Random stories in my old 9th grade notebook

Chapter one

The train lurched through the bleak outskirts of the lonely city. I explored the scenery through the frosted window. I heard the invisible sounds of an olive-skinned man and a chocolate-skinned woman performing a melancholy winter ballad on saxophone and keyboard, respectively. I glimpsed una nina wrapped in a large lavender parka, the mangled ends of her chestnut braids blowing in the wind. I stared into the face of a beautiful female teacher, and consumed the exquisite image of the fiery pomegranate red lips, the wavy black tresses that spilled on her sloping shoulders, the mammoth leather purse that nudged against her breasts as she adjusted it on her shoulder.

At that romantic moment, I felt a craving. A potent craving to sketch average-day homosapiens. My right side practically burned for an urge to spin the lead graphite tip on the perforated paper, to form an oval that would form a face, matchsticks that would form a much more complex body. How funny–a fifteen year old Leonardo sketching a contemporary anatomy, that of a handsome man spread out on beige paper like a snow angel, but a person residing in Illinois.

“Your current stop is Sulfur,” the concise masculine voice announced from the front of the train. I hoisted my messenger bag over my shoulder, pressing the front of the bag to protect it. My hometown waited for me twenty blocks away.

Chapter 2

I was fourteen-and-one-quarters when I was expelled from school. I had no desire to leave but the darn administrators forced me to. It was a windy March morning in sixth period art class. My cranium overflowed with equations and mathematical concepts from third period, and it was near explosion. My hands ached with the arduous task of writing a three-page essay on the current oil embargo and its effect on global nations. In fourth period social studies, my blood curdled and I nearly passed out at the formaldehyde-laden, expired seafood-smelling meadow-frog that the first period science class was forced to dissect (I asked the teacher if I could evade such a repugnant task. I lost that ephemeral jury.) A myriad of Shakespearean verses and lines from notable O. Henry stories spun like sugar plums in my head. After English class, I sped to Room 411, a classroom with a relaxed, good-natured atmosphere. I stole a seat next to the window from which the restaurants, hair salons and factories stood erected, and wrestled my 8×11 sketchbook from underneath the purple binder that held my math and social studies papers, the two-thousand ton science textbook that nearly broke the table I sat at, and a paperback copy of Invisible Man.

The bell echoed through the halls as students mingled in their cliques and gabbed loquaciously. Mr. Lasovitch pushed back his swivel chair and stood, resembling a five-foot eight inch tree in crimson lo-tops and a plaid long-sleeved shirt.

“Okay, guys, listen up…all eyes on me…”

Fifty pairs of multicolored eyes stared up at our art instructor.

“You lot are going to finish your charcoal drawings, under the circumstances…that you close your eyes while sketching. It is not difficult; just imagine some object or person in your head, and start doodling. Any questions?”

A cricket-chirp-worthy silence swept through the room.

“Okay, then. Let’s commence.”

I sat in my chair while twenty-four other middle-school students milled about the room, looking for those formerly new ebony pieces of smudge and fresh-smelling sooty dust. I heard the phone ring.

“Desmond Lasovitch. Yeah, I’ll send her down. Bye.”

The phone landed in its cradle with athud.

“Lilliane, the administrator wants to see you.”

I nodded, closed my sketchbook and gathered my items. I looked back in the distance at the bored teenagers who spun the charcoal sticks between their fingers and rolled their eyes in agony at the thought of drawing. My recycled sneaker squeaked like timid mice and my stomach lurched as I headed past the auditorium into Principal Dellafield’s office. I knocked on the door and walked in. Principal Dellafield sat on her throne, her ballpoint pen racing with vivacity across a lined piece of paper.

“Principal Dellafield?” I asked.

She looked up, her icy blue pupils washing me like a cascade, taking me in.

“Mr. Lasovitch said you wanted to see me.”

“Ah, yes, dear, come. Sit and let’s talk. And set your books and whatnot on the sofa next to my shelf.”

The couch looked comfortable with its velvet texture and lush green pigment. It felt as if I was disrespecting the property by setting a pile of binders on it, but I obeyed.

I pulled the chair from out in front of her desk. The chair swallowed me as I attempted to relax.

“Miss Pendant, yesterday at approximately three in the afternoon, a fellow student of Benisota Secondary School found a drawing of a woman, a drawing which the student considered quite blasphemous.”

The drawer inserted in her desk opened with a roll, and she obtained the paper. She held it up for me to get a decent view of.

Rendered speechless inside, I feigned indifference.

“What’s wrong with it?” I asked, my eyebrows sloping into two negative quadratic arches.

“It’s crude, Miss Pendant! At Benisota, all students are forbidden to wear or display anything that may be deemed offensive, such as nudity, for example. Now why did you draw such a person?”

I took in the naked woman that I animated. She seemed quite passionate and vivacious, her pixie haircut fading in the wind, her arms akimbo, commanding the entire globe to consume her ravishing beauty like a steaming rack of tender lamb…

“Miss Pendant?”

I snapped back to attention.

“Please answer me. Why did you draw what you drew?”

“Well,” I laughed nervously. “You see, my friend bought an entertainment magazine to school. I asked her politely–”

I coughed.

“—If I could borrow it to draw in. She shrugged and obliged. So I flipped through the magazine, and found a celebrity at the Academy Awards. I was going to draw her in a dress, I really was, but I guess my mind got carried away…”

I shrugged.

She sat back, astonished.

“Well, Miss Pendant, this is quite a shocker. Judging from your mature, ambassadorial behavior…I’d never suspect you would do such a thing.”

My face fell in complete chagrin.

“I would hate to say this, but…due to the action you committed, I must suspend you from this school.”

I felt a whip crack on my cringing body. I gaped in horror.

“But Principal,” I stammered. “You cannot–I–I cannot quit school! What about my degree–I can’t just throw it out the window like this—I have to finish school!”

If you were to come into the office this exact moment, you would see a formerly calm girl who, when she heard this news, was on the verge of exploding into smithereens.