This is an excerpt from a group story students have been working on this year that will appear in its entirety in the upcoming Story Hatchery Anthology this summer.
Story Excerpt
by
Leah Wilson, age 13
I walked quickly up the hallway to homeroom. My bus was always late, so I had to hurry. Other kids laughed and shouted across the hallway. I hated how they could never be quiet. Quiet was much better.
“Jeremy!” yelled a voice from behind me. I knew who it was without seeing him. It was my worst tormentor, a bully named Dan. I tried to run through the crowd, but my backpack was so heavy running was impossible.
Dan grabbed my backpack and yanked it as hard as he could. I was pulled to the dirty tiled floor by the force, landing painfully on my lumpy backpack. Dan and his gang snorted with laughter.
“What you got in there, Jeremy, an elephant?” jeered Dan. “That would be useful—you could stand on it in basketball so you could put the ball in the hoop.” Laughing again, Dan and his gang strode off in a pack. I heard Dan say, “He’s not even worth beating up.”
“Yeah, he’s so wimpy it would be over so fast nobody could see it,” agreed one of his friends.
My heart pounding with anger, I stood up, trying to ignore the pain in my back, and hurried to homeroom. I got to my seat just as the bell rang with a loud, annoying buzz. I set my heavy backpack next to my desk. Most kids went to their lockers before coming to homeroom, but I needed to be prepared for anything, so I crammed all my stuff in my ratty old backpack and carried it everywhere.
After the Pledge of Allegiance and the announcements, my teacher handed out tests from last week. My math test grade was a C-, my language arts test grade was an A-, my science test grade was a B, and my social studies quiz grade was a D. None of this surprised me. I didn’t have much time to study, with my job, buying food, and homework, and social studies and math were my worst subjects. I was okay at language arts because I like poetry, which is what we’re studying now.
“Some of your parents will be very disappointed with your grades,” my teacher said, handing a paper to a girl who glanced at it, turned to her friend in the seat behind her, and squealed, “I got a hundred!”
I rolled my eyes. Marta, the girl who always got A’s, and her best friend, Ella, were showoffs. They got an A+ for popularity, and they were model students. They and the rest of their group were the prettiest, most liked girls in eighth grade.
My teacher, who disapproved of talking in class, didn’t notice Marta speaking to Ella. “Some of your parents,” she continued, “will not be very happy at all with the lack of effort some of you show.”
A stab of longing pierced my heart. Maybe it would be nice to have parents that cared and were disappointed when you didn’t do well. But my parents never cared. My dad didn’t care about anything, and my stepmother was too busy in her teenager world. I think she just never finished growing up. And my real mother? I didn’t even know if she was alive, and if she was, she obviously didn’t care, or else she’d be here with me. I pushed my longing away. Who cared about parents?
After the teacher dismissed us, I headed down the hall to art class. It was the one subject I really, really liked. As I trudged through the mob of noisy kids trying to shove me to the dirty walls so they could get past, I heard something clatter to the floor behind me.
I turned around and faced Marta and Ella, both holding pink cell phones, tiny keyboards slid out, as if they had just been texting (which they probably had been, since they texted their friends all the time). Ella was holding my iPod, which must have fallen out of the pocket in my backpack I stored it in.
“OMG, this is, like, fifty years old,” said Ella, disgusted. I was sure she and Marta only bought the newest, coolest iPods.
“I don’t think iPods were invented fifty years ago,” I said, holding out my hand for my iPod.
“OMG. He’s, like, so weird,” said Marta.
“Well, duh. He’s Jeremy,” explained Ella, flinging my name off the tip of her tongue with distaste. Marta laughed, and Ella dropped the iPod on the ground with a crash. “Here, have your stupid iPod. Who would want it anyway?”
