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theclassclone · 2 months ago

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Walk a Mile in Someone's Shoes They Said...

Chapter 2

Word Count: 8,156 TW: Canon-Typical Master List || Previous || Next

Abe cleared his throat, “On a very special Clone High, the clones will be forced to socialized.” He paused. “That’s it. You can go now, that’s really all they’re doing. It’s one of the Unity Week events.”

CJ had her back to her 17th (or so) toxin; the lime green liquid dripping into the test tube as she replaced the European Yew on the shelf of over 25 different species of toxic plants that she hoards on school grounds. European Yew is obviously one of them, Nerium Oleander is another—in fact she had used that one in the same little witches brew she had strumming along—and, of course, the diverse collection wouldn’t be complete without the most basic toxic plant somewhere on the shelving unit: Deadly Nightshade (or more beautifully referred to as Belladonna). She walked away from her well cared for collection of harmful plants and peeled her gloves off of her hands; she dropped the gloves in the biohazard bin beneath the whiteboard and walked toward the large cabinet that was tucked away in the back corner of the room.

She pulled the cabinet doors open and slowly pulled a sheet of paper out from beneath one of her trays of test tubes and assorted vials. She shut the cabinet and froze upon seeing the bright yellow light of the school hallway begin to leak into her dimly light, though cool-toned lab. Her head turned toward the door like a camera shutter; her eyes were open wide, and her pupils and irises shrunk with a sense of rage before she was even bothered. She drew her eyebrows together and watched Mr. B enter the lab she had claimed from the school. His wheels, mostly, gave him away; uninvited. They squeaked with every turn and desperately needed some oil or something to fix that dreadful squealing sound.

Mr. B regretfully shut the door behind him when his occipital units met hers. “Aren’t you supposed to be heading to the courtyard? The Unity Week Mile Walk is about to begin.” He asked.

CJ hummed. She pulled her hands away from the metal handles that she had warmed beneath her grip. She strode back to the table in the center of the room and placed the paper down beside her notebook. She slipped back onto the stool and started scratching little notes in the notebook again—she was gearing up to pray to a God that she never even believed in because she wanted this stupid lime green liquid to be the one. That was already 32 pages of this notebook wasted, she wasn’t looking forward to 34 pages being wasted.

“CJ.” Mr. B seldom used her name—rather nickname—he typically opted to call everyone Wesley, for undisclosed reasons.

She hummed again—technically she was responding to him, just not in the way that he would prefer her to. She knew Mr. B in the same way that she knew the lore to Intergalactic Journey: Subsequent Cohort. He took her hums as her ignoring his efforts to communicate with her, while, again, she was technically responding to him.

She was not very hyper-focused on this little project as she had been playing this cat and mouse game for the last eight years and to no avail. He always walked away unscathed, even when she tried her hardest to maim him; she couldn’t understand how he was so cartoonishly invincible. She had done everything from mimicked the tactics from Skunky-Poo, to copying literal cartoons just to see if ‘cartoon logic’ would harm him (it, in fact, did not), to actually stabbing him with a kitchen knife (although, that one was actually an accident).

But she spent nights up in her room with more receipts for gauze than there are numbers in pi. She doesn’t have this strange cartoonish ability to heal within an instant and she can’t fathom why. Her closet looks like a hospital storage room.

She grabbed a new set of flimsy latex gloves from the box at the edge of her table and pulled them over her hands. She grimaced at the friction and paused with only her left hand gloved.

“Still?” Mr. B spoke up from beside her.

“It feels like my hands are being constricted. Luckily, I don’t plan on being a surgeon where I would have to live in these sort of gloves.” She affirmed. She wrinkled her nose and turned her head toward her liquid toxin. She reluctantly slipped her other hand into the glove and reached over the table; she stopped the flow of the liquid and removed the vial from the contraption.

“Are you going to participate in any of the Unity Week activities?” Mr. B asked.

She turned on the stool and held the vial between her index finger and thumb of her left hand; she rested her elbow on the table and looked down at the robot. “You do realize I didn’t answer the initial question for a reason, right?” She tipped her head toward the left and drew the corners of her lips back.

“Answer the question.” Mr. B tried his hardest not to sound demanding.

CJ turned back toward the table and grabbed the little cork she wedged in the spiral of her notebook as to not lose it (from experience… she lost many before she figured out this little trick and she often struggled to keep her grip on the corks); she slowly tried to twirl the cork between her fingers to get it near the correct orientation. She used the vial to aid her with sealing it and she pressed the cork firmly into the vial. She swirled the liquid around, activating specific ingredients. The liquid inside began to illuminate a very pungent, but bright green color.

“Answer the question, CJ.” He repeated, once again, using her name instead of calling her Wesley.

She placed the vial down between the spirals in her notebook so that it doesn’t roll away from her. “Do you want the truth or the sugar-coated lie that I tell my fellow students?” She swiveled in the stool again.

“The truth.”

