Short Story

This is a piece that I wrote for a school assignment where I had to take a certain author’s writing style (In this case, Neal Shusterman) and use it to write a short story.

They Save The Worst For Last At Ol’ Dogwood

Excluding the fifteen kindergarteners, there were exactly two new students at Dogwood Academy K-12 that year. One of them was a fifth grader, Amelia Greenwood, whose parents had moved out here from Boston home of the Red Sox, or as my brother Jon calls them ‘the stinky Sox’ - he’s four.

As you might have guessed, I am the other new student, and as you might have also guessed, My family and I are New Yorkers. Well, were New Yorkers until my parents decided to move out here to rural Noddington, Massachusetts. When my mom told me the name of the town I pictured a bunch of people in 19^th century get up like the people in that old movie, Gone in the Breeze, I think it’s called. Oh, I’m sorry, we’re two paragraphs in and I haven’t even told you my name! My name is Jason Johnson Jr. I am sorry to tell you, though the second I turn eighteen I am changing it. You see, alliteration is very important to my parents because they met in a college English class that focused on it.

At the moment I was waiting in the lunch line of Dogwood Academy the first part of the school day went by pretty fast considering it was the first day of the school year, but now that I was in the lunch line waiting for whatever piece of rubber they were passing off as food today it seemed as if the school day might never end. The lady who was serving lunch looked like one of those people who do the museum tours, she was dressed in a blue apron and had her hair up in a bun, and the only difference between her and a tour guide was her hairnet. When she opened her mouth I half expected her to start giving me a lecture on how the first chili recipe was written down in 1618 by some random person with too much time on their hands, but instead she asked.

“Meat or vegetarian?”

“Meat,” I replied. Actually the chili wasn’t half bad, it was quite an improvement from the plastic containers of heated up mush they served at my old school. I had just finished when the bell rang for the second half of the day.

The second half of the day exceeded expectations, we did archery in gym and in science the teacher had us look at onion peels under a microscope and stuff like that. Everything was going great until history. Mr. Davis was the 6^th and 7^th grade history teacher, and because I am in the seventh grade, so my fellow classmates had had Mr. Davis last year. I knew this when I walked through a door and I immediately knew I was going to have a miserable last forty-five minutes of school. I had gotten to class a bit late because I got a drink before coming in, which meant all the good seats would be taken, I had expected this to mean that I would be in the back. Instead I was front and center. Great, I thought he’s a spitter.

Unfortunately I was right. I have had several teachers throughout my education that spit, and I find that they usually have a certain consonant that they spit on. Take Ms. Parsons, my second grade teacher, she spit on every T, and Mr. Calhoon spit on his Cs and Ks, and as I found out, Mr. Davis’s consonant is P. This year we were going to study the American revolutionary war and compare it to other revolutions, so every time he would talk about the patriots and Thomas Paine spit would fly out of his mouth. The hands on the clock slowed to a standstill, and I was beginning to pray for the fire alarm to go off when the school bell announced that the first day of school was over. I was so relieved I felt as though I had been given a reprieve for a death sentence, and I silently promised myself that I would never get to history late again. I gathered up my books and left. As I headed home I thought, one day down, 179 to go.