near the window. We both dropped our heavy textbooks on the table in sync and took our seats.
"We need to have a random conversation about something. An interesting topic. I'm bored," my blue haired friend said bluntly, blowing a strand of cotton candy blue hair out of her face.
"Musical instruments?" I suggested.
"We talked about that yesterday."
"Maybe... College? I have no idea. I just came out of another seminar. That's all they ever talk about."
"Oh gosh, not college," Vivi retorted. "I can't stand talking about my future unless it involves ghost hunting with you."
I began to blush lightly as the bell rang, marking the start of free period. We got out our school IDs to go scan in for attendance when a perfect idea hit me. "I got it, Vivi! How about pet peeves? You said you couldn't stand talking about college, so.."
"Fantastic idea, mi amigo!" Vivi grinned, standing on her tip toes in line to pat my unruly pompadour. "So what's your biggest pet peeve?"
"First of all, it's 'il mio amico,'" I corrected her, deeply chuckling. "And my biggest pet peeve...? I have to say it's a close tie between people asking me to join sports teams or people who try too hard to piss of others for their own entertainment. If you're looking for more, I also dislike people asking me to translate cuss words to Italian and gender stereotypes."
Vivi and I scanned in and went to go sit back down. "Wow, I got a lot out of you, Lewis! It's a miracle! Four sentences in a row!"
"Shut up," I giggled, nudging her playfully. "Now you go."
"Hm. Where do I start? You already know I don't like talking about college... I hate lending out pens to people, if that's a thing. I just feel like they'll steal them. That's pretty much it but I also despise it when people assume I'm clueless and naïve for being an extremely quirky person. Some people treat me like I have the brain of a five year old! I don't let it get to me though. That would just be immature, so. By the way, did you ask your mom about Halloween yet?"
"Not yet..." I trailed off, zoning out a little. I was somewhat sleep deprived after staying up till one AM every night of the week reading creepypasta.
"Hey Lewis,"
"What?" I groaned.
"Hey Lewis," Vivi grinned mischievously, trying as hard as she could not to start laughing. "I've got a few puns on my mind, but I have a feeling you won't find them punny."
"Dammit Vivi," I exhaled, putting my head in my arms. "Please don't tell me anymore."
"Why not? I was hoping you'd find my jokes punbelievably punny! I even made up Halloween puns!" My slightly annoying blue haired friend cackled. "Lew, why didn't the skeleton cross the road?"
"Why not?"
"Because he didn't have the GUTS." Vivi burst into hysterical laughter as my face twisted into a look that screamed, 'Are you fucking serious?'
"What does a ghost eat for lunch? A BOO-logna sandwich!"
"Vivi, please stop. Now. It's not punny!"
"Lewis, I was just trying to lighten up your mood and- wait. Oh my god. You did not just do that."
"Oh yes I did. I was punprepared, but it proved to be puntastic." I told her, smiling like an idiot since I felt like one.
"Wow, I didn't know you had it in you! See, you can be punny if you try!"
"Eh, not really. I'm out of puns and let's face it, I can't make a clever joke to spare my life. My puns suck. I'm probably not that fun to talk to either." I sheepishly looked down at the littered cafeteria floor, my cheeks tinted red. "It's like outside of talking about ghosts, I'm the most boring person alive. I don't have a good sense of humor, I can't uphold normal conversations, hell, I can't even make a point without blushing like a mad fool! It's just pathetic."
"Jeez, stop shooting yourself down dude. You know that's not true. You're just a little rusty with social skills, like how my poetry skills aren't that great. Yet. Give it sometime, you've only been talking for a week you know." Vivi patted my back reassuringly. "It'll get better. But I'd reccommed boosting that self esteem of yours. You'd realize how lucky of a person you are if you just try."
"Lucky?"
"Yeah, look at yourself! You're wicked smart, you're friendly, you've got looks, I'm surprised you don't have a girlfriend by now! You're practically a bara and everyone digs baras!"
"I've never had a girlfriend..." I mumbled, blushing profusely. "And what's a... Bara?"
"Bara is a slang term for muscular guys. Which is good. The part you won't like is that it was derived from 'Barazoku,' a Japanese boy love manga."