“It’s just an idiotic excuse to exploit weakness and deep-rooted feelings from first- and second-generation clones. Scudworth, if there were a brain in that ancient noggin’ of his, should be taking notes and using this against the clones to gather them for his silly Cloney Island scheme—that may or may never come to fruition for obvious reasons.” She crossed her arms and tilted her head away from the table. “On the flip side of things, if Scudworth doesn’t use what they say against them, we can always just use it against each other under the guise of ‘cancel culture’—back in the day, you guys called it bullying, which is what we still do, but we don’t have the balls to call it bullying anymore.” She rolled her eyes around her eye sockets and scoffed at the absurdity of what her generation—not limited to the clones—has cultivated.

“I’m sure all of that nonsense is just in your head.” He told her. “You automatically assume the worst in people, and you never give anyone a chance. You should be taking these activities as opportunities to get to know your classmates and see how wrong you are about them.” Mr. B tried to reason with her.

CJ stared down her nose at the robot. “You do know that I cannot create nor maintain friendships, right?” She furrowed her eyebrows and pointed at him.

“I still think you’re holding yourself back or doing it on purpose.”

“I’m not understanding what wires you might have gotten crossed then. I’ve never brought home a friend from elementary school, nor middle school for that matter. I’ve never spoken of having friends.” She crossed her arms again and hunched over. “It’s easier to be a massive bitch because everyone from my generation of clones was already uncomfortable with me to begin with.” She frowned.

“That’s not true.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Name one clone that likes me as a person.”

Mr. B remained silent. His pupils darted around.

CJ pursed her lips and nodded. “Point proven, don’t need a research article for that one, huh?”

“I—.”

“Save your battery, Uncle B.” She clenched her jaw. “I made a fool of myself in front of the first-generation clones because as Vice President I have to speak publicly, I have to attend these stupid events, I have to be involved. It’s part of the ‘job duties’, whether I like it or not. And I don’t like it.”

Mr. B’s eyebrows lowered. “You didn’t even try to have a good time. You’re blaming them when it was actually your fault. You can’t keep blaming people for your problems.” He tried to explain despite his robotic voice. “Your peers have changed; you have new peers. The clones we brought back aren’t as bad as you think, you just need to give them a chance.” His voice rose two or three octaves above what was typical for him; it seemed as though he was trying to yell at her.

She inhaled deeply and straightened her posture; she grabbed the vial and twirled it between her index fingers and thumbs. “For some reason, I don’t believe you. Crazy, isn’t it?” She stared at the vial and swallowed. “I can always continue to make enemies, those are the closest to you, right? I can continue to make Scudworth’s,” she began speaking through clenched teeth, “pathetic life even more miserable than it already is.” She lowered the vial and glanced at Mr. B’s barely expressive face. “I can slowly drive him to the point of insanity and make him suffer until the day he finally dies.”

Mr. B rolled his pupils toward the door. “Whatever you say, Wesley…”

Her demeaner changed; her eyes widened with a false sense of childlike innocence, and her eyebrows raised. “Can I ask you for a favor, Uncle B?”

“I’m not going to poison your father for you.” Mr. B told her having anticipated her favor (as she had asked 16 previous times).

She groaned and swung her legs back under the table. “You don’t do anything I ask, but when that Wack-job asks you to do something you kiss the ground he walks on.” She slammed her elbows against the table and pressed her hands against her cheeks; the cork of the vial pressed against her right cheek. “And you wonder why I’m angry with you, too. You’d be able to change that if you would just help me.”

“Not when you ask me to harm him.” Mr. B told her.

She puffed out her cheeks. “You stand idly and watch us fight and harm each other. You can’t even lend a hand?”

“No.”

“No matter. I’ve got, what? 20 minutes before this shitty walk starts?” She slid off of the stool and pushed Mr. B out of her way with her leg as she stood up. “I’ll do it myself again and watch my own failure again. Or, who knows, this might be the one that does him in.”

“Is that really what you want?” Mr. B asked.

CJ tucked her chin to her neck and swallowed hard. She looked away from Mr. B and slipped the little vial into the breast pocket of her lab coat. She peeled her gloves off of her hands slowly; she felt the muscles in her right hand move without her brain actually meaning to sending the signals to do so. She closed her eyes and exhaled slowly as she just waited for the involuntary twitch to stop. She knitted her eyebrows together between the aggravation of Mr. B’s question and the unknown cause of this annoying little twitch.

“When did that—WESLEY!?!” Mr. B tried to ask her a question. He was interrupted by her conscious decision to kick his short robotic body toward the wall.

She slammed her hand down on the desk and rolled the latex beneath her hand. “I’m going to kick you a lot harder the next time you ask a stupid question, I’m not discussing that with you, and I never will, capisci? That’s Italian for you understand. I’m going to poison Scudworth now.” She pointed an arthritic finger at Mr. B and tensed her shoulders to her ears.

