Tip: when "Mr. Fuentes" is mentioned, Vic is the Spanish teacher and Mike is the math teacher
Gerard;
I look around my surroundings, observing the twenty-something other kids in my Biology class. It's a large mix of boys and girls, the boys outweighing the girls by a lot. I'm trying to find something to write about. It's a nasty habit, almost worse than drugs. I've been caught a few tomes, getting odd looks and a shrug of the shoulders. I guess people don't like getting written about. I think about writing about my teacher, Mr. Ashby, but then I remind myself that teachers ultimately change their personality when they walk into this building. They get nicer, happier. It bugs me. Why can't people just be who they really are, no matter the audience?
After that thought, I get to writing, clicking the end of my mechanical pencil, pumping the graphite out.
Why don't teachers, well people in general, act like themselves in public?
Mr. Ashby:
You shouldn't have to change who you are to impress people, or keep them happy, or anything like that. It's nonsense. I know for a fact that nobody is as perfect, tolerant, caring, anything as they act in public. Mr. Ashby, my biology teacher, he's so patient and caring, he's nice, he's understanding. I just have a hard time believing that anyone could naturally possess all of those traits. It's practically impossible in my mind. I feel like he does it to please the students, even the principal. I mean, no student wants a teacher who is strict, snarky, bitchy, and rude. I like Mr. Ashby.
"Gerard?" I hear Mr. Ashby's voice, sounding patient and calm. "Writing in that journal again, yes?"
I look up and nod my head sheepishly, my cheeks tinting red. I feel he caught me writing about him, like he knows the current paragraph in my journal contains my thoughts on him. It scares me, I don't let people know what's in my journal, but somehow I feel like they already know. "Sorry, sir."
"That's alright, but next time I might just have to take it from you." He smiles a little and turns back to the board where he was reviewing yesterday's lesson; cells.
I sigh and close my journal, caressing the leather lightly before carefully putting it in my messenger bag. I take it everywhere and have since I got it last year. It seems like a long time to have a book of blank pages and not have it full yet, especially with how much I write, but I modify my writing to be smaller than it actually is so I can fit more. I also jot down ideas along the margins. All the pages before the one I stopped on are completely full, looking more gray with white, rather than white with gray. I just want to get that book as full as I can before I have to move on to a new one.
