10-11-04

It’s a cold morning in Beverly Hills, California. We are all sitting together on a chilly slab of cement. Chitchatting and shivering ostensibly, we impatiently wait.

Across from me is Jamie Swanson, who has blonde hair. He’s kind of a nerd. To the left of him is Allie Finer. She is kind of half asleep. Two kids down from me is Liana. I had a crush on her at the beginning of the year but she started to like Matt. Slut.

After an eternity, Mrs. Sandy Kelly, our sixth grade English teacher comes around the corner and opens the door. We each pry ourselves from our comatose states and file inside the classroom.

She always gives us some busy work to do. When am I ever going to use this in my life – I echo in my head. Oh God, today we’re doing work in our journals. I feel that this is below me.

Liana sits next to me in the back. Sandy has us all nicely put into columns. Some teachers do columns, others do rows, some get pretty creative and put the desks in groups. I never understood that one. I always understood how beautiful the English language was, however. It’s too bad Sandy is about to ruin it for me.

“Hey, I think we’re all gonna go to the movies this weekend. Are you gonna go?” Liana asks me.

“Um, I don’t have a car,” I tell her.

“Get out your journals,” Sandy says.

I get mine out. She has us write things but sometimes she also has us cut articles out of the newspapers, put them in our journals, and write about them. Today she says to write something personal. Like, about us.

“What did you have for dinner last night?” Liana asks me.

“Uh steak.”

“Eww. Steak’s gross. You should have had chicken.”

“Okay.”

“Knock it off you two,” exclaims Sandy.

Everyone gets out their journals and begins to write. Independent study is the best part of the class. Any time we don’t have to pay attention to the teacher makes the morning easier. Plus, Mrs. Kelly is a bitch.

“What are you going to write about,” Liana asks me.

“Um, I don’t know.”

“Probably something about sports, huh,” she says.

“Why’s that.”

“That’s what boys always write about.”

“I disagree,” I reply.

“Then what are you gonna write about.”

“I think I’ll write something in the same vein as Finnegan’s Wake.”

“Ick. Pastiche is so sixth grade.”

I allow Liana to go back to her own toils without excessively commenting on them. She is pasting an article into her journal and begins to write about it, but only for so long before she decides to begin pestering me again.

“Do you like any of the girls in this class? Like, like like them?”

“Um. Do you mean like them as a friend or like, like them?”

“Like you like them.”

“Like like them?”

“Yes.”

“Um, I don’t know.”

“So you do.”

“No.”

“Hey, get! Do. Do, what I told you. Stop talking. Alexander,” Sandy starts to lose it.

But I feel sorry for her so I don’t shout back to her that the whole class can see her underwear. I feel that I have been put in a weird experiment with a bunch of monkeys. Nonetheless, I am playing along, aren’t I? I’ve been playing along the whole time. Ever since Mrs. Somers’ Kindergarten class when they used to laminate the desks so that the kids couldn’t vandalize them with those washable markers and now I wonder how difficult it would be to laminate the middle school bathroom mirrors. Then it occurs to me that we could do the same to freeway underpasses.

“Liana, would you like to go out sometime?”

“Um, okay, where are we gonna go?”

“I don’t know. I don’t have a car. So never mind.”

The class recovers from the initial euphoria of coming in from the cold and becomes restless. Sandy shoots me a glare, reminding me that my mother will be coming in for a parent-teacher conference later this week. I will not get started on how pointless those are.

“Do you ever wonder what the world will be like ten years from now?” Liana asks.

“Oh, I already know. Far too well,” I tell her.

“You do?”

“Oh yes.”

“Oh,” she responds. “What are you going to be doing?”

“Probably writing autobiographical short fiction that isn’t humorous, going back in time, and conspicuously changing my people’s names in case they feel slandered by what I’m writing.”

Moments pass.

“Can you pass the glue stick?”