"WHAT?" I exclaimed, covering my beet red face with my somewhat large hands. Vivi began to laugh hysterically.
"Oh my gosh your face!" She cackled in between bouts of maniacal laughter. "It's hilarious!"
After a good minute of humiliation, my blue haired friend finally calmed down enough to continue her point. "I'm still surprised you've never had a girlfriend before. You'd be a total package! I had a boyfriend once in the eighth grade, but I broke up with him the day after because I found out he only asked me out to win a bet for twenty bucks. So technically I've never been in a relationship either."
"That's terrible. But that also sounds like something a lot of guys would do around here."
"Yeah, I wasn't that affected by it. I was a little disappointed, but I didn't really care cause I wouldn't have wanted to date a jerk like that. I should have seen it coming. I think all the guys in my middle school were all a bunch of jackasses."
"I never paid attention to anyone in my middle school days, so I wouldn't know how my classmates were. I was too busy being stuck in a rough time to care." I sighed just as the bell rang, marking the end of the first half of free period. We would have to scan in again.
"I despised my classmates," Vivi said in a cheerful tone, making her words sound extremely eerie. "This one girl kept stealing my pens and I didn't realize it until I caught her taking my favorite lilac sharpie pen out of my bag. I may or may not have chased her down the hall and tackled her to get it back..."
"Wow," I said as we got in line. "That reminds me of the battles my younger cousins used to have over these Italian cookies every Chirstmas. My aunt Veronica would make them every year and my cousins would go ballistic over them. I got first pick once, so my cousins literally brought me to the ground for that cookie and I was calling out for help, but my grandfather just grinned and said it was revenge fordoing the same thing to him when I was younger."
"Sounds like you have an eccentric family," My blue clad friend giggled. "My brother comes home for the holidays and we just have a small celebration at our house. I always sneak away because my parents just spend the whole time fawning over my brother. And he just takes it all in. It's kinda irritating."
"That must be miserable. I always go to my cousin Alfonso's house every year. He lives in one of those gigantic houses with my aunt, uncle, and three other cousins. More people come over on Thanksgiving than Christmas though. All of the kids are running around getting into trouble. Alfonso, a few others, and I like to play shooting games and catch up with each other in his room. The adults are all conversing in English by the table and the grandparents sit nearby chatting in full Italian. What's weird is how learning how to speak Italian skipped a generation. Most of the parents barely know any Italian while us teenagers are fluent and the kids are learning it."
"I wish I could speak a foreign language," Vivi sighed wistfully. "I took a Spanish class in seventh grade, but it was nearly impossible to comprehend! Languages come easier to you when you're a child, so no wonder you're fluent in both languages. I've always wanted to learn a language like French or Spanish but it's just so difficult!"
"It's really not a big deal. The only kick out of knowing a second language is talking in front of people who don't understand it. Other than that, there's really nothing to it. I'd teach you Italian, but I'm not a great teacher. It's my grandparents who taught us all."
"Ah... We'll let's check in now. We're holding up the line."
"Sure thing, Vivi."
We finished checking in and returned to our seats. We spent the remainder of our free period conversing about you guessed it: ghosts. I told Vivi I never experienced an actual haunting, but I had some weird stories about the little yellow house my grandmother used to live in. We only went there occasionally, since she was usually over at my house babysitting, but my parents let me spend the night at her house every now and then. I would hear voices. At first I thought the voice was my grandmother's because it was always calling me in Italian. I would sleepily head over to her bedroom only to find out there was no one there. My grandmother could never find her things because they were always misplaced, but I assumed it was because she kept forgetting where she left whatever she was looking for.
The most memorable unexplainable experience at her house was the time I followed her into the attic. I remember hearing her say, "Follow me, Lewis. Come here, I have to show you something. It'll be fun." Only it wasn't my grandmother because she was passed out on the sofa. She woke up and climbed up the attic ladder to find me trying to put a noose on my neck that I knotted wrong. Needless to say I was yelled at, but she was left befuddled when I said 'the green light' had taught me how to tie one. She knew I wasn't lying because I didn't know how to even tie my shoes yet, but I somehow managed to make a small noose.