“You need to tell me—. What is that from?” He rolled himself away from the wall.

“What part of ‘I’m not discussing that with you’ did you not get?” She gritted her teeth.

“Does he know?”

“No.”

“Can’t you two just get along? He needs to know—.”

“Puh, right, like telling him anything is conducive to the situation.” She rotated her eyes. “He won’t listen, he won’t care, he won’t do anything, it won’t help.” She walked toward the door of the lab. She paused and rested her hand on the doorknob and looked over at Mr. B. “You both made your choices before I ever made mine.” She swung the door open and slammed it behind her.

CJ marched through the school pushing first- and second-generation clones out of her way, some of which saw her actions from the other end of the hallway and had moved themselves out of her way. She was on a mission, one of malice and ill intent. One of anger. The voices of her fellow students sounded more like underwater warbles to her eardrums, their gazes felt like camera lenses in this cancel culture era and navigating the stupid hallway full of twice as many students as usual felt like fighting against the undertow. She moved briskly, not yet running, and still too slow to be considered jogging.

“CJ, are you ready for the mile—.” Confucius tried to ask her, to his dismay, she had pushed him directly into his locker instead of letting him finish asking his question. “Oh, alright, that’s cool… I guess…” He waved his goodbye to her by using the hand with his phone in it as that was the hand stuck outside of his locker.

She pressed her hand to another student’s face and pushed them to the ground as she turned the corner to continue down the hallway all because she couldn’t be bothered to move to the side. Her pace began to slow down as she neared the principal’s office. She grabbed the vial out of her pocket and glanced down at it.

Maybe Uncle B had a point, is this really what I want?

She sauntered up to the door, slowly letting her newfound (maybe it has just been festering in the back of her mind, who knows) uncertainty cloud her mind. She pushed the door open, but she began to feel as though she were watching the situation from an arial view. Like she was no longer in her own body—dissociation was the word she was looking for, maybe, dissociation sounded right, but she only knew the words. She was never good at matching words to their descriptions. She started to feel that she was living in third person as a set of eyes almost atop her own head. She could see everything from her mid-scalp and forward. As if she were living through a drone with a camera! Her breathing changed when she had this shift in point of view; she controlled her breathing manually, taking deeper and longer breaths. Her autonomic nervous system seemed to have stopped working and shifted its controls into manual.

She stood in front of Scudworth’s desk and looked down at him.

He looked up from his paperwork—not that he was actually doing it, he just looked up from it. “Ah, CJ, what a surprise!” He spoke as if she doesn’t regularly come into his office to try to ruin his workday. “Is Mister B with you? I need him to do something for me.” He looked around his desk and peered around CJ looking for his long-time friend.

“He might be trying to get through your overabundance of students.” She studied the objects on his desk—picture frame (boring), stack of papers and file folders (boring), coffee pot (better), mug full of coffee or bad water (that’s what she needs), a desk organizer filled with who knows what (yikes), and other miscellaneous objects. “Of course, he’s able to help you—when I need help, he always refuses because it’s ‘dangerous’ or ‘concerning’ or he ‘doesn’t know where it’s been’,” she crossed her arms. “It’s like he doesn’t want me to have fun.” Her voice followed Scudworth’s typical speech pattern. “I need an unwilling victim—willing participant—for a little culinary science I’ve whipped up for no reason other than to broaden my horizons… whatever that means.” She gripped the right side of her lab coat with her left hand and tapped her right cheek with the top of the vial. She shifted all of her weight to her right side and glanced toward the ceiling. “Don’t have any friends to torture—I mean ask—either.”

“No,” he said. “The last time you gave me something I started foaming at the mouth.”

“Minor inconvenience. Part of the process.”

“Still no, I’m busy right now.”

She tensed her shoulders and gripped the vial between her index finger and middle finger and pointed it toward the ceiling. “Busy, doing what?! You don’t even do your job half the time! And your idiotic students don’t even know the basic definition of science. Nor do any of them know what the definition of culinary is.”

Scudworth narrowed his eyes at the vial between her fingers. “Why is it glowing?”

“Preparing for Halloween.” She said, she held her arm out and waved the vial in his face. “Fluorescent Halloween bullshit.”

Scudworth snatched the vial out of her hands. “Give me that.”

She withdrew her hand from his personal space. “It’s a cute little glow-y, flavor enhancing liquid. If it works as intended, it’d be great for… I don’t know… Homecoming. Or if one of these assclown students plans on throwing a Halloween party, I could scam them because I enjoy scamming my peers for money. Obviously. Haven’t decided. Anyway, I need someone to try this.”

Scudworth tore his eyes away from the vial and looked at her. “I won’t start foaming at the mouth, will I? This isn’t another trick?”

She closed her eyes, bit the insides of her cheeks, and scrunched her nose. “I’m going to kill you with my bare hands, old man.” She opened her eyes and relaxed the muscles in her face. “Tricks are reserved for Halloween—you know, ‘trick or treat’. You’re usually aware of the attempts I’m making on your life otherwise.”

