A/N: New story. Like it or hate it. Tell me which you choose :)
Since when did teenagers need to write an essay, as homework, to pass P.E. class? Hell, wasn't P.E. supposed to be about sports?
Writing was certainly not something I remembered being a part in gym class when I had been in High School. I was twenty-four years old now, so it wasn't too long ago. Moreover, I had never heard of something as stupid making kids to write a stupid essay in my P.E. class.
I had visited my family who lived in Forks a year ago, and at that time Forks High School's gym teacher had had a nervous breakdown. This pretty much left the school without their only gym teacher. As a coincidence, I happened to be studying to become a gym teacher in Australia.
The principal at Forks High, Mr. Voltura, had asked me for a quick interview and I had agreed. A day later, he told me that he wanted to hire me, if I could start right away. He didn't even care that I still had one year left of High School. So I, being the spontaneous person I was back then, decided to stay. I bought an apartment, far away from my parents. I started my new job the day after. I simply dropped out of school, but I didn't regret it much – Australia had never been my kind of place anyway.
Up until now, this job had been great. However, I was now sitting in Mr. Voltura's office, where he was explaining a new task for my senior students. They'd have to write a short essay – at least 5000 characters long. It was weird what they called short nowadays.
What would the essays even be about? It was gym class, for God's sake, there wasn't too much to write about. That was partly the reason I chose to become a P.E. teacher. I started to feel sorry for myself for having to read and grade those essays later on. Boooring.
I decided to pay attention to Mr. Voltura again.
"As I was saying, their deadline will be three weeks from now, on their gym class. You'll have one week to grade them after the due date." Mr. Voltura stared at me with a serious expression; while I'm pretty sure I looked dumbstruck. This guy took things WAY too seriously.
"Uh... Mr. Voltura, you know that today is the first day of this semester, right?" I discretely double-checked that he was at his sane mind.
"I prefer to start with discipline from the beginning," he explained very slowly with an 'important' look on his face.
I had begun this job almost a year ago, yet I only knew two things for sure about Mr. Voltura:
One – he made absolutely no sense. Two – He was not the type of person you wanted to mess with.
I tried to think of a way to ask him my next question, without him noticing that I hadn't paid much attention to his rambling. I decided that I would just ask bluntly. Mr. Voltura snatched two pieces of paper in my hands. "One of the papers is the grading criteria; the other one is describing the assessment. Understood?"
"Yes, sir," I mumbled. It was the first day of a new semester, and I had already been at my boss' office and my seniors had gotten a fun little assessment. Whew, I was starting to regret that I took this job...
Mr. Voltura nodded at me and told me that I was free to leave for my class. As if on cue, he picked up his phone and dialed a number. He always did that when a meeting ended. It wasn't like he was the worlds most important person, but he certainly acted like he thought he was.
I was on my way to walk out of his office when his voice stopped me. "By the way, Emmett, you're in charge of the detentions this term," He said, and if I didn't know better I would have said that his smile was smug.
Great. Say goodbye to your precious Wednesday and Friday afternoons, Emmett, I groaned internally.
I walked out of his office, and straight to my class, which was running late. I sighed as I remembered which class it was. It was most certainly not one of my favorite classes, mostly because it contained the most annoying, underage teenage girls whom all tried to flirt with me.
My day had just turned even worse.
Three lessons later, I finally had my lunch break. My schedule wasn't too bad – I almost always had my break at the same time as the other teachers. The cafeteria was pretty full, as usual on Mondays. I looked at my usual table and grinned when I was that Jasper already sat there.
I quickly took some food and sat next to him. "Hey man!" I greeted him happily.
"Emmett," He said with a smirk. "How do you like the new semester so far?"
"Don't even get me started... How 'bout you?" I sighed. No, this year certainly wasn't one I was looking forward to. Jasper Whitlock was the English and American History teacher at Forks High. He was one of my best buddies and only one year older than I. He also had a very thick accent – he grew up in Texas and moved to Forks a few years ago. I had never been able to figure out why.
