ESSAY POST
I did it on myspace, so I might as well do it here... Here's another essay for you to read... a little different style than the last one.. tell me what you think...
There’s no place like Home
Shiny orange and blue plastic cubes welded into the small unused sockets of what are supposed to be Ethernet jacks for computer connections are mounted in select areas along the white brick walls as well as the worn tile cubes that make up the floor. The mounted plastic seems to have faced years of neglect, because it is caked with remnants of brown dirt, gray dust, and white chalk.
Painted white walls of huge bricks enclose the room’s occupants like a jail cell. Your average school would have plastered walls or some sort of homely paneling, but not here. The white bricks are not smooth and white all over; there are dents here and there where something has been thrown or scraped against them. The stories behind those marks range from desks and chairs being hurled to people giving in to the temptation to sabotage pristine private property. Most of the written damage is done with pencils and pens, saying things like: Class of ‘05, J-Nyce was here, general professions of teenage “luv,” or names of random neighborhood gangs-- Tre III, Hill 4x, Ville 2x, Tribe IV, Dipset, the Diplomats.
Suddenly your tired eyes avert their steady gaze from the white brick wall mounted with the old yet unused plastic cubes. Looking up to the board, there is a small crack on the chalkboard, which is coincidentally situated directly above the dent to the right of the dusty cube of plastic mounted on the wall. Anything could have caused it. A story is told that one day two years ago there were two girls fighting over a boy and one of them picked up a chair and threw it at the other, who happened to be standing in the spot precisely where the two dents line up. Depending on the angle that the chair was thrown and the strength of the girl throwing it, it could be true. It’s not a very farfetched explanation, since girls fight over boys all the time around here. Just last year a boy named Mike had two girlfriends -- somehow they found out about one another and instead of getting mad at him, they started bickering between themselves. The bickering escalated into a riotous altercation between the two naïve young women who were screaming about who was the better lover, who had him first, who he loved more, etc, etc, etc. Andrea must have said something that Whitney didn’t like, because the next thing anyone knew, Whitney was swinging. In the flurry of fists, blood soon splattered: apparently Whitney had a razor blade under a ring she was wearing, which she used to slice Andrea’s face. But anyway, throwing a chair isn’t that bad of a thing here.
The silence is broken by the dropping of a pencil and the crumpling of a sheet of paper. With a few minutes left of the class period, students start unzipping backpacks and conversations erupt around the room. Discussions range from talk of who will to win tonight’s basketball game, a heated argument about the release date of a new pair of sneakers, to someone being filled in on the sex scandal that was uncovered while she was suspended. Although the scandal is a week old, new rumors still float around about what happened. “The newspaper said that the colonel was sleeping with one of the girls in JROTC, but it didn’t give her name because she’s a minor,” said the petite girl, who had read about the incident during her suspension.
A tall boy a few seats to her right looked over and whispered rather loudly in a tone sprinkled with bass, “I heard it was that girl with the big ass butt.”
“No it wasn’t! I asked her and she said it wasn’t her. I heard that it was this girl named Crystal Brown,” said the girl who sat between the two students.
Across the room, a student overheard the conversation and interrupted: “If you all are talking about the girl the colonel was banging, then I heard that her name’s Christina. And I have friends who are in the JROTC, so they know the truth.”
“It’s not her because she’s in school today and if you read the newspaper carefully, it says the girl stopped coming to school.” said Kimberly, a JROTC cadet, will an attitudinal movement of her head.
There are a few seconds left before the bell, and by this time, all the conversations in the classroom have condensed into one huge conversation about the sex scandal. With several students arguing about which girl was sleeping with the colonel and who has the most valid information, silence is nowhere to be found - in its place is the sound of at least a dozen voices arguing and trying to talk over one another as if the one with the loudest voice is the one who knows the correct culprit of the whodunit. The first bell sounds and the sizzling debate moves out into the corridor, where several of the debaters go to the right while the ones still arguing go to the left, huddled and moving like bloodhounds hunting for a fox.
Taking a left at the classroom door takes you to the building’s epicenter, the middle T, which is backed up daily like Interstate 95 during rush hour -- it’s the focal point of the school and where two-thirds of the students pass on their way to class. Down the hall on the left just before the middle T, students are clustered like scavenger birds around fresh meat outside of the Senior administrator’s office where the senior class sells snacks as a part of their fundraising efforts. Since junk food is nowhere to be found in the school at any other time of the day, they all try to get as much as possible.