Vivi said my story was gold in the ghost department, but the whole thing seemed like a hazy dream to me. My grandmother confirmed it was real back when she was still alive, and I still had memories of it, but was it really the work of a poltergeist? Who knows. Vivi, on the other hand, had plenty of stories to share with me.
"As I've said before, I went with my brother and his crew for some investigations. One of them nothing happened, but the other three were pretty interesting. We went to this old lighthouse before and got a ton of evidence! We got footage of a vase falling off a shelf and breaking on its own, we got lots of spikes in the EMF detectors, we even got class A EVPs! They were pretty threatening too. One of them called out my brother! It was amazing! The lighthouse was probably my favorite. He, the crew, and I also checked out an abandoned hotel and that was a blast. We didn't get a lot of EVPs, but there was a lot of physical activity, such as doors opening, cameras with full battery suddenly going dead, and a ghost touched someone. We also went to investigate this mental asylum too."
"A mental asylum? Were you guys allowed inside?"
"Eh... Nope. But we found a way in somehow! We got a lot of creepy EVPs within the first five hours, like screams and growls and ghosts cussing. Then, we reached the basement and my brother didn't want me to go down there, since the basement was very unsafe. It had a lot of dust and mold, so one of his friends and I went back to the base camp and reviewed our evidence until everyone else came back. We didn't know what happened, but my brother and his friends looked as if they had witnessed a murder or something. One of his friends had three, long scratches on his cheek. It had happened before, scratches. But it wasn't the worst part. They whispered some things to the girl who went with me, leaving me out of their fun. I don't know what could've happened, but they stopped letting me tag with them and soon after that, my brother stopped ghost hunting and went into business."
"Wow," I muttered in awe. "It had to be something serious if it made him quit his old passion."
"Yeah. Now he completely disapproves of me getting involved in the spiritual field. My parents are somewhat okay with it, but he flat out refuses to let me have his old ghost equipment. It's terrible. He's even going as far as trying to get me into girly things, like clothes and makeup. He does it every time he visits."
"That sounds similar to my cousin Alfonso's situation. He wants to go into filmmaking but my aunt Veronica won't let him take film classes and is trying to convince him to major in law school when he goes off to college in a year. I have a feeling you and Alfonso would get along. You're both so passionate about the things you love and would love to hear a little ghost story every now and then." I said as the bell rang.
"Crap," Vivi stood up and swung her enormous blue backpack on her shoulders. "Well I guess I have to get to class."
"Same here. Let's go through the Bio hallway though, so we can talk just a little bit longer before we have to part."
"Brilliant! I like how you think, Lewis!" My friend winked, getting a laugh out of me. "So what is it that we'll talk about?"
"Not sure.. Here's the stairs," I said, pointing up to the main corridor. "You know I'm not that good at coming up with topics to swell on."
We marched up the stairs when Vivi's eyes lit up and she laughed, "Oh my god, I just realized."
"Realized what?" I asked, holding out my hands in confusion.
"You're a hand gesture maniac! I couldn't see it before, but now that you actually talk it's obvious! Oh my gosh it's hilarious!"
"What? That's ridiculous!" I chuckled, doing a wrist roll with my hand to emphasize my point. Wait. "Holy shit,"
"Bwahahaha! You're doing it right now!" Vivi laughed hysterically, wiping invisible tears from her eyes.
"Shut up! You're making me feel like my grandmother!" I began to laugh along with her as we strolled down the Biology Hall. "Oh gosh, now I'm gonna be thinking about this during Chemistry-!"
Three loud thumps came from a locker next to my blue haired companion. She turned towards me with a puzzling look in her blue eyes. There was more pounding. Thump. Thump. Thump. Then finally, a worried cry came from the locker. "Somebody please help me!"
"Open the locker! Open it!" Vivi urged excitedly.
"But I don't know how to pick a lock!"
"Oh jeez, I'll do it." My now questionable friend whipped out her school ID and had the lock open within seconds. Vivi stepped aside as I quickly opened the rusty, old locker. Inside, a pair of teary, copper brown eyes stared back at me.
"Arthur?"