I, Tito Jacobin, 16, Now Begin My Life

    After 16 years of sustaining myself entirely with coffee and biscuits and slowly chewing away every eraser from every pencil I own and then—when this supply was exhausted—chewing down all ten of my fingernails, I, Tito Jacobin, have got one thing figured out: good things don’t happen to me. I will never enter an Ivy League college, I will never buy Mom a proper house, and I will never miraculously acquire the one ring to rule them all. No, poor little Tito is destined to die in these gray slab streets like a scrawny, diseased pigeon, pitiful and alone.

    So it’s to be expected that when Vivian Andromeda walks straight out of the clouds and into my life and smiles at me, smiles at me (except it’s probably just out of politeness, might even be a smirk, and anyways there’s no reason to get my hopes up because from what I’ve seen in the halls Vivian Andromeda would even smile at a rabid dog) I start writing my will in the back of my head. She sits down in front of me. Directly in front of me. I look up at the classroom ceiling and wait for the lights to explode in my face.

    “Morning,” she says. Her voice is in fact much hoarser than I remember, but it’s the best sound I have ever heard, anyways. “What’s your name?”

    Was that a question mark? Oh God, that was a question mark. I look down from the ceiling and see her face, and the impact is worse than if the lights had, indeed, exploded.    

    “Uh—what?” Next to her I sound like the squeak of a broken cassette tape. I cringe; but she just smiles again.

    “What’s your name?”

    “Oh. Uh. Tito Jacobin.” I’m quite certain the armpits of my shirt are getting stained with sweat, and I’m absolutely certain this is unattractive.

    “Nice to meet you, Tito. I’m Vivian.”

    Nice to meet you. Vivian Andromeda just said Nice to meet you. I brace myself for the apocalypse.

    She turns her head to glance at the clock, turns back to me. “Ready for the first day of school?”

    “No.” It’s out my mouth before I know what I’m doing. Crap. I turn away and shove my hand into the paper swampland of my backpack. Crap, crap, crap. I start thinking about my buck teeth, and my barbed wire hair, and I wonder if she can see my blush or if it just looks like my acne is becoming inflamed. I can hear her laughing already. In my ears the jeers are back from last year, and the year before that, and the year before that, all the way back to my first memory: kindergarten and apple peels and a certain hulking creature called Alec Karr. The world spins. Who was I kidding, after all?—good things simply do not happen to me. Vivian Andromeda does not happen. It’s all nothing but a joke, a cruel, sugar-coated joke.

    “Neither am I,” Vivian Andromeda says between laughs. “I’m terrible at English.”

    The world snaps into focus. I jolt upright, along with a fistful of gnawed No. 2 pencils from my backpack. “What?” My voice cracks.

    She shrugs, a little embarrassed. “English is my worst subject. Makes absolutely no sense to me. You?”

    “Best in the class.” Again with the automatically truthful mouth. This is my cue to curl up in a corner of the classroom and wait for life to open its black mouth and swallow whatever part of me it hasn’t already taken.

    Vivian Andromeda raises her eyebrows, and her perfect forehead wrinkles faintly. “Really? Nice. I hope you won’t mind if I ask for your help a lot, then. I mean, not like answers to the test kind of help—just figuring out what the book’s trying to say.”

    I swallow. For the first time, I gather enough courage to look her in the eye; and it’s the best view I have ever seen.

    “Sure,” I croak.

    The bell rings. Mr. Caulf rises from where he’s been sitting in the back of the room and strides to the front, slapping a meter stick in the palm of his hand rhythmically. “May I have your attention please,” he says in a reedy whine.

    Vivian Andromeda’s eyes flicker to him briefly, but then they settle on me again. “Thanks,” she chuckles. “Looking forward to it.” And this time, when she smiles, I know that it’s genuine. She turns elegantly in her chair to face the front.

            Mr. Caulf is talking. But I don’t care—the laws of the universe have just experienced a monumental shift. A weird, ungainly twitch starts around the corners of my mouth. Here it is.

            I, Tito Jacobin, 16, have just begun my life.