note: all formatting missing, but it's just a bit of italics here and there. this should give you guys a general idea of the flavour I'm working with here.

Chapter 2

Gym class passed rather uneventfully. Half the students never showed up, and I saw several performing the bolt-at-the-bell trick that I described earlier. Though he’d never admit it, Dunbar let us play dodgeball all class as a silent reward. It’s funny, when you think about dodgeball really hard; it’s almost like a microcosm of our day-to-day existence. There are the strong, confident ones who rush for the ball, throw like madmen, and dance around the front line looking for catches. Then, there are the people who don’t really want to be there at all, the lazy ones, who stand around the back, just getting out of the way. But, the players that you usually see going to the end, are the ones in the middle: They take opportunities as they come, never passing, but never going out of their way to avoid the danger.

Those ones in the middle always win. Sometimes, there’s a go-getter in with them, who pulled through it all via their unrelenting skill; rarely, one of the back men get to the end by never slipping up. But you either burn yourself out in a blaze of glory, you just don’t care enough to try, or you play it smart. That’s life, right there.

I’m usually one of those middle people. In dodgeball, I mean.

English was next, a class that I didn’t appreciate at all. In tenth grade, my teacher was awesome, Mr. Franzwik; he picked cool novels to study, and explained a lot of poetry, and basically taught us things. My current teacher, Mrs. Hurns, is the kind of lady who likes to text on her iPhone while we make shitty-looking, abstract collages with magazine cut-outs and then later try to justify them.

I hate collages. I dislike Hurns.

However, I do get to sit next to my friend Marcus, who is basically the coolest dude I know. You know, the kind of guy who is so disillusioned with the way the world works that he just doesn’t give one shit what anybody thinks, and as a result doesn’t tend to be very judgmental himself. I’m not fond of judgmental people, either, I should mention.

He’s really into that anime, or whatever, the Japanese cartoons with flashing lights, where people scream out the names of their attacks and then blow each other up. He doesn’t look the part at all, though: He has medium-length blonde hair, parted in the middle with just a little body - as far as I know, his hair regimen is similar to mine – and he has the nicest blue eyes, the kind girls go absolutely crazy for. He has this face that’s sort of between boy-band Justin Timberlake and bad-boy Brad Pitt, and he wears those really slim hoodies that make you look like a male model.

I have to laugh, though, whenever girls start flirting with him, because he is utterly oblivious at all times. Every time, after the fact, someone mentions how totally into him this or that girl was, and he just shrugs, and says “Really?” That one word, some days, would be justification if I had to murder him on the spot. I don’t think he has a penis.

So, we were in Hurns’ class, and she’s literally texting some friend of hers’, giddily. Meanwhile, I’m doing a fill-in-the-blanks worksheet on The Great Gatsby, which, to be fair, was the coolest thing we’d done so far this year. Though, that’s less impressive when you take into account that we spent all of September doing Death of a Salesman. Seriously, does anybody like that fucking atrocity?

Anyway, Marcus isn’t even doing the damn worksheet, because he’s one of those lit-nerds who can shit out an essay in fifteen seconds and get the sparkly stickers on it. Halfway through a book, he calls the ending, and tells you what it means. The guy has an honours grade, and I’m pretty sure he didn’t even hand in any of the Salesman worksheets.

I look over, and have to stifle a laugh, because he’s drawing a tit. Yes, a tit. A breast, actually, and just that. A disembodied, bleeding breast, and the blood is dripping down, forming words. He switches to a red ballpoint pen, and starts doing bloody letters. This is about where he notices that I’m watching, and it dictates his next course of action.

“NICK CARROWAY IS A FAG
HURNS IS A COUGAR”

I nearly fell out of my fucking chair.

By the time she got over to deal with my outburst, Marcus had switched back to the worksheet, cool as a cucumber. She gave me the face; that face that women who are huge cows make to show that they are displeased. Not fat-cow, I mean, just the unpleasant-cow. Angry mouth that goes really thin and tight, and the eyes roll back a little bit, because god, you’re a moron and you should shut your kid up and you totally forgot that coupon, asshole.

Now, I knew only that Marcus was going to try to top that. Then, it came. Under the question “What did Nick mean when he proclaimed that ‘Gatsby is worth more than the Buchanans and all of thier (sic) friends?’” Marcus scrawled, in big, block letters:

“HE SO WOULD HAVE TAPPED THAT SHIT.”

Every following question, mostly about the closing chapter, was in the same vein. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I imagined Hurns reading it all, and shitting the proverbial brick. Marcus would never hand it in, of course, but still. I think people like her sometimes need a shock like that, because they grossly underestimate the people around them. She was the type to think that we were all moronic kids, and that’s why she never put in the effort. I get the distinct impression that, while that stereotype has serious basis in truth, half of us sitting there were making more of ourselves than she ever did.

I looked up, though, and saw that class was almost over. I rushed to finish the sheet immediately, knowing that I’d never actually do it for homework, and also knowing full well that I didn’t have the luxury of breezing through the class. I managed to get something out all across the board, filling in little boxes and writing between every line as I went, and as much as I would have enjoyed otherwise, Nick Carroway’s sexual preference was not once mentioned throughout the entire page.

I put my pen down, and was halfway through a deep breath when the bell rang. Chatter exploded, because Hurns was an utter tyrant when it came to noise in her classroom. “She probably can’t get into the mood for her sexting while we’re talking,” I often thought. Sheets went in at the front of the class on the desk she never used, because it wasn’t attached to a computer that could get to Facebook.

I turned around to see Marcus smirking at me, hands in the pockets of his secretly-Old-Navy-brand jeans, as he pulled out a five dollar bill. I smiled in return, my own stomach growling.

“arty time, man,” he mused aloud, “let’s nosh the fuck out.”