Categories > Original > Drama
Sleeping In
He will not go to school today.
Not up to facing the world with his homework unfinished, lying ignored beside his glasses. He burrows deeper into the sheets, hiding his face from the too-bright sun. Even the light hurts. He isn't feeling well, he'll tell his mother.
His section won't fall to pieces without their class president, for once. They'll believe his excuse anyway; they witnessed him throw up just outside the gate the afternoon before--dry painful heaves, painful even in memory, and there might have been tears. He can't remember.
Food poisoning, he told them.
There is no place he needs to be, just here, in the safe shell of his warm room. All he wants to do is just sink and fade away, forget that the world continues on outside. They won't need him today not really. He already knows the routine, nothing earth-shattering.
Just this:
He'll arrive to school a little late, already stressed. Thursday, and he's assigned to recite the morning prayer, in a loudspeaker to be heard throughout school. He'll stutter, his voice will break, and then he'll have to endure the joking and the ribbing, at least until the student body finds another target for their vicious sense of humor.
After that, meetings with all the class officers, and planning for next month's Foundation Day. Freshmen never get the glamorous jobs like contacting bands to play on concert night, the sort of jobs reserved for seniors. He holds no weight there, his voice so powerless that he might as well be invisible. He'll be the errand-boy as usual. Relegated to soliciting signatures and permission slips from irate class advisers.
Long quiz in English after lunch, 'Lord of the Flies' and Shakespeare. His classmates will want someone to copy from, and answers will trickle slowly from his corner seat to everyone else's test papers--he's the only one who ever studies, always the go-to guy. Even when he doesn't volunteer.
Lectures, club activities, then PE exams.
He'll never get a moment's peace. His whole life revolves around responsibilities, but even a model student needs a break sometimes.
He cannot face them all today--his parents, his classmates, his teachers, and that upperclassman with the hooded eyes and mocking smile, the student council president, who would excuse him from Father Faustino's afternoon class--to discuss council matters, he'd say--take him by the hand to lead him into the bathroom. The same way he did yesterday.
Discreetly, so the teachers would not notice.
It'll be the kind of day when everyone in school will want something from him.
*
He will not go to school today.
He will not go to school today.
Not up to facing the world with his homework unfinished, lying ignored beside his glasses. He burrows deeper into the sheets, hiding his face from the too-bright sun. Even the light hurts. He isn't feeling well, he'll tell his mother.
His section won't fall to pieces without their class president, for once. They'll believe his excuse anyway; they witnessed him throw up just outside the gate the afternoon before--dry painful heaves, painful even in memory, and there might have been tears. He can't remember.
Food poisoning, he told them.
There is no place he needs to be, just here, in the safe shell of his warm room. All he wants to do is just sink and fade away, forget that the world continues on outside. They won't need him today not really. He already knows the routine, nothing earth-shattering.
Just this:
He'll arrive to school a little late, already stressed. Thursday, and he's assigned to recite the morning prayer, in a loudspeaker to be heard throughout school. He'll stutter, his voice will break, and then he'll have to endure the joking and the ribbing, at least until the student body finds another target for their vicious sense of humor.
After that, meetings with all the class officers, and planning for next month's Foundation Day. Freshmen never get the glamorous jobs like contacting bands to play on concert night, the sort of jobs reserved for seniors. He holds no weight there, his voice so powerless that he might as well be invisible. He'll be the errand-boy as usual. Relegated to soliciting signatures and permission slips from irate class advisers.
Long quiz in English after lunch, 'Lord of the Flies' and Shakespeare. His classmates will want someone to copy from, and answers will trickle slowly from his corner seat to everyone else's test papers--he's the only one who ever studies, always the go-to guy. Even when he doesn't volunteer.
Lectures, club activities, then PE exams.
He'll never get a moment's peace. His whole life revolves around responsibilities, but even a model student needs a break sometimes.
He cannot face them all today--his parents, his classmates, his teachers, and that upperclassman with the hooded eyes and mocking smile, the student council president, who would excuse him from Father Faustino's afternoon class--to discuss council matters, he'd say--take him by the hand to lead him into the bathroom. The same way he did yesterday.
Discreetly, so the teachers would not notice.
It'll be the kind of day when everyone in school will want something from him.
*
He will not go to school today.
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