Two Left Legs
The left leg of Caprice's chair was broken and it was messing with his mind. The chair was one of those cheap metal ones that was meant to look classy, but everyone knew was only a price range away from the plastic ones that were used in the other classrooms. Sadly, all Caprice noticed was that it's back left leg was off balance and that got him wondering whether the leg was really off balance, or if it was the rest of the Matrix that was tilted instead. He thought about this, and giant robotic spiders, and hot chicks, and black leather that wasn't really real at all which meant that in reality that hot chicks in black leather were naked. He pondered the last observation so thoroughly that he started feeling dizzy and figured he should go sit down until he realized he was already sitting.
Caprice recalled from his distant world of black leather thoughts that he was sitting in the broken chair under a slight overhang outside the Principal's Classroom. The Principal's Office had been literally blown away in a suspicious explosion last year, but after some months of failing to find any possible culprits of bomb-setting, the administration had tried to save face by telling the word at large that the office must have mysteriously spontaneously combusted. Caprice therefore knew he was dealing with an idiot of a Principal. And he knew that an idiot is someone of whom you should be very, very afraid because they have the nasty habit of spontaneously combusting in an entirely different way than offices do. But Caprice wasn't afraid. Interested, maybe, but he hadn't been even vaguely fearful of anything since last night. He had reached a sort of Nerdvana, a completely apathetic approach to the world because he knew that somewhere – in some alternate reality of sorts – the world was being run by giant, robotic spiders that sucked the life out of people and the only hope for the survival of the human race were (seemingly) a bunch of hot chicks who were really good with computers and liked to perform naked mud wrestling at 5. These thoughts brought him inner peace in such large quantities that he had some excess peace to use on the outside.
An overweight woman who was clad in an ocean of khaki shorts opened the door of the classroom/office and poked her head out in his direction.
"Mr. Lickbum? Please come inside now," the khaki clad behemoth recited. Caprice turned his head slowly towards the voice and raised his eyes in an intimidating way. At least it would have been intimidating if Caprice had looked more like Keanu Reeves and less like an undercooked French roll. Their pudgy eyes locked and Caprice glared in a subtle way which he thought would frighten the soccer mom with the obviously pure and cold intelligence which lay behind them. "I know," his eyes said, "I know about the Matrix."
"Get inside. Now." replied the woman, only she spoke out loud and with no subtlety at all. So Caprice hefted his flab as well as his pride and shambled into the classroom. It was one of those portables that's as telltale a sign of bad funding as is Buffy moving to UPN. Completely rectangular and with bland grey carpeting on the floor and walls, the room had gone the extra mile to seem unremarkable – a standing monument against creativity. There was only one desk and it was at the far back of the room, right in front of large and drably tinted picture window. From the door to the desk, Caprice had to run an invisible gauntlet as the room seemed to grow along with his guilt. He approached the principal's desk ill at ease after what seemed like a quick eternity of walking to his doom. Said principal was balding and his sharp, spindly body was hunched over his desk like some voracious hyena whipping out a memo on the carcass of a freshly killed zebra. Caprice furrowed his eyebrows and wondered where he got these odd and horrible similes.
The principal didn't stop writing but managed to look up at Caprice using only his eyebrows.
"Ah, Caprice Henrich Lickbum III, is it? You've been busy, haven't you?" the Principal's voice sounded insidiously normal. As if, like the classroom, it was stretching itself to be grotesquely unmemorable.
"Hmm…" Caprice pondered the question, hoping he could draw out the time before he was expelled. He was certain he would be expelled, too, because he had read it in the Student Handbook. On lonely Saturday nights, Caprice would pull out his handbook and read it all again. He specifically recalled at this point the parts about destruction of school property, breaking and entering, illegal use of computers and their alarmingly similar connections with immediate and unquestionable expulsion. "Yes, I guess I have been pretty busy Mr…um… Sir."
"Well then, let's see: you broke into the computer lab and commenced to first destroy and then inexplicably steal one of our school owned computers. Has this ever happened before?" there was a vague silence filled by the scritchy sounds of memos being written too quickly. The principal had a habit of speaking only in rhetorical questions – hoping some naïve student would answer them and thereby declare his guilt.
"Er… well, no. Not exactly like this ever before. Nope. I didn't mean to steal it either, it just sort of came out that way. I wouldn't have ever stolen it if I hadn't broken it. Not that I meant to break it either! I mean – I – I…" at this point, Caprice the Geek would have traditionally either dissolved into tears or run from the room with a guilty expression flaring, but the Principal stopped him before he could do either.
"Right, you say it's never happened before, then? Hmm… well since you have a clean record, I suppose I can let this one slide."
"What?"
"Let it slide, Lickbum," said the Principal and molded his eyebrows into a imprudently quizzical expression, "That seems to be fair… considering…" the sentence had been left hanging, as if Caprice was supposed to do the considering for himself but what he was considering couldn't possibly have been what the Principal was considering, considering of course.
"Er… thanks?" Caprice replied carefully, hoping to slip out of the room before the Matrix shifted and the office exploded again. He stood up from the cheap chair he had plopped himself in and had turned to leave when some sort of male intuition made him look back. There, in the window, was The Quite Attractive Trinity. She was looking at him in a most concerned way that would have been verging on fear, but since she was above the emotions of the Matrix, would never really get there. Trinity looked straight at him and then slowly swiveled her head and looked straight at The Principal. She then looked straight back at him and mouthed "Run". Caprice not only saw her mouth move, he heard the words in his head, drilling into his subconscious like an urgent message from his own brain. So he ran. Not out the door, that was too far away and this was too compelling of a message, but straight towards the window.
Trinity smoothly somersaulted out of the way while Caprice body slammed straight into the window and regretted it the moment he hit the air outside the window. There was a horrible sickening silent second where the world seemed to slow down and, if a camera had been filming the scene, it would have swiveled around to get the full shot. the hidden layers of Caprice's flab came falling out, wobbling like fleshy jello and sending the shock waves of reverberation up and down his body. The broken safety glass seemed to hover in the air around him, catching the sun as the pieces sparkled with horrible premonitions. Then life caught up with him again, and so did the ground. He hit the asphalt like a beached whale dropped from a 747 and would have taken weeks to heave himself up again from the tragedy if Trinity hadn't swiftly scooped him up and out of the way of the falling glass.
The glass crashed the ground followed a short breath later by leather patent shoes and the body above them. "Trinity." said the Principal, cracking his neck from side to side and speaking in an that eerie monotone, "How nice to see you." Trinity stared back at him with her cool blue eyes and spoke to Caprice in a cold, sad whisper, "He's an agent. Take this and run. Answer it and you'll be safe," Caprice looked at her with his little bewildered eyes, a bit disoriented still from the surprises he'd just experienced. "Er…" he replied. "Go! Now!" Caprice took one last look at her and one quick glance to size up his former principal gone Agent and ran with his geeky heart out. The phone rang mid-stride and he flipped it open, not slowing for a second to answer, but instead just holding it to his ear. And the next second, there was nothing.
If reviews are plentiful or especially desperate, I'll update next chap. soon.