Does this sound like something you'd like to read?
I woke up Wednesday morning, finally numbed to the frenzy of it all after 16 years of spiraling straight down into the bowels of the underworld.
7:28am. Standing outside room A-6, red eyed, rosy cheeked, shivering and slouching under the weight of a backpack bursting at its seams, wishing I had been coherent enough this morning to grab a sweater on the way out.
A minute or so before the bell rings, a punch on my shoulder brings me out of my daze and back to Earth.
“Hey Tim.” Not Timothy, just Tim. One syllable. Plain. Simply. Commonplace. Not like me at all.
“Good morning.” I couldn’t even bring myself to call her by name. Charlotte Chartreuse. A dazzling name for a dazzling human being from a dazzling family. In a neighborhood full of cream-colored houses her family’s was a striking shade of beige.
She smiled giving me a flash of perfectly white teeth set in a perfectly shaped skull covered by perfectly clean skin and hair. I bet she showered this morning.
“You’re not going to believe what I heard last night.” Charlotte always knew something I wasn’t going to believe. She had parents who traveled. And then told her about it. On the one hand it made her easy to keep as a best friend of 12 years, but on the other hand it made me insanely jealous. Curse you, Charlotte. Curse you and your forward-thinking, open, loving family. Curse my piteous inability to swindle myself an adoption into that family. There was actually a time when I spent my nights planning how to break into a nearby adoption agency and change my legal parents without telling anyone. By the time Mr. and Mrs. Chartreuse found out, they would have no choice but to-
“You’re not listening, are you?”
“What-um… no, not really. No.”
“What distracted you?”
“I was thinking about why your family never adopted me.”
She laughed and showed off those accursed perfect, white teeth, “Believe me, we would if we could,” and we parted ways to sit in our desks on opposite sides of the room.
I slithered into my seat as my arm collapsed letting my backpoack flop to the floor. As my backpack scrunched and sunk into itself my shoulders and back did likewise, driving my attention down into the surface of my desk. Is that really what the grain of the wood looks like after being chopped down and broken up into desk shape? Or maybe it’s just painted on. Who the hell would bother painting the grain onto a slab of wood?
A quick flick of the fingernail revealed that it was neither. The wood grain was simply an (easily chipped) layer of plastic on top of a block of masonite. How depressing. I pulled a mechanical pencil and began burrowing away, seeing how big of a cavity I could create in the masonite without disturbing anymore of the plastic layer abov-
“Tullins!”
I glanced up. A man swam into view. My bespectacled teacher, Mr. Fjord. This was geometry. He was holding an attendance sheet.
“Tim Tullins!” He was looking straight at me.
It finally clicked what he was doing. “Here!” The words practically leapt out of my mouth and my hand shot up, sending my pencil careening away to lodge itself in the corroding ceiling.
Three people laughed.
A class of twenty-eight, and three people were alert enough to see me and laugh.
I really wouldn’t mind the embarrassment if it would add a little color to the classroom.
But really, I was just adding to the mass of grey.
My other 5 classes passed in about the same fashion. More and more people woke up so that in my last class, as we changed desks and I tripped over my backpack, my shoes, and my own bloody self simultaneously, about a third of the class got a good chuckle. I blushed and kept my head down, but inwardly I made a vow to trip over myself at least once a day, just to brighten up the room a bit.
The day’s lecture began, and I sliped into what had become my default posture: head down, scribbling notes and doodles in the notebook I was supposed to be doing work in. But I was in a new desk, and new territory calls for exploration, so I pushed my notebook off to one side and began tracing out the carvings and messages scrawled across the surface of what would be my post for the remainder of the semester with the retracted end of my mechanical pencil. Some fellow by the name of John Kramer had been foolish enough to sign his own name, perhaps to show ownership, but his plans had been thwarted when another pen and different handwriting followed up his signature with likes men.
This addition had likewise been discredited however, when, in the original signer’s handwriting, it was crossed out and replaced with was here.
John’s attempt at reclaiming his last shreds of dignity was destroyed by the third and final revision which replaced, in permanent ink, the word here with killed in a fatal accident while pole-dancing. The late John Kramer was of course no longer able to retort, and the case was put to rest.
On the opposite side from the evidnce of John Kramer’s sad demise, there seemed to be an ongoing gang-war (or rather, a gan-symbol war) fought entirely through guerilla carving.
The text and accompanying illustration populating the middle of the desk was less discernible-mostly just a series of long streaks undoubtedly made by someone who was eager to show off the fact that they had smuggled a knife onto campus, but found that he lacked the creativity to do anything expressive with it. There were also the obligatory but necessary profanities, scribbled in secret by various previous students as a way of asserting their independence and sticking it to the man, but what caught my eye was a small cartoon figure, which looked as if it had actually been burned into the surface of the desk, holding his own dismembered head, zealously grinning, high above his body. The caption read: Join a Revolution. Next to that, in pencil that had almost faded completely: I can’t find a revolution. Then, in sharpie and perhaps the same handwriting as the vandalizer who reported John’s death: Start one.
I stared at the suicidal revolutionary for a minute, crushed by the fact that my own head had remained rooted to my shoulders so firmly for so long. Tears began to well up in my eyes and through the blur, in a burst of frenzied energy, I ripped out a piece of paper and copied down the illustration. Around the figure, I drew others, growing smaller as they faded into the distance with differently shaped heads and bodies, all decapitating themselves and cheering. I finished with just five minutes left in the period by filling in the few square centimeters of white space with the words Let’s Start a Revolution.
I folded up the declaration, wrote Open In Secret on the outside, and passed it to the girl sitting next to me telling her, “Pass this to Charlotte,” and buzzing with anticipation of the coming evening.
