Watercolour

Twenty Five

Alex's P.O.V

I squeezed through the groups of people crowding the hallway as they caught up from the two week holiday, somehow managing to take up twice as much space as they needed; leaving people like me, who actually wanted to get somewhere, sidling up against walls and strange people trying as hard as possible not to make any eye contact. Occasionally I'd pass someone from one of my classes and we'd exchange a small nod or a 'hi', but apart from that, I successfully made it to period one without having to speak to anyone.

It didn't take long for me to realise that Ms McKenna wasn't in and the news of our class being unsupervised for the next two hours spread like wildfire across the rest of the year group. The classroom soon found itself full with students; from both our class and others. Some students, who weren't fortunate enough, despite their hopes for their own teacher's absence, had clearly taken the opportunity to have a free period in an unsupervised statistics lesson.

The noise level in the small classroom slowly rose and I kept my eye on the clock hung above door; at 9am we would be able to leave if our teacher hadn't already shown up and with five minutes left to go, I was already debating if I should go home and come back for my next lesson or stay at school and work in the library.

Before I could come to a decision, the door swung open and a woman who was probably in her late 50s stood in the doorway. On shutting the door behind her, she made sure to slam it loud enough causing the whole room to go silent and suddenly rush for a chair. I couldn't help but crack a smile at the fact that the woman hadn't even opened her mouth yet and she had managed to silence thirty or so 17 and 18-year-olds, regardless of whether they took statistics or not.

Over the next two hours, masses of statistics worksheets and practice papers piled up on everyone's desks as we worked in utter silence. Some people had tried to tell Mrs Garvey, as she'd introduced herself, that we were meant to be finishing our coursework but she had just ignored us and carried on with her original plan anyway. She'd also refused the requests from many of the students who weren't meant to be in our class to leave as she clearly didn't believe their objections of "I'm not in this class", "I'm meant to be in Business" and the one "I don't know two shits about maths"; which, I might add, ended up with the student being given a break-time detention.

Finally, the bell rang and, after a three-minute lecture on making sure the classroom was tidy, we were allowed to leave.

I went to mine and Lucas' usual spot on the field and sat down. A few minutes later, Lucas came up from behind me and threw his bag down beside me before collapsing onto the grass as well.

"Hey," he said, pulling an apple out from his bag.

"Hey," I responded, not turning my head to look at him.

"It was your class that was uncovered, right?"

"Yeah, although turns out we had been scheduled a cover teacher and she was a right bastard."

"Wait, so what happened to the people from my business class who bunked and went to yours?"

"They were stuck doing stats in silence with Mrs Garvey," I answered, trying my best to mimic the old lady's voice.

"Are you being serious? That's hilarious," he replied, laughing. "That'll teach them not to bunk again."

"Yeah, I guess so," I chuckled before we went back into a moment's silence.

"You have art next, right?"

"Yeah."

"Cool," he said, unzipping his bag once more and retrieving a stack of papers. "Could you give these to Ruby of she's in, please. She wasn't in period one and two."