Walk down the hallways just like I do every other day. Right side, just like a road. I catch eyes avoiding mine, faces avoid looking my direction. It isn’t me. It isn’t anyone. It’s that people here don’t want to say hello. They don’t know how.

Get to my locker and I turn the lock. I’ve run the combination so many times, I’ve forgotten it. I just know the pathway. I know the strokes to make.

No one is to my left. Or right. Full size locker with no neighbors. Actually, there isn’t anyone until five lockers to the right. And it belongs to a guy I know from physics. We talk sometimes, after physics, about physics. When we are both at our lockers and we just got done taking a test or quiz or something. But that’s all. It’s purely physics. Nothing more. The conversation ends there. Not far enough away for conversation, but far enough away for anything true. Far enough away for there to be no talk about anything real.

There’s a girl three to the left. Sometimes I talk to her too. Our conversations are a little better. Maybe it’s because she’s located a little closer. If we didn’t talk and just stood at our open lockers, shuffling books in and out in silence, it would be too weird. That’s what they call silence these days.

So we talk. About classes and college and finals, jobs and work. Sometimes we are done with our lockers and we just stand and finish talking. Almost like friends. But the things we talk about, they aren’t deep. They barely skim the surface. They don’t mean anything.

When I get to thinking, really thinking, it’s usually during physics. It’s not about him or her or even me. It’s about my locker. It’s about where my locker is. It’s right in the middle of a desert, no water for miles. Or to be more specific, three full lockers. I wonder if its location is why I never have any good conversations with people. I wonder why my locker is in the middle of a stretch of unused ones, seeing that every student in the school gets the right to their own locker. I guess some just choose not to use theirs.

Then, I wonder, if I was given freedom of my locker location, if I could chose anywhere for my locker to be, if it would be between the cheerleaders and the artists that gather in a crowd around their lockers, looking happy. They laugh and smile and joke and tease, and they look truly happy. Would that be where I would choose to be?

Or would I stay where I was, in the middle of metal cornfields, the only car on the road. I wonder if I would chose to stay, because it was comfortable. I wonder if I would stay because it was something I knew.

I shut my locker and merge into a traffic of quirky teenagers and cheerleaders, artists and physics students. I walk to class, staying in the right lane, as if it really matters.