Running Late

That Awful Day

As soon as she walked in, she felt the tension. A cold breeze brushed her shoulder as she made her way to the the last open seat. She felt the professor's glare as her shoes clacked on the hardwood floor of the classroom. In her haste, she had forgotten to brush her hair that morning, so of course the blonde models in the back that always looked like barbie dolls threw taunts behind her like the flaming whips from the days of old. She usually felt out of place in her perch at the center-front of the class, but today it felt as if it were a set of stocks, placed so that her classmates could point and laugh. She had broken the sacred silence that accompanied silent reading and the attendance that followed, normally solely punctuated by the teacher's sharp tone and crisp consonants. She only reached her desk as her name left his lips. She felt as if every accusatory statement he had ever thrown her way was repeated, and resounded exponentially louder with every syllable. The hollow sounding "o" to echo his usual response to her, since she never seemed able to give the right answer, the "l" and "i" reflecting the lies she used to repair her fading dignity, the "v" with the "i" that follows to mark the grades he would have awarded if he had the choice. And finally the "ah", which more frequently passed through her lips when one of his few moments of praise occurred.

None of them hate her, not really. They just can't understand that which makes them afraid; at least that's what her dad said in one of his many lectures. She led a busy life: four teams, six clubs, band, choir, volunteering two days a week, all advanced classes, decent friend circle and a steady boyfriend. The only thing truly wrong was the professor, who seemed to have devoted his life to tormenting her. Also maybe the divorced parents and the girls who pictured themselves as goddesses, but other than that she did alright for herself.

On this dreadful day, her alarm clock decided not to go off and her bus got a flat tire in the middle of the route, which resulted is this gross miscalculation of her schedule. She hoped that her day would not perform the inevitable and get even worse. Almost every time she had this class she would find it difficult to breath as she walked through the door, even more so today to the point where she felt close to fainting due to lack of oxygen. A loud clack echoed around the room as the pencil of a poor unfortunate rolled across the floor. She blushed in sympathy, and the red menace turned deeper as she realized it was hers.

As she proceeded on the remorseful journey to retrieve it, she heard the squeak of the door, and for a brief moment felt satisfaction. The sound distracted the malevolent eyes of her peers from her to the unsuspecting victim that stalked through the portal from the outside world. Fortunately it was another student, which could only serve to alleviate more of the unwanted scorn she currently felt. Still, it could not completely remove the dread she felt every time she sat in her bruised desk, with the battered chair and the pockmarked surface.

Her emotions never consisted of what the normal person considered 'positive', a trait her classmates had always condemned as 'different'. All would be well soon, though: the class lasted one short semester. In a few weeks she would be free from the bubble heads and brooding glares. Her gnawing drive to run from the class had been long close to sabotaging her chance at passing, a fading willpower endangering her hopes and dreams. In her mind, she pictured the class as a mountain that she needed to scale, cold and stone-faced, scoffing at every step of progress. None of her pain mattered: she knew the peak was near grasping, a terrace of peace and wind and sunset, never to be burned by the heat of the valley below. Every obstacle, from the judgmental teacher to the unnervingly low grades, from the horrible classmates to the uncomfortably cramped space, were just rocks falling from the the peak above. As long as they didn't hit her too hard she could just get up and keep climbing to the top of the mountain and the goal that awaited her there.