Audio and PDF versions of this post will be coming soon. Sorry, it’s the end of the school semester, and things are a little hectic. Enjoy!
The week passed quickly for David. Large amounts of caffeine had an effect like speeding up an audio track of his life, without the squeaky voices.
Everything felt rushed and nothing seemed to get done. Todos lingered on his list as he rushed from class to class. He spent his lunch time finishing the next class’s homework. He ate quickly so he couldn’t taste the food.
Today was another Monday. David had spent his entire weekend creating a digital inventory of his coin collection on his computer. He hadn’t thought of homework beyond the occasional glance towards his shoulder bag.
David was in study hall. He was drawing a floor-plan. He wanted to rearrange his room so that it had a more professional, more productive feel. David could be a little obsessive sometimes about reorganizing his room. Every few weeks, he would come home exhausted at the end of a long day at school, take a look around his room, and spent the entire night reconfiguring every speaker and bookshelf in the room.
He could be doing his homework for the next day, but David just didn’t feel like wasting his time. He needed that pump of adrenaline that came right before the work was due, otherwise he just couldn’t focus on something so utterly unnimportant. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t tried to get some work done, but it was as if the focus was broken on his eyes.
“Alright, you’re free to go,” the polka-dot-wearing teacher yelled from her desk. She wasn’t in a good mood today, and David wondered why. Had she not meant to wear the polka-dots today? Did a gumball machine throw up on her?
David broke into a cough to hide his laughter. It felt good to laugh! He looked around for someone to share the joke with. It was more of an excercise than anything else. Why did he even try? Maybe he would go crazy soon and start making up friends to talk to him. Maybe he would start to have mysterious blackouts, and the newspapers would start printing stories about a mysterious thief who breaks into the school gym and steals girl’s panties from the dressing rooms.
David stood up, slung his bag over his shoulder, and breathed a sigh of relief. He had speech next. If he had to have a class at the end of the day, speech was a good choice. He reasoned that experience in drama, as well as his pent-up desire to communicate would offer him a perfect toolset for breezing through the class.
The dozen or so students waiting for speech class looked as if they were all about to lose their virginity. Their tense faces told David they were already regretting their choice to break out of their shells and sign up for the class. No doubt their parents had encouraged them with statements like “You only have to take it once! Just get it over with while you’re still in high-school.”
David stepped over the threshold of the classroom and found a seat near the front. He didn’t like to sit in the front row for any class. He felt it made him seem too eager. He felt uncomfortable without the back of a head to look at.
The girl in front of him had curly brown hair. She was wearing sunglasses and could have been sleeping she was so still.
An overweight kid dressed in a baggy shirt that read “Yo Fadda” kept shifting uncomfortably in his seat as he searched for comfort in the plastic-mold school desk.
David hated those school desks. He could handle their bias toward right-handed humans, even though he was a leftie. It was their plastic-mold-connectedness that made him feel so much like he was in a car-seat. When he sat in one, he felt as if the roller-coaster operator had just clamped the uncomfortable bar over his lap, and then the ride just sat their. For fourty-five minutes.
David looked up from his notebook to see the shiny-headed Mr. Ronald in the doorway. The teacher had a look on his face David couldn’t quite place. Smugness was the closest adjective he could think of.
A fake denim shirt was draped across the wiry form of Mr. Ronald today. It was too big for him, and the collar hid any view of whatever neck had been there to begin with. The overlong sleeves of the shirt were not rolled up. Instead, they were buttoned tightly around Mr. Ronald’s wrists so that the sleeves billowed out.
“Hello class!” Mr Ronald said as he bounced through the doorway, “Welcome to speech!”
“He-lo-mis-ter-ron-ald,” the entire class sounded in unison. Everyone knew this routine from elementary school, and the “Hello Mister” chant had become more of a mockery than a sign of respect.
“Please, call me Saint! Now, raise your hand if you have ever given a –” but the rest of his words were lost on David. His mind had siezed up at “call me Saint.” Was he kidding? Feeling confident, David raised his hand.
“David, good to see you again! Did you have a question?”
“Uh, yeah, what did you say you wanted us to call you?”
“Oh, call me Saint. I don’t like Mr. Ronald, too formal.”
David hadn’t heard wrong.
“Is that a nick-name or something?”
For the first time, his new teacher’s smile faded a little.
“Saint is my first name. Saint Ronald.”
David stopped all movement in his face. He had learned this useful skill in drama class, and it had served him well through the years of highschool classes. He could entirely paralyze his face. If he twitched so much as a single muscle however, his entire face would give way to whatever emotion he was hiding.
Had this man’s parents actually named him Saint Ronald?
“As I was saying, who in here has ever given a speech?” Mr. Ronald contined.
A few of the students raised tentative hands, tryning to communicate with their curvature that they were to be noticed, but not called on.
“Hi Jamie, I remember your brother from last year. What kinds of speeches have you given before?” Mr. Ronald directed his question towards a perky bonde girl with thin, dramatic glasses, on the right side of the room.
“Oh, like, when I was in seventh grade we did, like, these presentations for our, like, science class.” As she spoke, her tightly-arranged ponytail bobbed back and forth. She looked like the love child of a Barbie and a bobble-head.
How did people like her survive in this school? David wondered to himself as he examined Mr. Ronald’s face. To his surprise, Mr. Ronald was beaming at her as if she had offered to shine his head for free.
“Great! And did you feel as if you did a good job in your presentation Jamie?”
“Oh, like, well, ya. I mean, it was, like, really hard to talk in front of, like, that many people.”
David’s head exploded and bits of his brain splattered the walls of the classroom. No, not really, but that’s how he felt. He wanted out. Out of this school. Out of this classroom. Out of this plastic seatbelt seat. But he didn’t show it on his face. He didn’t want to expose his hatred for the system, or the system would fight back. He knew this from experience.
The year before, he had nearly lost all momentum. In a school as intense as his, that would have meant all of his “work” from the beginning part of the year would have been meaningless. He would have had to repeat the grade.
He had pulled through with the help of a therapist named Mrs. Perch. She was patient, and almost as jaded about school as he was. When he had told her he wanted out, she hadn’t fought him.
“Then go,” sho had said, “school just isn’t the right thing for some people.”
He had said he wanted to stay through at least the rest of the year, because his parents had paid for it. She had given him some coping techniques. One of the ones he liked was just to look at the semester in chunks. She told him not to look at it as a whole year, just look at making it through the next month, the next week, even the next minute.
David tried to use this method now. He focused on listening to Mr. Ronald’s next sentence, and then the next. He focused on staying calm and focused for the next five minutes. THe focus didn’t come, but at least the chunks of brain stayed in his skull.
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{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
have you upload the pdf and audio…?