Skittles

My thighs have been chafing so bad. They still haven’t fixed the air conditioner in the kitchen. Derek says it’s against regulations. The lack of cool air is bad for the dough, it can cause mold spores to spread.

Derek is the coolest guy I know. Even though he's 32, when I work with him it feels like I’m hanging out with someone my own age. He’s hilarious. Like, when some lady comes in complaining, demanding for her pizza to be remade, I’ll make it while he’ll go in the back and pull up some porn on his phone and then he'll come back out and jizz all over it (I don’t know how he got so good at timing his nuts). And then we’ll send it out. We just die laughing, imagining them bringing it home, putting it on the dinner table, and feeding it to their families.

I’m always happy when people return their pizzas, that’s my dinner. I basically eat pizza every night. Albert Einstein ate the same thing every day, and never changed his clothes, and that’s why he was so smart. Derek says if you’re hungry don’t wait for someone to tell you it’s okay to eat. He doesn’t wait until the shift’s over, he’ll pull off a slice and take a bite, he doesn’t care. He fits the slice back into the pie like he’s finishing a puzzle you can hardly tell there’s anything missing.

Derek thinks I’m cool too, even though I think he just sees me as a little kid. He’s always inviting me to go to the kratom bar next door with him after work. But my Mom picks me up right after I get off so I can never go.

We have a policy in the kitchen that this is a safe space, whatever you're going through you can talk about freely. We’ll all be there for you. This has really helped me. Before working here I never talked about my feelings with anyone. How I hate when my titties show when I wear my backpack. How most nights I stay up late in the bathroom for hours just staring at my naked body, holding in my stomach hoping it’ll stay that way. How sometimes my mom gets frustrated with me and calls me a retard. How she’ll remind me that every teacher I’ve ever had has advised her to hold me back. How she says her life would have been so much easier if she had never met my dad.

Derek says I remind him a lot of himself when he was younger, before he started fucking. Apparently, he lost his virginity when he was thirteen, to this older girl who his parents paid to tutor him.

“Once you get your dick wet lil bro, it’ll all start making sense.”

I started thinking about older women I could lose my virginity to and Miss J immediately came to mind. She’s my math teacher and she’s beautiful. She looks just like this porn star that Derek showed me who dresses up like Lois Griffin and does anal with big fat guys. When I sit in her class I can’t help imagining some big fat guy bending her over her desk and doing anal with her. That big fat guy could be me.

So, I skipped her class yesterday, because I knew we had a quiz and I could come in after school to take it and we’d be alone together.

When I asked her she said, “Of course!” And that if I wanted, we could go over the formulas a bit before. She noticed I’d been struggling. The way she looks me right in the eyes and smiles, I know she wants me.

All I’ve thought about today is how different my life is going to be after this. I didn’t even care about Kayden and his friends in Computer science. They like to throw stuff at me during class. But it’s not even to bother me, I'm more like the very center of a dart board. The point of their game is more to not get caught by the teacher, and I sit the closest to her desk. They also call me Skittles. At first, I thought they were calling me fat, but then I realized they were actually calling me gay. Taste the rainbow. But none of that matters, everything is going to change.

The bell rings. Before I head over to Miss J’s I need to go to the bathroom and flush my underwear down the toilet. They have Star Wars on them.

Miss J and I are going over the formulas at her desk and for once, I finally understand them. Now that someone is looking at me, and speaking just to me, it makes sense! She turns around to get something out of her cabinet, now’s my chance. I stand up, unzip my fly, and fish my penis out. It’s still soft. I focus and try to make myself hard but it’s not working.

Miss J’s eyes go wide when she turns back around, she quickly looks away. She says nothing. She gets up and leaves the room. I’m confused. I don’t know if I should leave. I stay in my seat, still soft. I think it’s been ten minutes but I can’t tell.

She comes back and without looking at me, hands me the quiz. I go back to my desk and take it.

I got an 84.

My Mom has a date so she has to drop me off at work early. She’s wearing lots of makeup and a dress made out of jeans. She’s singing along to the radio, taking big puffs from her Rick and Morty vape.

“Do I look okay?” she asks.

“I guess…”

I don’t like to think about her with men. But she's a lot nicer when she’s seeing a new guy. She doesn’t yell at me for not taking the garbage out. She doesn’t care about much else except for the new guy.

I walk in through the back door and Derek is on the phone in the office. He’s screaming at whoever he’s talking to, it sounds like he’s about to cry. “I DON’T CARE, YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO LOVE ME. YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO HELP ME! I’M YOUR SON. DO YOU WANT ME TO FUCKING DIE? WILL YOU BE HAPPY THEN? I JUST NEED TEN DOLLARS! YOU DON’T HAVE TEN DOLLARS? YOU FUCKING BROKE BITCH. I HATE YOU. I HATE YOU. I FUCKING HATE YOU.”

I should probably go out to the back. I know I should. But I don’t, I just keep standing here, listening. And then there’s a sound like sobbing, a weird wheezing noise that sounds like he has asthma.