Concrete Zoo, Chapter 1: New Prison

The concrete walls, grey with no variation of color, towered above him. They streaked up to the sky, melding with the pale blue ether and thin, thin wisps of clouds.

Each step he took was laborious, a chore. His feet seemed to be cast in stone blocks. Sweet didn’t bead on his head or back; it streamed downward, into his collar, the small of his back, into his underwear.

It was 105 degrees outside, and they were being herded into the rectangular building made of grey, lifeless concrete blocks. He was one of one hundred teenagers, flowing virtually noiselessly towards their future, two-by-two, crushed together, moving at a pace dictated by someone far ahead of them.

He was finding it hard to breathe. He turned his head upward and saw a brief relief by staring towards the sky. He noticed the edges of the rooves overhead. I think I could cut my arm open on one of those blocks, he thought, glancing twenty feet into the air at the buildings on both sides of him.

His blue and grey Mossimo shirt was glued to his back, but he didn’t dare pull it away: he was too close to the girl next to him. He didn’t want to jam his skinny, sharp elbow into her side. She looked like a nice person; why piss her off on the first day?

He couldn’t help but stare at her for a moment. Unlike Ben, her head was dry, and her black hair, perfectly combed, bounced around her shoulders. Her pink polo shirt looked sweat-free as well. She held her folder perfectly in the crook of her arm. Her backpack seemed to weigh nothing. She almost glided above the ground.

How the hell did she do that? He wondered.

His backpack, jammed with thirty pounds of books, was a burden. He could barely lift his new Vans Cabalerros off the ground. It’s not the way he wanted to start off the year.

Someone sneezed in front of him. He looked up and saw the door of the building slam open. The first wave of students entered the yellowish hallway through the double aluminum doors with half windows.

They were entering building A, a squat, narrow building slammed down between the towering auditorium on his left and the equally large gym building on his right.

All grey. All with razor-looking edges.

The sun vanished as he approached what would be part of his prison for the next nine months. When he thought, “prison,” he heard his mother laugh, her neatly permed red hair shaking as she giggled at him and handed him a five spot.

“Get a good lunch,” she said, shutting the door behind him as he headed to the bus stop.

Ben knew if she was shuffling along with him at that moment, she wouldn’t be laughing.

Not all entering building A were silent and sullen. Some joked with friends, some called others names, and some gripped about the heat. It was August in Scottsdale, Arizona—what did they expect?

Most were like Ben: hands in their pockets, eyes on the ground, shrugging their onerous backpacks over their one shoulder to keep it from sliding to the ground. A few students wore $100 Guess jeans and $85 Ralph Lauren shirts. But Ben and most of those in his field of vision wore skate brands or knockoffs.

Ben adjusted his pants: they were sliding down his hips, made more accessible by the water now rolling down his legs. Unable to take it anymore, he finally pulled his shirt out and wiped his forehead free of the dripping perspiration.

And then he knocked into the girl next to him, his elbow jabbing her arm.

She looked at him and smiled.

“Sorry,” he mumbled.

“It’s cool,” she said back.

Silver brackets and wire shown from her perfect smile. She grinned and stepped up to the door, half open. She pushed the bar and went in. Ben followed by opening his door awkwardly. He couldn’t take his eyes off the girl’s hair and graceful walk.

He trudged down the hall, the fluorescent lights casting a greenish-white glow onto everything. The yellowish walls and chipped linoleum flooring looked like tapioca pudding had been smeared all over it.

Suddenly, Ben could breathe a little easier. The crushing crowd was breaking up as students flowed into rooms to his right and left. Each room was entered by warped wood doors with small glass panels pretending to be windows. Every time a door opened, the clammer in the room and the wail of a teacher’s voice burst out for a few seconds, then vanished behind the dense door.

The girl next to Ben vanished before he knew it, sucked into a room halfway down the hall. He scolded himself for not paying attention: he didn’t know where she went. He’d have to pay more attention the next day.