“No, I’m not!”

She reached over his desk and curled her fingers around his wrist. “If you don’t try this stupid glowing bullshit, I will dump it down your throat myself.” She pressed her right palm into the desk and started to pull him toward her. “Let. Go.”

He resisted her efforts to pull him toward her so she could pry the vial out of his hand once he was as close as she wanted him to be. “I am an adult! I don’t need your help, let go of me!” He pushed a hand against her face in an attempt to make her let go of him.

“Augh!” CJ quickly released her grip on his wrist.

Scudworth fell back into his desk chair, nearly toppling over. He spun his chair to face away from her, tantrum-like. She waited; she stared at the back of the desk chair in silence, listening to him grunt and struggle to pull the itty-bitty cork off of the itty-bitty vial. She tapped the tips of her fingers together rhythmically. She watched Scudworth slowly turn back around to face her, defeated by a little vial and its cork. He held the vial out to her.

“You’re an unethical geneticist and you don’t think to use your playing god prowess to just fix your arthritis or some shit.” She swiped the vial from his hands and fiddled with the vial, trying to pull the cork out.

“You must have me confused with someone who is fucking insane—I’m not going to argue with you about this again. Especially because you can’t open it either!” He grabbed his mug and leaned back in his desk chair.

“Hmph, technical difficulties!” She insisted; she twisted the cork haphazardly and nearly dropped her vial. She pushed the vial into Scudworth’s gloved hand.

He, to her slight surprise, willingly poured quite a bit of the toxin into his mug. “That seems like enough. Take your little science fair project back.” He handed the vial back to her.

She pressed the cork into the top of the vial and stared at Scudworth with drooping eyes. “Little science fair project.” She mumbled through a tight jaw. “Right.” She slipped the vial back into her lab coat. Her gaze remained on Scudworth, waiting for the fool to actually take a sip of his beverage.

He slowly sipped his now poisoned coffee. “Delightful. You said this was supposed to enhance flavor?”

She hummed. “Unfortunately, that is what I said.” She forced a smile upon her face. Her shaky grin continued to falter the longer he remained stable and conscious in front of her—she saw no tremors, no twists or twitches in his face, he didn’t start convulsing, he was not frothing at the mouth. Once again, his cartoonish ability to survive had defeated her. Her pupils shook as she tried to focus on her through her growing fury. Just once she’d like to get her point across, but as luck or fate or the God she doesn’t even believe in would have it, she would not be getting her point across.

“You should consider going into the culinary sciences; you’d make a killing.” He beamed.

Her eye lid twitched at his expression—just how disgustingly genuine he tried to make it seem. “I’ll consider it.”

“It’s not every day that you make me proud—well that’s an understatement—but this?” He continued the one-sided conversation, holding his mug in one hand and flailing the other as he spoke to her, completely unaware that she had stopped listening to his chaotic ramblings.

CJ inhaled deeply and sat down in the old, fairly taken care of chair that usually remained in front of Scudworth’s desk. She hung her harm over the upholstered arm and rested her cheek on her arm as she wished her clonefather would just start frothing at the mouth or something other than ramble in her presence—even if she wasn’t listening, the thought of him rambling was enough to make her lose her mind. She traced her finger around the upholstery, swirling it around the fabric, and giving herself the sensation of a ‘store-bought numbness’ (as she called it) in the tip of her finger.

She began to wander through the cubicles of her mind, poking her inner self between each opening, looking for some sort of excuse as to why she was a failure or as to why he just remained unaffected. Her inner self collected little scraps of theories and ideas behind her misfortunes: there could be some kind of genetic component that was keeping him alive that she was simply lacking by some freak mistake, he could have built a tolerance to poisonous concoctions in his youth to avoid being poisoned to death as an adult (but that didn’t explain anything else; but that did aid in the substance abuse theory she had about him so…), well, he could simply just have drug strength because that has enough research to back up that claim. Regardless, it was back to the drawing board for her. Her inner self dropped the scraps of ideas at her feet and walked over them, trying not to get her shoes wet. She fell forward into the soft, mauve-pink grounds of her own mind.

CJ sat up straight in the chair with quite the start. She had nearly dozed off, or perhaps she did doze off, she wasn’t entirely sure. She looked up at Scudworth and leaned toward the right side of her chair to get a better view of him. She slowly slid forward in the chair and her hands gripped the ends of the armrests. Her eyes wandered the desk—no mug, head was on the desk, movements that appeared to be convulsions, foaming at the mouth. She stood up from the chair and crept around the desk. She stopped upon a simple crunch of bits of ceramic beneath her foot; she lifted her foot and took a step back. She bent down to look at the broken mug and the puddle left behind by the liquid that remained. She slowly lifted her head and watched her clonefather continue to twitch, barely holding onto that sliver of consciousness behind those thoughtless eyes. He tried, with that last bit of energy, to reach for her. CJ’s honeydew eyes failed to show an inkling of delight with her success. For a moment, Mr. B’s words rattled around in her brain again. She wasn’t sure if this was what she wanted. The years of effort into what might be the very moment she tried to get to. She pressed her hand against his desk to keep herself steady; she poked at him, lightly, with her other hand. She quickly pulled her hand away and stumbled backward.

