A Girl Like Her

"Jans" commanded the old annoying shrew that called herself a history teacher. I looked up, startled, from my seat in the middle of the classroom (where she had cleverly placed me). I had been day-dreaming again. And she had caught me....again.

"Can you please share your thoughts on Columbus Day" she thought she had me there, but she had something else coming.

"Ah, well, you see Mrs. Windom; I believe that Columbus Day is a waste of time,” I said, standing up to help prove my point. “You see, Columbus basically started the slave trade all by himself because he couldn't find enough (if any) gold and riches to pay for his trip. So instead, he had the people of the "new world" the people that, stupidly, believed to be from India, back home for slaves. I don't think we should even be thinking about celebrating such a man. All it is to us kids is a day from school and an excuse to see parade, nobody even cares about Columbus, especially because he never set foot on America to begin with. And even then he didn't discover it at all. The Vikings had been there hundreds of years before him and people from the UK had probably been fishing off the coast of Canada anyway. Honestly, what does that leave us with? Nothing but a civilization destroyed because of one man's selfishness. But I guess he pulled it off. Bravo, Chris, Bravo" I clapped sarcastically

My classmates stared at me blankly not knowing weather or not to hate me or celebrate me with a day and parades. Mrs. Windom was completely silent, a sure sign that I had baffled her. Her lips formed a straight line, her cheeks were flushed. She wasn't just taken by surprise, she was furious because of it. I had just used her class work to mock her. I had turned her into the fool, in front of the entire class. How dare I say such awful things about Christopher Columbus founder of the new world! She lived for that kind of shit. She couldn't tell me I was wrong. I was right; everything I said was fact-based. I just didn't tell her what she wanted to hear, and if I wasn’t on her shit list before, I sure as hell was now.

I sat back down and leaned back, lazily, and placed my dirty old converse high-tops on the desk of the person sitting beside me. The prissy little bitch sitting there,, gave me a look dirtier than my shoes and turned her back to me, flipping her long, straight, blonde hair in my direction. It smelled like a mixture of expensive perfume and fruit scented shampoo. Becky Andrews was her name; she was a prissy little popular girl. She hated me, but not because she knew me, because of what her friends would think.

Mrs. Windom still had said nothing. The bell rang. Becky was the first to leave. She dared not make eye-contact with someone of my social status. She was a popular, and I was a trouble-making outcast. We mixed like hot oil and water. And if anyone knew anything about oil and water, they’d realize how bad of a mix that is. How as soon as the water touches the hot oil it boils and shoots everywhere, hurting whoever it is that put the two together; but people are stupid. Just like Christopher Columbus, full of bullshit, cover-ups, and only looking out for themselves, not caring who they hurt in the process. She was the same way, and I had to keep telling myself that.