Reasons||m.c.

three

three//

It took a week before we were settled in. We got out rooms painted and all the furniture delivered. That only took a few days. Then we had to unpack everything. We started with the kitchen as a family. We unpacked in our rooms by ourselves - except for the little kids obviously. After the kitchen, we worked our way around the house. I still wasn't done unpacking and I had my first day of school tomorrow. Great.

~~~~~~~~~~

I tugged at the uncomfortable outfit I was required to wear and stepped into the school building.

I looked down at my schedule and the map I was given, finding my way to my locker. I put the few notebooks and folders I had in there and then looked at my schedule again. My first class of the day, English, which was my best subject.

I grabbed what I needed and walked down the empty hallway, finding the classroom. I was beyond nervous as I shakily opened the classroom door. The teacher stopped talking and the whole class looked at me, making me more nervous than I already was.

"You must be our new student," he smiled kindly. "I'm Mr. Wesley."

Kind of like my brother.

"Would you like to introduce yourself?" he asked.

I shook my head, which apparently he was surprised by.

"A bit shy I see," he laughed, checking a paper. "Well class, this is Jade. You moved here from America, correct?"

I nodded again and he smiled, "Okay, well we're just starting a project in class today. So go ahead and sit where you want."

There were two empty seats in the class. One next to a quiet boy who kept his head down, sketching mindlessly on his notebook. And the other next to a girl who was your stereotypical popular. Yes, I had been popular at my old school, but not the stereotype bitchy girl.

I chose to play it safe and sat next to the boy. He glanced up at me and smiled softly before continuing to his work. It wasn’t much, just small circles and swirls as his boredom grew.

“You’ll be pairing up for the project. You’ll have to work outside of class to complete the project. Go out somewhere. It can be in nature where there’s no people or it can be a busy street. Take a picture of somewhere. Then you two have to work together to write a poem, telling a story about that place. It must be a two-voice poem with two different views on the scene. For example, a sad person may see an empty field as a relation to what they feel. Empty. No one is there for them. But a happy person may see an empty field as a chance for new explorations and untouched beauty. Make sense?”

A lazy chorus of ‘yeah’ spread across the classroom.

“Okay, get with a partner and you have the entire period to start working!”

I groaned. First day of school in a new country and we were being forced to do a partner project.

“Uh, Jade?” a voice asked from next to me. I looked over at the boy with dark blond perfectly straight hair.

“Yeah?”

“I’m Ashton,” he smiled sweetly, exposing two dimples on each side. “Would you want to be my partner?”

I couldn’t tell if he was just trying to be nice considering it was my first day or if he genuinely wanted to be nice and maybe be my friend.

“Yeah, sure. Thanks.”

He pushed his notebook and pencil forward on the desk and turned to face me.

“I don’t know where anything here is, so you’ll have to pick the spot,” I started off.