Excerpt: Moralicide

“Hi,” I said. I stood on the opposite side of the table and didn’t sit down.

He glanced up at me, his eyes hollow, dark bags under them, standing out stark and zombie-like from the pale skin of his face. He just stared. I heard his stomach grumble unhappily, still unfed. His face might as well have been made out of wax.

I was torn, then, somewhere between the knowledge that if I wanted to even pretend I was a decent sort of guy, I’d apologize, and the worry that he might start screaming at me. I tried to remind myself… he used to be smart. Then he went crazy. Now he’s…

“Boy’s restroom, first floor,” he said, his voice odd and inflectionless. “I remember you.”

“Um…” I said. I glanced behind me and saw that two of the guys I recognized from the team were in the breakfast line. One of them looked over and called for me.

I tried to look John in the face again, but he was too creepy, so I tried to find something to stare at that wasn’t rude, and wasn’t him, and my eyes landed on the book in front of him.

“Whoa,” I said, taken aback by the notation I couldn’t recognize. “What math is that?”

“Calculus,” he said, his voice still flat. “Yes, I’m failing again. And no, I’m not hearing voices today, and I don’t have a split personality. Does that about cover it?”

“No, I mean…” I was tripping over my feet talking to him, disarmed by his expression, by how absent he was from our conversation, or maybe by the fact that he was there at all -- I had expected more crazy, or hoped for it, even. It’d be easier to take. “I wanted to apologize.”

“Someone’s filled you in on the tragic sob story of John, and now you feel like a shit,” he said. He prodded the eggs, stabbing completely through them so that the plastic of the spork clicked unnervingly on the pastel green tray. “Your pity is noted, but unfortunately, I’ve little to say to you except ‘get in line’.”

“It’s not like that at --”

“No? Then what is it like? You are a perfectly capable, beloved example of the deep dark poison that lurks in the hearts of men. The only thing that checks your love affair with casual cruelty is the sudden knowledge that you’ve been caught at it. Even when I’m lost somewhere in the inane misfiring neurons of my own insanity, I remember what happens, Alexander Freeman.”

I wanted to hit him. In fact, when he yelled at me like that, I was glad that he was crazy. He probably deserved it for being the sort of arrogant prick who thought he knew a guy after meeting him once in a bathroom.

“Hey,” I said. “I just wanted to apologize!”

“Save it,” he said. He slammed the calculus book shut and pulled it off the table in one motion, stuffing it into a beat-up duffel bag that sported the school’s mascot on one end and the school acronym on the other. “And pray that it’s only the school’s most amusing failure who sees what you are under your skin.”