*Young Adult Dystopian*
Excerpt
“I gladly sacrifice my life for the good of others. One life will make the difference, and that
life could be mine. For this reason, I’m
devoted to finding the cure.” I said the
words out loud, but I wasn’t thinking about them. A couple of squirrels chasing each other held
my attention more securely than the pledge we’d been forced to say since
kindergarten. By tenth grade, the thing
had lost all meaning.
I sat back down among the rows of desks, still eyeing
the squirrels. I folded one of my legs
under me and let the other one swing. At
five foot three, I wasn’t the tallest member of my class, but I wasn’t the
shortest either. My violet eyes followed
the dance of the squirrels while I toyed absently with a lock of my jet-black
hair.
My teacher was blabbing about our latest reading
assignment, but those dang squirrels were so cute I couldn’t focus on her.
“Macey?”
I turned to face her.
She was one of the younger members of the faculty, but dressed to try
and fit in. Her loose-fitting floral
print blouse was tucked into her high-waisted navy skirt. She stared at me over half-glasses perched at
the end of her nose. I imagined she
referred to them as spectacles and liked to put the end of them into her mouth
while pondering literary stuff.
“Hmm?” I asked.
“Care to answer the question?”
I glanced out the window to curse the squirrels, but
they were gone. “Could you repeat the
question?”
She half-smiled as she leaned against the front of her
desk, knowing she’d caught me.
“Certainly. Why do you think
Billy has a stutter?”
“Oh jeeze, I don’t know. I didn’t understand a single page of this
book, Mrs. Whitehead.” A few snickers
escaped from some of my classmates.
“Hey, guys, don’t throw me under the bus here! I couldn’t have been the only one who didn’t
get anything from this!” A few faces
turned to Mrs. Whitehead and nodded.
“Look, I know this was the shortest thing we’ve read so far, but it was
all moon language to me. Quite frankly,
I hated it and think it was a waste of time.”
I nodded to accentuate my point.
A couple of kids clapped, but soon it died down under
Mrs. Whitehead’s unceasing gaze. The
bitter taste of regret worked its way to the back of my throat. It burned a little like a vurp.
Mrs. Whitehead frowned.
“Fair enough. Let’s go over it,
then, and maybe you’ll get more out of it.”
Even after talking about it for the next hour, I still
didn’t get it. I mean, Mrs. Whitehead
seemed to find Billy Budd very
enlightening, and if all that was in there, great. I didn’t see it. Sometimes I wondered if people overanalyzed a
book. Maybe the writer didn’t really
mean all that stuff, and you saw something that wasn’t meant to be there, ya
know? In this case we’d never know. Melville had been dead over two hundred
years, so asking him wasn’t really an option.
When the bell rang, I gathered my things quickly,
hoping to escape the classroom without confrontation. With her gaze burning a hole in the back of my
head, I kept my eyes glued to the floor.
I was pretty sure her spectacles magnified her stare, the way the sun’s
heat is more intense through a magnifying glass. I reached up to scratch my scalp, making sure
she hadn’t given me a bald spot. I
rounded the front row of desks and, by some miracle, made it out into the hall
where I disappeared among the sea of bodies.
Once I was a safe distance from Mrs. Whitehead’s room,
I leaned against a row of lockers. One of these days you should really learn to
hold your tongue, I thought. I took
a deep breath, checked the top of my head one more time, and continued on to my
next class: History.
Buy Links:
Social Links:
No comments:
Post a Comment