She straightened her postured and stared down at her clonefather. She thought this would feel more exciting. She thought she would be grinning from ear to ear, skipping out of his office with glee—maybe even break into song and a well-choreographed dance. But she didn’t feel excited, nor did she have the urge to sing and dance her way out of the office. Actually, staring at what could potentially be her clonefather’s corpse left a strange and pretty indescribable feeling—no, not necessarily indescribable, more like a void had opened up in her chest and slowly began to consume her the longer she stood before Scudworth, uncertain with his state of being. She had created that void herself. But rather than a void, because it wasn’t so much as a void that she had created—because logically, to her, voids aren’t created like this—she more than likely drove a stake through her own chest and continued to widen the wound throughout the years with her own two hands and tried to pretend that she didn’t know what she was doing to herself.

How unfortunate that she might have won but felt no satisfaction, instead felt quite the opposite.

Confucius blared his upbeat music and airhorn sound effects in the courtyard to grab first- and second-generation students’ attentions. He kept the beats going, raised his hands and climbed on the cement planter to keep the energy high. The student body mindlessly gravitated toward him, his activity co-host, and his large collection of speakers that drowned out the sound of his voice.

He lowered the volume of his music and silenced his airhorn effects. “Happy first day of Unity Week! Pew, pew, pew!” Confucius pointed at the first row of students. He jumped down from the cement planter. “It’s ya boy, Co-Co-Confucius!” He introduced himself with an upbeat, DJ-esque persona. “Our first Unity Week activity is to ‘walk a mile in someone else’s shoes’! Tell ‘em how it works, Sacagawea!” He pointed at his co-host and turned the attention toward her.

Sacagawea clasped her hands together. “Okay, we are going super literal on this one. You’re going to swap shoes with someone you don’t know and literally walk a mile together! Make new a new best friend and turn on your smart watches, because you’re about to get those steps!” She fist-pumped the air, exaggerating her words to keep the energy high, to ensure that the student body remained engaged and excited.

CJ kept herself close to the doors of the school in case she needed to make a speedy escape—she found it to be sickening that Confucius and his peers (her peers as well) were such people-persons, and that Confucius was able to keep such a large crowd engaged by fluctuating his voice and moving his hands in specific directions and in specific motions. She didn’t quite understand the charisma behind it—it was, dare she admit it, enchanting when specific individuals held that sort of charismatic power, and disgusting when others tried their hand at it. Some people just lacked charisma and fluid bodily movements to be able to engage with a crowd—CJ was one of those individuals that was unable to be charismatic and move fluidly.

She hoped that neither generation of clones would approach her for this idiotic idea of a unity activity. In all honesty—walk aside—she thought the concept of the Unity Week was rather… counterproductive… but not a single member of the student body council listened to her. She was convinced that no sound came out of her vocal cords when she so much as suggested that Unity Week was a bad idea. That, right there, had her wondering why she was still VP. Sure, Scudworth had rigged to votes to put her in this position because he thought she needed it, to get her to socialize, to have her make friends, to let her voice be heard because his never was (hence his situation with John Stamos). But she still didn’t socialize, she still had no friends, and she still wasn’t heard. As the VP of the student body, arguing her points, she stood in the middle of cubical brick formation, screaming at no one, listening to the own sound of her voice ricochet of each and every brick, going nowhere else.

First- and second-generation clones continued to pair up creating a muddled mess of humans mingling and pushing between each other to wear someone else’s bacteria infested footwear. Somewhere across the courtyard, CJ can only assume a first-generation clone said something that her generation has dubbed a ‘canceled’ word as all of her generation (excluding herself) gasped and gawked in a specific direction. And in order to seem cool and in the loop part of the first-generation clone followed in suit and gasped and gawked at the clone who seemingly offended everyone.

She crossed her arms and scanned the courtyard; a short—very short—redheaded clone appeared to be approaching her. She ignored his gaze and hoped that he was actually headed toward someone else. To her dismay, he actually got closer to her. He appeared to have been mustering up all of the courage in the world to ask to her walk this mile with him because he seemed just as unenthused with the event as she did. She inhaled deeply at the short, blue coated clone and considered just slipping back into the building and calling herself a visual hallucination or a ghost or something of the sort.

But… she stopped herself. Between feeling the watchful occipital units of Mr. B from the window of Scudworth’s office and this short clone now standing right in front of her, it was pointless for the VP to run away and call herself a figment of someone’s imagination.

“You don’t seem to have a partner.” He told her.

“Well, thank you, Captain Obvious,” she snapped at the redhead. “I don’t even want to be here.”

