I was sitting in my chair and my eyes were fixated on one thing and one thing only. That one thing was the excruciating and painfully slow second hand of the clock. My ears were of no use to me as I sat there in English amongst annoying students waiting only to hear one thing. That one thing being the bell which signaled it was the weekend. The weekend only meant one thing as well. It meant I didn’t have to be in school.
I didn’t have any plans for the weekend. I just wanted out of the building. Out of the way of noise and dramatic stories of the students I didn’t understand. The teacher continued reading out of the book periodically stopping to describe the details the students couldn’t get. I figured if we needed a history lesson behind each piece we read, what was the sense in even trying to understand the last half when we read it alone. This thought then was interrupted by the epiphany of what’s the point in even listening to the first half when it is the weekend and my mind is wired to think of other things through any comprehensible reading in the first place.
Luckily the bell rang and I carefully waited for everyone to exit the room first before I casually filled in the end of the line as if I had something important to put away which was taking up time. I had put my papers in my folder slowly and told Mrs. Grethers, “You’re a wonderful reader! It makes the story understandable. Have a good weekend.”
In teacher mode she replied folding up her lesson plans, “Thank you and you have a great weekend as well.”
I left casually walking down the hall amongst the jocks dressed in their similar attire of numbered jerseys and the school colors of yellow and black, the minors who usually had their boxers showing, and the wonderful preps who dressed in glasses and sweater vests. I headed down to my mom’s room, she was a special Ed teacher at the school which never really helped my friendships grow fast. I guess I never wanted them anyways.
Walking into her room she is talking in whispers to another one of her colleagues. Mrs. Veldon was sort of a quirk wearing black knitted long sleeve shirts over something more eye catching with color. I wasn’t really paying attention to the conversation, but she left in a smile laughing looking at me to say, “I will hope to see you on Sunday.”
She said it in such a way that I figured I was somehow in the know of what the hell might be occurring on a Sunday. So I responded smiling like I knew exactly what was going on, “Oh yah for sure. See you this weekend.”
After she left kindly in her natural tall stride I walked over to a desk to sit down. My mother bubbly and faker than at home took in her end of the day calls. I had to laugh at her because she was wearing this button up shirt that had a failed button on it. It was a plaid shirt of blue and white but that simply didn’t matter to any of her students who might of cared to look at her outfit because I am sure they, as well as myself, couldn’t help but notice her belly fat and belly button that stuck out at the bottom of her shirt when she sat down.
Though this site entertained my mind I maintained my posture and said nothing about it. I was annoyed not just because my mother sort of embarrassed me but because it was Friday and we were wasting perfectly good time. Time that I could be spending online looking at the hot guys on MySpace or other sites was wasting away. Or talking with my new online friends I had been acquiring was being lost.
After a half an hour more of waiting as she fumbled through papers spun in her chair and occasionally said something of no use to my thoughts we had come to the time where she would find someone to talk to. Sure enough after we had put on our coats and I with my backpack now on weighting me down she found three people of no interest to talk to on the way out of the high school.
Once we finally left this place which had always seemed to make me anxious and over worked I asked somewhat rudely, “What are we doing on Sunday?”
Mom as we walked down the hall way turned her head my way saying, “We were invited to church by Mrs. Veldon, the lady that was in the room.”
Even more aggravated than before, “Yah mom I already know who she is.”
Mothers have this nasty ability to ask questions in which you can’t say no to. She did just this by saying, “Do you want to go?”
Minus my mind going no, no, no, over and over again I somehow managed to say, “Sure, why not.”
Of course I now had to justify why I didn’t want to go in my head. So I started rattling different justifications around in my head as to why going to church was such an atrocious thing. I finally came to the conclusion that because I was anxious and possibly homosexual churches would only send my anxiety through the roof because they were a sort of mating grounds for questions and statements from old saggy people and young leader figures like, “Got a girlfriend?”
Well I stopped at that one. That was enough to justify not wanting to go.
