A New School

I walked into the school for the first time. It was old and a musty scent hung heavy in the air. There were large fluorescent lights in the halls and stairways, but they somehow were not enough to light the edges. There were dark spaces everywhere.

I wondered what might linger in those corners. Could it be something from a horror movie or some nefarious person who came in through the same antiquated doors as we did?

I would know about half the students here this year, but at least half of them would be new. I didn’t fit with the students from my own school let alone those I’d never met from a new school. Forget being a square peg in a round hole. I was more of a trapezoidal peg.

A sea of people, some familiar and some alien, trudged at me from the opened doors as I tried to find my homeroom. Finally, I saw it in the distance and ducked through the waves of students to make it to the classroom just as the bell rang.

The teacher, who I would later call Mr. Randall, said, “Mr. Krantz, I presume. It is so nice of you to join us… and so promptly, I might add.”

It was obvious that I had started the year on the wrong foot already. I looked around the classroom to find a seat only to see the other students staring at me with the blank eyes of the possessed. There was not a friendly face in the room.

Finally, I saw a seat between a red-haired girl who smelled of the syrup she’d put on her pancakes that morning and a blond jock that smelled of sweat and turf from the football field. I had never seen either of them before, but I had no other choice.

Mumbling, “Excuse me” I made my way back to the seat and sat down in the shadows, hoping no one could see me and dreading what may find me there. For the next half hour, I sat there smelling syrup and sweat and waiting for the bell to release me from that prison and propel me into another one.

Don’t worry, Mr. Randall. I will return for fifth-period math if I survive until then.