John Bender walks across the football stadium with a sense of purpose not seen in the likes of anyone but soldiers returning from a victory. His tweed trench coat billows around him like a cape. His finger tips are beginning to freeze on his walk home because the finger-less leather gloves don't take them into account. No matter. Today is the first day of the rest of his life.

"Fuck you, dad," he mutters under his breath, "Fuck you. And fuck you, too, Mr. Dick Vernon. See you next week in your shitty detention. Right now, I gotta girl to call."

It isn't fair that she couldn't have stayed with him. They could have walked around in the cold winter air together. That way they wouldn't jinx it. That moment where her mouth had been on his and he'd found himself leaning in instead of pulling back. What a funny thing.

Instead he walks the streets of Shermer Illinois like a god. He doesn't kick stray cans or slam his fist on mailboxes to see how many he can dent. He rocks his shades with a new appreciation for the first time in a long time for being alive.

His heart is pumping blood. His lungs are breathing and processing air. He's got eight more weeks of detention in his near future but he couldn't give less of a shit because they are all humans and it is fucking beautiful.

He slams the screen door to his house. On a normal day he wouldn't dare. Dad doesn't take nicely to being woken. But today is not a normal day. Today is what brains in the philosophy class like to call an epiphany day. At least, he thinks that's what they call it. Regardless, today is the day that John Bender realizes he has been going about it all wrong. It is on this chilly March Saturday that he realized people are the same and that there may be a single girl out there for him after all.

We philosophers like to call this a motherfucking epiphany.

Inside, Bender is surprised to find the dingy living room father-less.

"Shit, what kinda karma am I gonna have to pay for a day this good?" He mumbles to himself as he kicks off his ratty boots and tosses the coat onto the maroon velvet couch.

He eats some left over Chinese food from the fridge before getting to it. It's his father's left overs. The bastard is so paranoid that he labels all of his food. Serves him right. It's too bad that Bender won't be there to see the look on his old Pop's face when he realizes someone ate his left-overs. There's only the two of them that live in this house so it'll hardly take Sherlock Holmes to put two and two together.

Once he's done, he starts his mission. It takes Bender a while to find the school directory. It's lucky he didn't laugh about it with his friends the moment he got it and rip it to shreds after they'd finished prank calling all the freshmen with terrible family emergencies. Prank Calls. What a fucking child. Everything in the past seems so stupid now.

He finds the directory finally at the bottom of a stack of Daily News papers. It has a large coffee stain and a bite-marked chunk missing on the side. Hopefully it doesn't mean that the number's gone...

"Did you do this, you stupid cat?" He scolds the gray feline that has ambled into the room. The cat blinks at him with amber eyes unphased, "It better still be here or you'll get it good..."

The S's... flip to the S's.

Smith, Sneider, Sordo...

Her name is there. In black and while, on a pristine, never-looked at portion of the school directory.

Claire Standish.

Bender's hand floats up to caress the gemstone in his ear. He can almost still feel impossibly soft finger placing the earring gently in his palm as if it was a delicate and intricate diamond made out of glass. The slight glance in the direction of her father to make sure he was adequately horrified. Her deep eyes on his. This is the first gift he has ever received which he did not have to work for. And yet, debatable, the hardest he ever worked was in trying to convince her he was something else. But she'd seen right through him.

Most guys would worry that this is too early to call. After all, he just saw her twenty minutes ago, grinning back at him with that freckled smile, delighted at the look of death on her father's face. Serves him right. Fucking tool.

But John Bender had never been known to think anything through in his life.

Thinking is for rocket scientists and drug dealers. And at the moment, I'm not a member of either party.

Besides, John Bender is not most guys. In that respect, he resembles the great narcissists of old: Nero and Napoleon. Guys that were so full of themselves they never considered failure as an option.

So he picks up the phone and dials. One ring. Two rings. Three rings. Just enough to convert him into thinking this is a bad idea before a woman picks up.

"Hello?"

"Uh, hi."

The only thing Bender remembers that his mom ever taught him was that you should always introduce yourself on the phone. But he knows full well that he's here to serve a very different purpose. He's here to be the boy you'd never take home to mom and dad.

"I wanna speak to Claire. Is she home?"

There's a long pause where Bender has time to feel rather pleased with his work. Today has been a good day in the verbal sparring department, too. That Barry Manilow line was fucking genius.

"Don't you know that it's impolite not to introduce one's self over the phone, young man? Who is this speaking?"

"John Bender, and who are you, lady?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"Claire. Put her on the phone please."

"The nerve!"

"Listen, m'am, I'm not lookin' to start something. I just wanna talk to Claire."

He is beginning to get annoyed now. The stupid cat won't stop staring at him and then flicking his yellow orbs back to his dusty food bowl. He can't remember where he put the weed he got back from that brainiac kid. He thinks he hears someone coming up the drive and now why the fuck is this lady ruining his day?

There's another long pause where he hears voices in the background. It's hard to pick up anything definitive except for one phrase.

"No way you're speaking to him."

"She is not home at the moment. Besides, she is grounded so don't try to call back here. Goodbye."

Click. Beep.

The bitch hung up on him.

There's the sound of drunk stumbling outside as Bender hang the phone back up. He runs up to his room to change and freshen up before his dad can say anything.

Bender looks at his long shaggy hair in the mirror. Is that a white streak growing in? Must be all the stress. Life is stressful when you've got a maniac for a father and no shits left to give about staying alive.

The gray streak looks kind of bad-ass, Bender decides. It looks good with his new earring. That makes him smile as he pulls on his most tattered and shredded pair of jeans and heavy metal shirt.

When he looks at himself in the mirror again, he either looks like the kid that dies first in a zombie movie or a mother's son-in-law in a nightmare.

Perfect.

It's time to crash some rich motherfuckers' family dinner.