Turning right, you enter the girls’ restroom, which has a line of students waiting to use three useable stalls out of seven. Each of the four sinks has someone in front of it: one girl fixing her makeup, another fixing her friend’s hair; another who had just exited one of the stalls is washing her hands. At the far end of the restroom, a group of four crowds in and around the last stall and the open window next to it. They are in the middle of a conversation about something that happened to one of them last night when she got high with her friends. In the meantime, they pass around a cigarette and take turns smoking and flicking ashes into the toilet that is no longer white, but has been blackened by the ash from cigarettes and whatever other substances are smoked in the bathroom between classes. The restrooms have white plaster instead of brick walls. Along the entrance seems to be for autographs and shout-outs, because that’s where everyone has written her name and the name of every single one of her friends. Behind the toilet of the door-less stall to your left, the wall is painted with an ongoing conversation between two girls who evidently don’t like one another. It begins with one girl writing her name and the names of all of her friends on the wall and then another girl expressing her dislike for one of the girls on the list because she is “a hoe” and the first girl responding by saying, “Any of you hatin’ bitches can come see me” and the other responding with, “I don’t have time to come find you. If you want to see me, you can reach me at 555-4251.” In a third handwriting is sloppily sprawled the question, “who is this?”
The principal is now on the PA system giving the usual orders to “move expeditiously to your next class,” but his deep, raspy voice is barely audible above the sounds of the restroom and the hallways--water running in sinks, toilets flushing, the hollow thud of the paper towel dispenser, and the monotonous hum of voices from dozens of conversations all around.
Later, you find your way to the cafeteria and sit at one of the round tables with the group you eat lunch with. The kids you eat lunch with aren’t the people that you hang out or converse with at any other point of the day, because they‘re not your real friends: all of your friends have different lunch waves than yours. An administrator is on the microphone in the center of the cafeteria directing students into the lunch line and others out of the cafeteria. His voice gets lost in all of the laughter and movement in the room. After about five minutes, everyone already has his food and is either sitting or moving toward a seat. But one kid who knows not what to do with himself decides that he thinks--yes, he decided to think--that ketchup would give a fine contrast to the white shirt of the administrator. After he throws the ketchup, the domino effect begins. Within minutes there are French fries and chicken wings, salads and pizza slices flying in every direction. Some kids seek refuge under tables and chairs while others take their chances at fleeing for the door without being hit. An open packet of French salad dressing lands on the back of a student wearing a white tee-shirt, while a pizza slice falls on her new white sneakers and a Hawaiian punch splashes on the girls next to her, all of whom are wearing light colors.
Lunch serves to calm the excitement of the day, since most of the kids are tired after they have had lunch. At the end of the lunch wave you leave the café to find security at the stairs between two groups of boys who are arguing about one of their fellow Villains, Chauncey, being shot by a Tre Blood. You walk to the right toward the main foyer and toward history class where you have been discussing Jim Crow laws. In an attempt to participate in class, you mention that “Jim Crow laws gave whites a reason to lynch blacks,” but you are immediately persecuted because “you always gotta use them big ass words like ‘lynch’ and shit” which you then have to define for an unknowing peer. When class is over, it is now time for you to leave the building. As you walk toward the glass door of the school, you look out to see a group of boys across the street. Beside you is another group of boys who are heading toward the door. Once they walk out of the door and get onto the sidewalk, a round of gunshots rings through the air and one of the boys in the front of the group that just walked out of the door falls to the ground. The boys across the street jump into a small car that pulls in front of them and they flee the scene. Within minutes there are sirens and the boy who was on the ground in a puddle of his own blood is now in an ambulance on his way to the Emergency Room at Yale New Haven Hospital.
Later, on the news, you hear that he is still alive, reportedly paralyzed, and in the ICU. The boys won the basketball game that night, but no one knew about it but the team because the only thing on the news was the shooting. But all of this doesn’t happen while you are there, some of this happened five years ago when you were still in middle school, like the shooting. But the reality is that history repeats itself, and the way things are looking, it could happen any day now.
This is just to keep you occupied until I write about my birthday tomorrow