In the morning I get up to 5am to catch the smelly school bus. It gives me a headache and makes me want to hurl. I have to catch the bus because mom works some job and dad… well, dad died in a car accident when I was 3.
The bus driver gets lost a lot but usually we arrive at Mrs. Murphy’s 5th grade class on time. Otherwise we all get expelled.
First period is keyboarding. As if I wasn’t born with a fucking smartphone sewn into my skin. “We’re learning the ‘correct’ way to type,” Mrs. Murphy always says when I ask why I have to do keyboarding.
“Do you know how little it’ll matter if I use the right fingers on the right keys in the real world, Mrs. Murphy?”
“More than you’ll ever know…” said Mrs. Murphy, lighting a cigarette and taking a long drag.
Next is recess, which I love because it’s not school. I like to play something called, “tether ball.” It’s a game where you hit a ball attached to a pole by a rope, and try to hit it around the pole and hope you don’t get smacked in the head. Sometimes we get concussions but the school nurse says, “you’re fine,” and takes a long drag of her cigarette.
The next class is language arts. As if everyone doesn’t already speak English, you big dummies! They often make us do reading. Except the books are never about sex or drinking. Who cares!
Math is probably my favorite class because the people who make the classes up only require us to go up to calculus. The class takes up about 2/3 of the day so we don’t spend a lot of time on any other subject and only have a 5 minute lunch.
Please help. Please help me.
Lastly, is science. Science is great but my only problem with it is that we only make volcanos out of baking soda and what is it? Ammonia? I can’t really remember.
It’s great to see the explosion but sometimes I wish we could do something like get one of those magic school bus chemistry sets or maybe have a class geology day where we dig up dinosaur bones from the local fossil digging plant that had a nuclear meltdown last summer. It’s all cleaned up now, though.
That’s when the bell rings and we all get on the smelly school bus again to go home. Like cattle, we stay in our bus seats that have no seatbelts.
On the walk home from the bus stop, every day I get my backpack stolen from a group of local teens. It’s fine though.
When I get home, I usually eat a bowl of cereal and watch TV for the rest of the day. Mom roughs up the hair on my head and we talk about her day. I love mom.
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