I hadn't really worried about it that day. In fact, I had completely forgotten to mentally prepare myself for my book talk for reading seminar. It was basically advertising a book in front of the class. The basic, here is what I'm going to say, had been written the night before.

"Becca, we missed you yesterday."

That was pretty much my awkward "hello" as I walked into the warm classroom. I couldn't even turn to face my teacher, Mr. Schwarz, because I already felt my face flare up. I walked over to my friend, Nakita, and started bombarding her with questions like, was it hard? Did you do good? I'm scared. I can't do this!

I was clearly overacting and made no effort to try and hide. My entire class could tell. The bell that signaled the start of seventh hour rung and I felt my heart rate speed way up. My hands shook like an earthquake and my face went from its normal pale white to looking like I had spent four months in the sun without any sunscreen. Naturally, Mr. Schwarz thought it was hilarious when I blushed. This was not the first time it happened, in fact, it had been every day since the beginning of the semester because I had some god-awful curse. Just kidding. I don't know why. Shyness maybe?

"Good afternoon!" He yelled, startling everyone in my class, "Today, Becca will be doing the book talk."

I blushed. A lot. Like beet red a lot. I attempted to hide it but knew I had epically failed when I heard, "Becca, did you get bad sunburn over the weekend?"

"Shut up," I whispered behind my folder. I am a horrible whisperer. No I'm not, I just whisper loud enough that he heard and answered with a high laugh. He does these roll call questions before we go about our normal activities and the question that day was, if you could curse your enemy for one day, what would you do? I almost said have their cameras break (because he was videotaping our book talks), but I didn't. I had no clue that my class would be counting down like they do in movies and it actually scared the poop out of me. They messed up the first time. Kinda lucky for me I guess. They had to redo it. Oh poop.

Part of our grade was eye contact and I remember being almost paralyzed every time I looked up. I was afraid that my legs were going to collapse or that I would die of embarrassment. For some unusual reason, though I know it's not true, I think that it's my fault that we had to do this, that if I hadn't been so "mysterious" that this wouldn't have happened. I ended up only missing two points because I didn't really describe the setting that well. I'm not really mad that I couldn't keep it together during that whole thing. I draw anime and every person blushes. It's my way of laughing at my embarrassment. It makes me feel better. I've never seen myself blush. I refused to watch most of it, I looked up once and it was weird. It's strange seeing yourself blush, take my word for it. All it took was a minute and a half of insane embarrassing courage… literally.