Room 206 - Luke Hemmings

nineteen

New Year's Eve morning, I woke up and noticed I had awful dark circles under my eyes, so I tried to cover it with concealer but nothing could make me look better no matter how much I piled on my face. I went into the infirmary about my hand once my adrenaline had calmed down and told the nurse that I smashed my hand in a door (she clearly didn't believe me but didn't really question me) and luckily I hadn't broken anything, it was only bruised and would be fine within a couple weeks. I trudged to Professor Hemmings' classroom for a tutoring session that Headmistress Morris had insisted on and he was already sitting at his desk, probably preparing some shitty lesson for us to have the day we get back from our break.

"Good morning, Miss Williams," he smiled at me, and I tried to smile back but managed to not roll my eyes for once. It definitely was not a good morning but if that's what he wanted to believe then I wasn't going to be the one to spoil it for him. I didn't have the energy to make some sarcastic remark.

"How has your break been?" he asked me as I set my notebook and textbook on the desk, eyeing my wrapped up hand that I was trying to hide from him.

"Fine," I shrugged. "Yours?"

"It has been well," he said, sitting down next to me and flipping my book open to some practice lesson in the back that he never used in class but always used for these dumb tutoring sessions. I ripped out a piece of notebook paper to write on; this had become a regular routine for these tutoring sessions.

I tried to focus on the lesson and what he was trying to explain to me, but I had to reread things over and over again because I couldn't get the image out of my mind of Alex lip-locked with that bitch while I sat crying over him ignoring me all week. And the fact that he went so long without telling me, hiding it from me and pretending that nothing happened. I wondered how long he had actually been lying to me. He probably was lying about it being the only time, too. He was probably cheating on me for so long.

"He has distaste in the idea of the death penalty," I said, trying to sound like I understood the passage that I'd just read about 20 times but still had no idea what it said.

Professor Hemmings sighed, taking off his glasses and resting his hands against his face. I am hopeless. (Not that I cared that I was stressing him out.)

"Okay," he said. "Let's start with a shorter and more simple passage instead."

Thank god.

He turned a few more pages and I stared at the paragraph long passage that was in front of me. I could read this and interpret it with no problem.

The very first sentence of the paragraph talked about these trees and a forest and I immediately thought back to a time over the summer when Alex took me hiking through this wooded park and we jumped off a waterfall and went swimming, then took me for a drive through all these back roads on the way home, listening to some dumb Indie music that I wasn't actually into but seemed perfect at the time. The night ended in me going home to my parents to tell them I was home but as soon as I was in my bedroom, sneaking Alex through the window and making out, which led to other things that hurt to think about. He probably did those other things with that skanky bitch that was all over him at the Autumn Dance and then with the girl that he was making out with over that week that we weren't talking to each other.

I got through the end of the paragraph and realized I hadn't been paying attention to anything I was actually reading.

"Have you finished reading it?" Professor Hemmings asked me.

"Yes." I read it, but I didn't absorb any of it.

"Okay, what is the author comparing the tree to throughout the entire paragraph?" he asked.