He nodded. “Yeah, I figured as much. Brooding teenager, far away from everyone.” He held his hand out for her to shake. “Vincent. Vincent van Gogh is my clonefather.”

She stared down her nose at the redheaded clone and took in as many details as she could stand to remember. His head was wrapped with a bandage—probably from a self-mutilation attempt, much like his clone father—and his coat dropped to his knees. He looked pathetic. She touched her index finger to his hand and pushed his hand away from her. “My given name is CJ; I try to go by my middle name Adair.”

“CJ is easier to remember.” He commented; he slipped his shoes off and pushed them toward her.

“Are you trying to ask me to be your partner for this stupid walk?” She asked.

He simply nodded.

She bent over and pulled at the laces of her boots and slipped her feet out of her boots and kicked them toward Vincent. She pulled Vincent’s shoes toward her and slipped her feet into his loafers. “I’m surprised your loafers fit.”

Vincent secured the laces of CJ’s boots. “You could kill someone in these.” He pointed the toe of one of the boots toward her.

CJ hummed. “Technically, disguise yourself as Keanu Reeves and anything can be a weapon.” She stood up straight and shrugged her shoulders. She bounced on her toes and felt the uneven grass beneath her feet. “I cannot stand flat soles. They’re so… flat.”

Vicent shook his head at her comment. “I’m so sorry.” He turned away from her and began following the crowd of students as they began walking away from the courtyard.

CJ reluctantly followed him; her strides were longer than his, so it didn’t take much time or effort for her to be able to catch up to him. His strides were small and quick, almost as if he spent his entire life running because of the length of his legs. She, however, had no choice but to control her speed to walk beside him to honor the ‘rules’ of the walk—mostly because she could now feel Harriet glaring at her from the front of the hoard. And if she didn’t honor the rules of the walk, Harriet would soon be out for blood. As innocent as Harriet seemed, she was chaotic, unpredictable, and could hurt someone if she pleased to. She was very serious about her Unity Week and wanted everything to be perfect by her own standards—which were vastly different from CJ’s.

“Are you as much of an artist as your clonefather?” She asked.

Vincent weaved through the sea of students with his small hand gripping the sleeve of her lab coat. “Well, I’d like to think so. I’m sure some of my murals—and graffiti—are still around. And if not, you’re welcome to come over to my house so I can show you some of my art pieces and works in progress.” He offered. “If you’re interested.”

CJ stumbled behind him as he dragged her toward her fellow student body council members. “Obviously; perhaps I should have prefaced my question with my interest in the arts. I’m no artist myself, but I’ve always envisioned my future home being filled with renaissance portraits or Dali or van Gogh.” She started to resist his efforts to drag her through the crowd. “I enjoy the works of van Gogh, Dali, M. C. Escher, da Vinci, so on and so forth. Names are not my strong suit, but I can honestly say that I don’t like modern art.”

Vincent smirked and slowed his pace. “You have quite the list though; I don’t often hear someone mention M. C. Escher, if I’m being honest.”

“He’s highly regarded in art class, I still consider him part of a basic list of artists.”

Silence grew between Vincent and CJ, and they trailed behind CJ’s fellow council members and their partners—they weren’t close enough to be included in their conversations, but they weren’t far enough for CJ and Vincent to get themselves put on Harriet’s shitlist. CJ was uncomfortable with the silence because she was unfamiliar with Vincent, and she did not want to be in this situation; she felt like a hostage to Harriet’s event. Chained to Vincent by wearing his worn, bacteria filled shoes and forced to converse with him through stale conversation questions. She didn’t see the appeal in being forced to make a best friend by wearing their shoes and walking with them.

Vincent glanced up at CJ and finally broke through the silence that became unbearable for him. “Who’s your cloneparent?”

She glanced toward the ground upon hearing the question—if she were being honest, she had never told anyone who her cloneparent was, nor who she lived with, which may have earned her the title of one of the most mysterious students at school and one of the best at keeping secrets. Her pace slowed as she considered the various ways she could answer Vincent’s question. She had never been asked before, so she had never had a reason to figure out how to answer the one thing she never wanted to talk about. The walk continued without her; students pushed past her, some even walked into her once she stopped walking altogether. She stood in the middle of the trail Harriet had picked out and watched the sea of students move forward without her. She kept her gaze toward Vincent, not necessarily staring at him but staring in that general direction. The scene surrounding her soon became a mess of blurred student-shaped colors and a blurred background.

Vincent had, unfortunately for her, noticed that he had lost her several steps ago. He turned around and studied her like she was one of his own paintings. His question had made her eyebrows come together, she appeared to be frowning, and she was picking at her nails. Vincent walked against the grain and reapproached CJ; he lightly tugged at the sleeve of her white lab coat to try to bring her back into reality.

She pulled her arm away from him and stared down her nose at him. “What?”

“Are you okay?”

