Change in Life

Chapter 3. Rivals Feud

English was the subject Blake was failing at. No matter how hard he tried and the effort maintained to keep what he learned, he just couldn't get it. He could read, but he wasn't good at it. Compared to his friend, Jacob, who was in his class, he was still learning. Jacob could read a three hundred-page book in less than a day. Blake could only get ten pages done by that time. This was why he was failing. He just couldn't pay attention for long enough to accomplish anything. 

They were expected to finish an extremely boring book of over five hundred-pages by the end of the week. He hadn't even started it, and it was the end of the week. All creative writing things he was good at. Non-fiction was boring, especially with the new-age content they were basically being told to enjoy and understand. The subliminal messages seen between the barely clear-cut lines of text the author was saying might as well be written in another book completely for all the good interpretation it did.  And when it came to giving an oral presentation in class, he just could not... talk, more or less care. He had trouble talking to his best friends at the best of times, let alone talk in front of a whole classroom with opinions only made half just.

He didn't know why he was so scared of being the center of attention. He guessed the first reason his shyness came from when he was just in primary school. They were asked to write a story on whatever they liked. at the time his heart pranced as he loved to write stories. His mind was full of boundless imagination. The only problem was he would only let someone read it when he had finished. Not before. And that's exactly what his teacher didn't do. Blake's old primary school teacher hated him. She would always pick on him for no reason. One of the reasons he thought was he might have been a little slow at times.

Being so young back then, he wrote about having special powers and how he saved the world. Like any child would with introverted fantasies. He was only halfway through it when his teacher grabbed the piece from in front of him, walked to the front of the class and read every word of it to the whole class, pointing out the mistakes and all. By the time she had finished, every student was staring at him with stifled giggles. He had never been so humiliated in his life.

Now that he was in high school, everything had changed. Mrs Clark, who was his English teacher, came down the corridor and unlocked the door. Mrs Clark was also an extremely nice teacher. Nicer than Mr Gordon. If there was work to be handed in and Blake didn't do it, she would always let him off the hook. She understood him like none of the other teachers. She took the time needed to make sure he got things done. Not necessarily right, but finished nonetheless.

The English room was a lot better than the maths room. The first good thing about it was that it didn't smell like rotting oranges. In Blake's mind, it was the best room in the school. It featured cement brick walls that held up an exposed timber beam roof with two clear panels in the roof to allow soft sunlight to naturally light the room. And full glass windows for one side of the walls opposite to the doorway in that opened on to a secluded fern garden. It made him felt comfortable. It reminded him a lot of the woods at home.

Taking his seat in the middle row, Blake waited for Jacob as he was the first one to arrive. He soon came in the door and sat down beside Blake. Jacob was a gentle giant in Blake's point of view. He was massive. If he wanted to, he could seriously hurt somebody. Luckily he was the kind who saw everything as sacred, like Blake in a sense. He had yet to see Jacob go off the trolley.

The rest of the class came and they were ready to watch a film Mrs Clark had brought in. As usual, she liked to keep the movies they watched in topic to what they were working on. It was Romeo and Juliet, the worst movie in the world in Blake's point of view. Good as a play, but he felt it needed to stay that way. Patronizing it on the big screen only served to take the magic out of the many emotional moments. Still, it was better to watch it than to read it.