7:28am. Standing outside room A-6, red eyed, rosy cheeked, shivering and slouching under the weight of a backpack bursting at its seams, wishing I had been coherent enough this morning to grab a sweater on the way out.
A minute or so before the bell rings, a punch on my shoulder brings me out of my daze and back to Earth.
“Hey Tim.” Not Timothy, just Tim. One syllable. Plain. Simply. Commonplace. Not like me at all.
“Good morning.” I couldn’t even bring myself to call her by name. Charlotte Chartreuse. A dazzling name for a dazzling human being from a dazzling family. In a neighborhood full of cream-colored houses her family’s was a striking shade of beige.
She smiled giving me a flash of perfectly white teeth set in a perfectly shaped skull covered by perfectly clean skin and hair. I bet she showered this morning.
“You’re not going to believe what I heard last night.” Charlotte always knew something I wasn’t going to believe. She had parents who traveled. And then told her about it. On the one hand it made her easy to keep as a best friend of 12 years, but on the other hand it made me insanely jealous. Curse you, Charlotte. Curse you and your forward-thinking, open, loving family. Curse my piteous inability to swindle myself an adoption into that family. There was actually a time when I spent my nights planning how to break into a nearby adoption agency and change my legal parents without telling anyone. By the time Mr. and Mrs. Chartreuse found out, they would have no choice but to-
“You’re not listening, are you?”
“What-um… no, not really. No.”
“What distracted you?”
“I was thinking about why your family never adopted me.”
She laughed and showed off those accursed perfect, white teeth, “Believe me, we would if we could,” and we parted ways to sit in our desks on opposite sides of the room.
I slithered into my seat as my arm collapsed letting my backpoack flop to the floor. As my backpack scrunched and sunk into itself my shoulders and back did likewise, driving my attention down into the surface of my desk. Is that really what the grain of the wood looks like after being chopped down and broken up into desk shape? Or maybe it’s just painted on. Who the hell would bother painting the grain onto a slab of wood?
A quick flick of the fingernail revealed that it was neither. The wood grain was simply an (easily chipped) layer of plastic on top of a block of masonite. How depressing. I pulled a mechanical pencil and began burrowing away, seeing how big of a cavity I could create in the masonite without disturbing anymore of the plastic layer abov-
“Tullins!”
I glanced up. A man swam into view. My bespectacled teacher, Mr. Fjord. This was geometry. He was holding an attendance sheet.
“Tim Tullins!” He was looking straight at me.
It finally clicked what he was doing. “Here!” The words practically leapt out of my mouth and my hand shot up, sending my pencil careening away to lodge itself in the corroding ceiling.
Three people laughed.
A class of twenty-eight, and three people were alert enough to see me and laugh.
I really wouldn’t mind the embarrassment if it would add a little color to the classroom.
But really, I was just adding to the mass of grey.
My other 5 classes passed in about the same fashion. More and more people woke up so that in my last class, as we changed desks and I tripped over my backpack, my shoes, and my own bloody self simultaneously, about a third of the class got a good chuckle. I blushed and kept my head down, but inwardly I made a vow to trip over myself at least once a day, just to brighten up the room a bit.
The day’s lecture began, and I sliped into what had become my default posture: head down, scribbling notes and doodles in the notebook I was supposed to be doing work in. But I was in a new desk, and new territory calls for exploration, so I pushed my notebook off to one side and began tracing out the carvings and messages scrawled across the surface of what would be my post for the remainder of the semester with the retracted end of my mechanical pencil. Some fellow by the name of John Kramer had been foolish enough to sign his own name, perhaps to show ownership, but his plans had been thwarted when another pen and different handwriting followed up his signature with likes men.
This addition had likewise been discredited however, when, in the original signer’s handwriting, it was crossed out and replaced with was here.
John’s attempt at reclaiming his last shreds of dignity was destroyed by the third and final revision which replaced, in permanent ink, the word here with killed in a fatal accident while pole-dancing. The late John Kramer was of course no longer able to retort, and the case was put to rest.
On the opposite side from the evidnce of John Kramer’s sad demise, there seemed to be an ongoing gang-war (or rather, a gan-symbol war) fought entirely through guerilla carving.
The text and accompanying illustration populating the middle of the desk was less discernible-mostly just a series of long streaks undoubtedly made by someone who was eager to show off the fact that they had smuggled a knife onto campus, but found that he lacked the creativity to do anything expressive with it. There were also the obligatory but necessary profanities, scribbled in secret by various previous students as a way of asserting their independence and sticking it to the man, but what caught my eye was a small cartoon figure, which looked as if it had actually been burned into the surface of the desk, holding his own dismembered head, zealously grinning, high above his body. The caption read: Join a Revolution. Next to that, in pencil that had almost faded completely: I can’t find a revolution. Then, in sharpie and perhaps the same handwriting as the vandalizer who reported John’s death: Start one.
I stared at the suicidal revolutionary for a minute, crushed by the fact that my own head had remained rooted to my shoulders so firmly for so long. Tears began to well up in my eyes and through the blur, in a burst of frenzied energy, I ripped out a piece of paper and copied down the illustration. Around the figure, I drew others, growing smaller as they faded into the distance with differently shaped heads and bodies, all decapitating themselves and cheering. I finished with just five minutes left in the period by filling in the few square centimeters of white space with the words Let’s Start a Revolution.
I folded up the declaration, wrote Open In Secret on the outside, and passed it to the girl sitting next to me telling her, “Pass this to Charlotte,” and buzzing with anticipation of the coming evening.