Shakespearean - JayTim - Camp NaNoWriMo - July 2017

Chapter 12 - Pyramids

On Monday, Jason swaggered into Professor Kent's Journalism class with a confidence he most certainly wasn't feeling. He'd completed his paper the night before, triple and quadruple checking it for grammar and spelling, but he still wasn't sure he was happy with it. Something about it seemed somehow... not enough.

He took a seat more towards the front this time since he wasn't late. Professor Kent was already at the podium and he waved at Jason. "Hey, Jason. How have you been the last couple days?"

Jason smiled. "Pretty good, actually. How about you, Professor Kent?"

He rolled his eyes. "Please, Jason, my name is Clark. I've been really good. Tim tell you about Dick and Wally?" Clark's eyes were alight with joy at the mention of the new couple.

Jason laughed. "Yeah, I'm pretty sure he's told the whole world by now."

Leaning down on the podium, Clark nodded his agreement. "I'm sure he's just very happy for his brother."

"And pleased his theory was right all along."

Clark chuckled softly, giving him a knowing nod. "Yes, definitely that, too." He checked his watch and sighed before looking back up at the class. "Alright, everybody, come to order." He cracked a small smile. "Jimmy, just because you're in the back row doesn't mean I can't see that you aren't paying attention."

Jason chanced a look over his shoulder to see a kid in the back row sinking into his chair, a sheepish grin on his face. Snickering quietly, he turned back to face the front. Clark continued on with the class, reminding everyone of the rules of the previous assignment from the week before. "Now, I'm going to have you all come up here, one at a time, and read your paper out to the class." Jason's eyes immediately went wide, and his throat suddenly got very tight. "Then, the class will attempt to guess your topic." Jason swallowed around the lump in his throat, hoping that Clark wouldn't have time to get to everyone and he'd be one of the lucky students who got out of it. He didn't think that it would be too difficult for people to guess people's topics when they wrote whole papers about them, so he wasn't really sure where Clark was going with this either.

One by one, Clark called on random people throughout the room. They would read out their papers, and, at least half of the time, the class would struggle to figure out what the topic was. Jason was surprised just how many people had failed to follow instructions. Some people had just rambled on with a list of statistics, and some people didn't even have complete sentences. There was one guy who seemed to have just written bullet points. All in all, the class was only able to figure out the topics of about half the class. Clark took notes as he went, but he didn't collect people's papers.

Jason was the second to last person to read his paper aloud. By the time it was his turn, he'd already figured out he had one of the better papers in the class. Complete sentences, good grammar, essay formatting; he had more proper elements of a research paper than anyone else did. He'd figured, hey, this was journalism class, it would probably be a good idea to write a paper that looked like journalism. He'd essentially just written a short newspaper article on his topic.

When he was finished reading his paper, he looked up to see half the class was irritated, and the other half was jealous. Glancing over at Clark, he saw the professor was nodding with a pleased smile. A kid in the third row sighed in what sounded like defeat and raised his hand. Clark nodded his permission to speak and the kid dropped his arm to the desk with a quiet thud. "Human Trafficking," he said, with a look a Jason like he was daring him to tell the guy he was wrong.

Jason swallowed hard and nodded. "Can I sit back down now," he asked Clark. The professor laughed quietly but agreed and Jason hurried back to his seat. Clark wrote down a few more notes on his pad and moved on to the next person, who looked extremely displeased with having to go after Jason.