“Fine—I don’t talk about my cloneparent.” She stated. “And I don’t plan on starting.” She began walking again and sped back toward the front of the group.

Vincent jogged after her, barely able to keep up with her in her own shoes. “I didn’t know—.”

“I’m well aware of that fact, that’s why we’re getting that out of the way now, right?” She inhaled deeply. “But,” she tilted her head toward her right shoulder, “I will tell you that my cloneparent was a scientist—and not a very good or famous one. You won’t really learn much about their contributions to society, they’ve been wiped from our history because they don’t really matter.”

Vincent huffed; he slowed his pace as he approached her side. “I see. Do you think you’re doing better than them?”

She laughed dryly and abruptly stopped making any such sounds. “As far as academia, I’m a certified genius, it’s just far easier to accept my fate as a high school student than to jump through the several thousand hoops to skip all this nonsense. But I have college-level research grants, an honorary degree, and all that fun stuff.” She listed. She crossed her arms and slouched slightly. She tensed her shoulders and glanced down at Vincent. “But I’ve got enough balls to admit that I have about as many deficits as I do scientific achievements. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows—in fact, I legitimately loathe sunshine and rainbows.”

Vincent chuckled. “So, you didn’t draw little suns with smiles on your kindergarten drawings?”

CJ smirked. “I drew little cauldrons with puffs of smoke in the shape of a skull like every cult classic.”

“Calm down, Sally, Dr. Finkelstein isn’t here.”

They fell silent again—this time, it was a silence that Vincent was able to stand for a bit longer after their little bit of small talk—even their small talk was hard to get through at first. CJ was able to walk side-by-side with Vincent without having a single thought that complained about having to walk next to someone—they had begun to walk side-by-side, in sync, as if they had practiced this their entire lives. Vincent tapped CJ’s arm and pointed toward a clone from his own generation—who he identified as the clone of Abraham Lincoln—and the clone beside him—who CJ identified as the clone of Christopher Colombus, who goes by Topher Bus. They chuckled at Abe walking in shoes that were way too small for his feet. They chuckled at the way Abe crouched to talk to Topher, and at the way Abe had to limp and walk in such robotic and meticulous movements because of the immense amount of pain he was feeling from Topher’s shoes. CJ accidentally locked eyes with Topher for a moment. It was tragic, but she couldn’t help but take the blame for the tragedy that weaved itself through those honey-colored eyes. His eyes never used to remind her of the dirt. But they do now. She looked away but she could still feel his sticky gaze on her.

As they approached the end of the mile, Vincent was laughing at the absurdity of Clone High and its principal. CJ, on the other hand, was not laughing despite the fact that she found the same amusement in the absurdity. They compared generations; Vincent had a fairly neutral view of his generation because he had a few friends (two of which were Julius Caeser and Cathrine the Great—who had joined them at one point during their walk and have been in and out of their conversation) and had sweet revenge on a fellow short statured clone. CJ, on the other hand, had a poorer view of her generation between her own personal outlook on life (extremely negative) and because she was raise by someone who thought he was raising an early 2000s child or even a child in the 1990s or earlier (this diluted her humor and made her have a particularly negative view of woke culture, in fact, it made her a little more like the person that raised her). That and her deep-rooted hatred for their principal drove her to be a better scientist than him.

“Wait, wait, wait—you have tried to kill him?” Vincent asked for clarification.

She crossed her arms and felt herself come back down to Earth after having a relatively good conversation with Vincent. “It’ll be a successful kill if he doesn’t wake up.”

“What did he ever do to you?” He asked with some semblance of horror written all over his face.

The corners of CJ’s lips twitched into a small smile. “He made the first-generation of clones for profit and he made the second-generation for shits and giggles. As a second-generation clone, I thought it would be hilarious to be a cliché—a creation turns on its creator.” CJ justified her reasoning. “In all honesty it’s kind of fun.”

Vincent nodded slowly. “You have problems.”

“I sure do.”

The mile walk came to a complete end as the students filed back into the school’s courtyard; Frida and Harriet pulled CJ and Vincent over toward the entrance to the building. Behind them, the rest of the clones gathered around and started returning shoes to their original owners.

Frida and Harriet stood on either side of CJ and smile as all of the clones—at least the ones that were paying attention to them—gathered around them. Namely the first-generation clones that were their partners, but there were a handful of others that gathered around Frida, Harriet, and CJ purely to see the stark contract between CJ (grumpy) and Frida and Harriet (not grumpy).

“We are so excited to announce that we are inviting the coolest of you frozen to join us. Every day. At lunch!” Harriet gripped CJ’s arm and leaned into her.

Frida leaned into CJ and threw up a peace sign and grinned; she chuckled and pointed toward the crowd of students.

CJ grimaced.

Harriet pulled CJ down to her height and giggled slightly. “Hopefully this inclusivity will help you guys because we look forward to representing you on the student body council! Right?”

“No.”

“Duh,” Frida pointed a finger gun at Harriet.