The air towards the end of the hall was cleaner, less dense, less smelly. He was one of a dozen students heading towards the last door on the left. The hall ended right after the door in another wall of grey concrete block.

He thought that the decorator must have been killed after this place was built.

While waiting for a handful of guys to enter the room, he noticed the ceiling tiles above the door were water-stained and cracked. One was missing a corner, and he swore he could see a mouse tail sticking out of it for a fleeting second. Then it was pulled up and gone.

He realized he was the last person in the hallway. All was quiet. The drone of hushed teacher’s voices eked out of the closed classrooms. The room in front of him was alive, however. The door was open, and he stood on the threshold, looking for an empty seat. He counted them and quickly realized twenty-six desks filled the room, the seats made of hard yellow plastic—what is with the yellow? he thought—the desk part made of particle board and faux wood, barely big enough for his arm to rest on, let alone a book and a notepad.

He spotted a seat near the far right back of the room and walked quickly to it. Sitting down, Ben slid his backpack off and set it in front of his feet. The air conditioning was on full blast. Well, he wouldn’t fry to death in the green-grey-colored room. The light bounced off the polished, dull flooring, casting a weird glow around everything.

The guy sitting next to him—much too old to be a freshman—belched and jammed a wad of tobacco in his lip. He wore a jet-black shirt and tattered jeans. Under his foot was a skateboard, which he rolled back and forth, back and forth.

The girl next to him, pale, streaked black and green hair, leaned over and kissed him. Her oversized The Cure t-shirt could have fit another person inside it.

“Class, class, class,” came a bubbling voice from the front of the room.

The source of the voice was hard to see. Ben had to lift an inch or two off the seat to make out the person standing front and center. She was four foot ten, her hands were folded in front of her, her avocado and orange shirt puffed out in her arms, and her thinning yellow-red hair stuck straight up like a wire brush.

“Geez,” Ben said under his breath.

“Yeah,” the skater guy said. “Third year with her. She’s something.”
The teacher pushed her tiny glasses up—not that she could see through the microscopic lenses—and waited.

The room did quiet eventually.

“I’m Mrs. Figgins, and I’ll be teaching you the wonders of Spanish 101,” she said.

A groan went up.

“Oh, I see,” she responded, “no habla Espanol.”

She turned side to side as she spoke.

“Nope,” said the skater guy, then ducked down behind Ben.

Mrs. Figgins’s head snapped around; her beady eyes bore in on Ben. His heart pounded. She was gliding over to him. The class was quiet and watching. She stopped in front of his desk.

“Como te llamo?” she said, smiling.

Ben looked at the skater next to him, eyes begging for help. The skater grinned, his eyes becoming small slits in his face. The girlfriend just popped her gum.

“What is your name?” Mrs. Figgins asked, smiling.

“Ben,” he answered, his voice cracking with fear.

She moved closer to the desk; those behind him tittered at him.

“Ben,” she said, leaning close, “guess what? I don’t want to teach you. But I have to.”

She smelled like cigarettes and dead roses. Ben gagged, and she motioned for him to stand.

The bell couldn’t come soon enough for Ben. He was the first one out the door because he had been standing off to the side of the room, with a clear shot to the door, the entire class. He spent the whole first period holding her three colored markers and the video remote so Mrs. Figgins could show them the first hour of her summer vacation in Spain. It was the first of over forty hours of footage she would unload that year.

Ben thundered into the walkway between buildings and wrestled his class schedule from his pocket. He saw “Drafting” was next, in the “Shop” building.

He looked around; he couldn’t remember where that building was on the campus. The girl he’d jabbed with his elbow passed him at that very moment.

“Hey,” he said, “do you know where the shop building is?”

She stopped and squinted, thinking for a moment. “Yeah,” she said.

He waited, but nothing followed.

“Well?” he finally asked.

“The other side of campus,” she said, looking at her watch. “And you’ve got three minutes before they throw you to the wolves.”

“Shit,” he muttered.

“Mrs. Figgins runs tardy sweep after the first period,” she said and walked off.

Ben sprinted past her and out into the courtyard of the high school.