My morning begins with the incessant beeping of my alarm clock. I'm a real grouch when a human being wakes me up, morning or not, and so Mom handed me an alarm clock after one too many sour mornings when I was six or seven or so. Now I usually catch the alarm in the first ten seconds or so. My alarm is set for 5:46. Mom's alarm is set for 4:23. I don't know why we can't set our clocks to go off at the normal even times that other people do. I know that my clock is set for the bare minimum of time it takes to hop out of bed and drag on some clothes, grab my lunch (which I won't eat) and my backpack (which smells like moldy sandwiches), and be ready to get in the car with Mom.
She drives me up the road not two minutes, to my grandparents' house. Eventually I will be allowed to stay home in the mornings, get my own breakfast, and walk to the bus stop myself, but not just yet. I'm younger than everyone else in my grade due to a mid-year birthday and the decision of my teachers to place me in third grade when we came back from winter break of what had started as my second-grade year. I missed the times tables, fractions, and cursive handwriting. I'm not sure this was the wisest move, as it took me a while to get caught up on that stuff, and even longer to get caught up in the finer points of acting the age of my peers. I probably won't really get there until college, if not later. But for now, I am concerned only with whatever sugary cereal my grandfather might have splurged on for me--in grade school it was almost always corn flakes or plain Cheerios, but now I'm getting Honeycomb and Waffle Crisp. I don't know what changed, but I don't complain.
Once it starts getting light, or in the winter, before the sun has even peeked out, I head to the bus stop, which is only a few steps down the hill. My grandmother sometimes watches me go, standing at the front door. I don't look forward to the bus, really. It is the last few minutes of sanctuary--at least in the mornings, when everyone else is still groggy and half-asleep--before what is to my eleven-year-old self, somewhat of a living hell.
Mornings aren't so bad, with language classes and science, but then there's gym and that involves hiding in the bathroom stalls to change. The locker room, which is the same one my mom used when she went to high school in the same building, is no preservation of modesty. Gym is embarrassing and I stick to my best friend who is similarly disinclined towards physical activity. After gym is band--my favorite--and I enjoy the acerbic wit of Mr. M, even if he is sexist, because I enjoy playing.
By the time fourth period rolls around, though, I have to pee. We are only allowed to leave class to pee once a week (we have to be signed out in our school-issued planners, and teachers check to see how often you go), so I usually have to hold it because it's almost impossible to get to your next class if you detour for the bathroom between classes. There are some teachers that will send you with a hall pass instead, and you impose on their generosity as much as possible without setting off the warning bells that will make them think you're smoking in there or something when really you just have a small bladder and had extra milk with breakfast this morning. If I can't get to the bathroom, odds are that I've either squirmed uncontrollably through an entire class until lunch, absorbing nearly nothing of the lesson because I'm focusing on my bladder's spasms, or I've wet myself to some degree. I am ashamed, of course, but at least my shirts are long and cover up my sins.
Lunch is normally outside with the few outcast friends I've managed to collect, and for some reason we do not eat lunch. Sometimes, in later days, I will discover that I can spend my lunchtime on the growing Internet! of 1996/7 and at least once get in trouble from the librarian for trying to print hundreds of pages of the libretto to one of my favorite musicals. She tracks me down later specifically to ask me what I was thinking. I don't know the answer to that question.
Instead of throwing whatever perishables I have packed for lunch each day, I let them collect in my backpack, which has the strangest odor to it after a few weeks of this. In my memory, this will be the smell of junior high, sour and rotting, and it fits my opinion of those two years in educational limbo between elementary and high school. It's like someone decided that kids our age were so obnoxious that they just separated us from the rest of the world until we got the worst of it out of our systems.
Afternoons were average, with at least one really interesting class for the "gifted" kids. Both years, last period was always the worst. Math with B. C., whose unrelenting torment about my furry legs in seventh grade eventually allowed me to persuade mom to let me start shaving. Eighth grade was choir. I loved singing (and was a proud alto) but not the girls I sat with, who never missed an occasion to mock me relentlessly for anything and everything, real or imagined. I felt fortunate to leave class a little early, one of two girls chosen to spend the last half hour of the day watching out the window in the principal's office with the Intercom microphone, calling buses as they arrived, dismissing the students who rode them. One of the reasons I was chosen, I think, was that aside from knowing I wouldn't abuse the PA, my bus was one of the last to leave. Eventually we would give the call that all students remaining were dismissed, and we would make our way outside to wait for our own transportation home.
I had a sort-of boyfriend, and he lived close enough to me that we rode the same bus home, and so I had some solace as we rumbled back to where we started every day, often heading back to my grandmothers' house until my mom came home from her job. I was allowed to walk as far as the top of the hill with him, but then I had to come back. If I behaved myself I could talk to him on the phone for a half hour, and a half hour only. We spent a lot of the time singing together because we were just weird like that.
Until dinner, I would hole up in my grandfather's bedroom, where there was a tiny color TV with a dial that ratcheted loudly as it went around. If I spun it too quickly my grandmother would yell. It only got about eight channels and I watched a lot of PBS. I might work on my homework while we waited for Mom, and when she came we would finally have dinner together, and then she and I would go home.
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Okay, so not my favorite prompt, but it was what came up when I hit the button. Maybe tomorrow will be more interesting? I tried to remember my dreams when I woke up, but I could remember nothing beyond a guy whose eyes were sometimes red.
Current prompt from http://www.creativity-portal.com/prompts/imagination.prompt.html. Always taking suggestions for sites with short creative writing prompts!
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