The Bottom Club

02 | scintilla

IF ANYONE ASKED him to mention three things about himself, Wyatt would say that:

1. In his seventeen years of living, he had been heartbroken a grand total of twenty times.

2. Of the twenty he'd only dated thirteen―he defined dating very loosely―so yes; the list included his celebrity crushes.

3. He deserved a Nobel Prize, an invite to the MET Gala, and bestie status with a main pop girlie after all the bullshit he'd had to go through.

There were a ton of other more interesting things he could say, but in Grace's class those three spun around inside his head, teasing each other. It was his last period of the day.

Grace Barker was in her mid-twenties, with fair skin and dreadlocked hair which stretched down to her lower back. She was also one of those people who actually loved the jobs they did and it was evident in how passionate she was when she went about the entire affair of teaching: never arriving late to class, how emotionally invested she got when it came to debates, the list was never ending; once last year they'd had to stop class as she'd gotten teary eyed right in the middle of an analysis of Shakespeare's Othello, when Monique Jones, one of the only African-American's in Wyatt's grade, narrated a fact sheet of statistics about race-based crimes off-heart after some random kid made a comment about how racism was no longer a thing, and how people of color needed to stop playing the victim card.

To date that was probably one of the most awkward experiences he'd had to sit through at Mayfield.

"Alright class," she began, clapping her hands to grab everyone's attention. She wore a plain yellow summer dress that flayed from its waist down and a pair of gold flats. The Cheshire grin on her face was suspicious, and he soon found out why.

"Poem-a-Thon," she said simply.
The room fell silent, and then soft muttering began which, eventually replaced with groans, including Wyatt's.

Preface: Poem-a-Thon (a play on marathon) was an event that all twelfth graders who took AP Lit. at Mayfield Academy had to participate in. Basically it went on for the entire fall term and involved an assignment in which each person memorized a poem, recited it in front of the whole class and then briefly discussed its contents, all within an undetermined amount of time. It made up for about forty percent of their grades, and right around the time where college admissions decisions would be coming out everyone's final results were pasted on the school notice board (in only this subject, thank God).

What with trying to balance school work, his social life, and a failing relationship over the summer Wyatt hadn't had the time to even look at a poem, much less learn one by heart enough to recite it, and everyone in this class knew that unless it was voluntary―which wasn't always a guarantee―the order of presentation was picked at random by the teacher.

It was a tradition that the academic committee tolerated because some thesis report published a few years ago showed it trained the brain to remember things.

Grace looked like she was about to break into a dance routine and that meant that nobody was going to be getting off the hook, even if it meant that you had just gotten out of your thirteenth relationship, or contracted Lime Disease (rumor had it that this had actually happened once, and the girl had had to give her presentation from her hospital ward).

At this point Wyatt was ready to hand in his Nobel Prize and MET Gala invite if it meant he got to sit this assignment out.

"Who wants to go first?" she continued; hand on hip as she sat precariously on the edge of the table in front of the class.

It was also a well-known fact that usually, the first to go often had the highest grade in the class.
Marco Valdez's hand shot up so quickly Wyatt barely caught the motion, followed predictably by Monique Jones's.