“We’ve decided to throw together a super exclusive Inclusivity Committee for you frozens! It’s totally exclusive!” Harriet said.

CJ weaseled her way out from between Frida and Harriet; she grimaced. “Right. And what wonderful first-generation clones did you pick without consulting me for this wonderful committee that you also made without consulting me?” She asked, angrily.

“Whaaaat?” Harriet laughed nervously and glanced between Frida and all of their first-generation partners. “I didn’t! We didn’t! Puh—no one excluded you from the decision-making process.”

“Okay, so then I get to pick?” CJ asked.

“Nah, girl, we already picked.” Frida stepped forward and pulled and lanyard out of the pocket of her cargo jeans. “So, what do you say, Cleo,” she paused.

“Finally!” Cleo held her hand out for the lanyard.

“Good pick, girls.” CJ crossed her arms and smirked, approvingly, at the choice.

“Could you step out of the way so we can give this to Joan of Arc?” Frida held up the end of the lanyard to show an image of Joan on the Inclusivity Committee badge.

“Just kidding.” CJ sighed.

Joan and Cleo gasped at the revelation—apparently the future seems to love people like Joan more than to do people like Cleo (save for CJ, who liked Cleo). CJ remained unsurprised that she was uninvolved in the decision-making process and was further unsurprised that Harriet and Frida had chosen to admit Joan to their strange exclusive Inclusive Committee. CJ and Vincent stood behind the members of the Inclusivity Committee and were immediately left to their own devices, so they switched their shoes back. Vincent, once again, felt more like himself, short, depressed, and Dutch. CJ felt like herself again as well, empowered and about 5’8” after the heel. She clenched her jaw as Frida and Harriet dragged on the entire lanyard ordeal in front of them.

Joan swiped the lanyard from Frida. “Oh, wow.”

“WHAT?!” Cleo raised her voice, her eyes bulged out of her eye sockets. “Just hold on a second for me. You’re the hottest girl in school,” she pointed at Frida, “and Joan is considered cool?” She pointed at Joan, “oh, my God, this is such a nightmare. I have to be dreaming, right? Someone needs to wake me up!” She pinched herself, and when pinching herself did not wake her up, she resorted to using various objects, including a bear trap and a bag of rat traps that CJ had handed her. Cleo continued to batter herself bloody in disbelief of the future that she was currently living in.

“Is she good?” Frida asked.

Joan shrugged her shoulders. “I have no idea.” She looked back at the lanyard in her hands. “Wow, I don’t even remember this photo, is this a yearbook photo of me? Why is it so crystal clear?”

“Technology.” Frida said.

CJ rested her arm on Vincent’s head and turned her attention to him, rather than continuing to listen to Frida, Harriet, and Joan. “And I’m done here, obviously.”

Vincent immediately pushed her arm off of his head. “That was very painful to watch.”

She stood with her shoulders back, arms crossed over her chest and her feet were shoulder width apart. She hummed, “which part, because I think the entire thing was painful.” CJ raised an eyebrow and looked down at Vincent.

“Aren’t you the VP? You didn’t get a choice in the committee member.” Vincent said.

“I like Cleopatra.” CJ deadpanned.

“Why?”

“She’s practical.”

Vincent nodded slowly. “Right… If that’s what you want to call it.” He looked away from her. “Your council buddies’ kind of ruined your mood, didn’t they?”

“We’re not buddies.” She told him harshly. “It disgusts me—their attitudes about the whole thing and calling you ‘frozens’ sounds like the next racial slur.”

“Yeah, I didn’t want to say anything.” He glanced up at her. “I wasn’t sure if that was just me.”

CJ bent down to Vincent’s height and pointed at Joan’s boyfriend. “Don’t want to interrupt our race and ethics class, but is that boy in the red shirt always that weird?”

Joan’s boyfriend—the boy in the red shirt that CJ referred to-threw his new lanyard around his neck. “Hot, uh, dog, Joanie! Wouldya look at that, we’re in the club together!” He happily skipped toward Joan and grabbed her shoulders. He quickly grabbed her waist and picked her up; he spun her around and began singing. “Me an’ Joanie sittin’ in a tree! Bangin’ in the Inclusivity Committee!”

“JFK stop it!” Joan giggled.

“So-so.” Vincent confirmed.

“Does your lunch table have an open seat?” She whispered. “Because I don’t think I can deal with these fucking assclowns.”

Vincent nodded. “Yeah, join us whenever you want—hey, do you want to come to the Grassy Knoll?” He asked with a lopsided grin.

“Eugh, I just walked a mile with you.” She straightened her posture and peered down at him. “No offense.” “It’ll be fun, we won’t stay there all night.” Vincent tried to convince her.

#oc: cj scudworth #cinnamon j scudworth fanfiction #clone high x oc #clone high x oc fanfiction #principal scudworth fanfiction #the genetic puzzle #the genetic puzzle chapter 2

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