Professor J, Meet Me Halfway

Chapter Two

I am a very irritable person.

It’s not a good trait and I knew that, matter of fact, it annoyed me that I was so irritable in the first place! Crying for no reason, loud noises, tapping, stupid questions, bad taste in music, cats—they all pissed me off.

It was insensitive of me to want to… sit on someone because that person was crying over some band breaking up or some bad grade, but that person needed to get over it. It was rude for me to think that people who asked idiotic questions desperately needed duct tape covering their chops, but savants say, ‘Think before you speak’ for a reason.

Well Mr. Jameson seemed to be lobbing full speed onto the dark side of my list within the first night having him as a teacher. I squinted at the worksheet the newbie handed out in class. What was this?

The sheet only asked six simple questions… six trivial questions. My legs tangled in my blue sheets as I scanned the thin piece of paper flopping in my hand thinking to myself, ‘What’s the freaking point to wasting our time on this?’

I mean, Mac or PC… that was one of the questions. I didn’t know nor did I really care. I also didn’t care about the type of superhero I’d be.

I almost scrawled ‘you’ under the question “What would you like to see change the most in your English class,” but I stopped myself. That would be rude.

Removing the stubby metal piece from the tip of my pencil from my teeth, I stuffed the sheet into my AP Euro book which I tucked into my backpack with the sea of misplaced papers. Mr. Jameson probably had no intentions of grading it anyway, it was so pointless.  

I’d never been one for organization. My backpack was a mess, my locker was a mess, and it was an off day when I could walk in my room without tripping on something. Candy wrappers, game consoles, light bulbs, you name it, it was probably on my floor.

“Keller! Dinner’s ready!” My mom called from downstairs.

On the way downstairs I tripped on an empty pudding cup I’d left sitting around; I steadied myself on the door casing.

“Hey mom.” I smiled at the woman standing over the pre-made food on the oven when I turned the corner into the kitchen. “Wow, mom, this looks delicious.” I eyed the thin pizza—covered in green things and mushrooms—and vegetables in front of her.

Forking a piece of corn that somehow ended up on the stove top, my mom sighed. Her stringy brown bangs flew before fluttering and resting again against her honeyed cheeks. “Your dad didn’t feel like cooking, so I pulled this from the freezer.”

Rolling my eyes, I got cups from one of the center cabinets to the right of the stove, “Right. Let’s just blame it on dad. You could’ve asked me to cook.”

Turning and facing me at the other side of the good sized kitchen, Mom rose an amber eyebrow, scoffing. “You hate cooking.”

“I don’t hate cooking. I hate the cleaning part.”

My mother’s eyes became slits as a bubble of laughter arose in her throat, and she quickly shook her head, turned around, and pulled some paper plates from the stash by the stove.

I grinned, my mom’s laugh was contagious as well as her smile. She was Filipino and while I’d gotten my caramel skin color from her, I looked more like my dad. Mom was only about 5’2, but I stood four inches over her. When she was alive, my sister, Mackenzie, favored Mom more. Her hair was straight, they had the exact same small eyes, and she had been ten times curvier than I was at only fifteen, when she died.