"Same old, same old... But hey, I heard that you were in charge of detention!" Yep, this was Forks – news traveled faster than the light over here. Though honestly there wasn't much light either. I sighed and explained my meeting with Mr. Voltura to Jasper. When I was finished, I pulled out the piece of paper explaining the essay assessment, and handed it over to him.
After he read it, he burst out laughing loudly. The other teachers at our table immediately turned around to glare at us. Most teachers were pretty boring, except Jasper and the math teacher, Mr. Davis.
Jasper read out loud: "The content of the essay shall be about the two following key-points: Positive and negative aspects of regular exercise and the students' personal opinion about their favorite sport. Both points shall have a clear connection with each other. The essay must be at least five thousand characters."
Mr. Davis chuckled. "It can't be that bad, EmCarthy." EmCarthy was his personal nickname for me. He had put that together from my first name (Emmett) and my last name (McCarthy).
Jasper grinned at him. "Sure it can. Didn't you listen? He'll practically have to read a hundred essays, each of them about the same boring topic with the same boring details."
"When you put it that way..." Mr. Davis thought out loud.
I growled at Jasper. "Way to make it all better, dude!" I knew exactly how boring it was going to be and I didn't need him to tell me that.
"Well, at least you'll have something to do while you're sitting on detention... Which will be a real Dejá Vú to you, Emmett," Jasper teased. He knew that I hadn't been the best student back in my High School days. In fact, I had been one of the worst. The principal's office and the detention room had almost become a second home to me.
I grinned at the memories that flashed through my mind. We joked around for about ten minutes until we fell silent. I shoved some food into my mouth and grimaced. School food wasn't too bad – usually. But they served some weird, brown vegetable sauce today. Yummy.
"The food is really disgusting today!" Jasper exclaimed.
"You read my mind, dude," I sighed.
Fifteen minutes later, my and Jasper's lunch-break was about to end. I walked with him to his class. He was telling me about his cousin that was sent to live with him a few weeks earlier. Apparently, she had been a troublemaker with her parents in Texas, so they figured that they just could send her to live with him.
"I don't think it's a good idea that she came to live with me. I haven't even seen her since she was four years old, but I've heard a lot of scary stories. She finds Forks boring... and there aren't many things to do here, so she'll just come up with some more trouble!" Jasper complained.
I fake-gasped. "Forks: boring? Not at all!"
"If she does anything bad, Mr. Voltura will blame me. And she will do a lot of bad things, trust me."
"Then tell her not to," I suggested.
"It's not that easy! Thank God that we have different last names, now not many people can guess that we're related." I frowned – he really seemed embarrassed of her. But maybe it was just me that was over reacting. Uh... no, correction: maybe it was just Jasper that was over reacting.
"Are you still not going to tell me her name?" I questioned him. Jasper had this strange idea that he shouldn't tell me who she was and see if I could find it out myself. It was extremely frustrating. He wouldn't even tell me which grade she was in – and if she was a junior, it would be nearly impossible to guess. As far as I knew, the only new senior was someone named Hale... Haley, maybe?
The bell rang and announced that my class would start in ten minutes. "Have fun," I grinned at him and walked extremely quickly to the gym. When I came in, a few of my seniors had already their P.E. clothes on and were waiting for the lesson to start.
I loved that it was easy for me to remember which class I was going to have next. My schedule was cleverly organized– I had freshmen in the morning and seniors on the afternoons.
"Mr. McCarthy?" One of my senior students called my name shyly. I turned towards her. It was Ashley, who was supposed to be in this class. "I can't participate in class today. Um... I hurt my ankle yesterday."
"Do you have a note from your doctor or the school nurse?" I sighed. She blushed and shook her head no. I decided to let her go this time, but I wouldn't be so accepting next time.
"Take care of yourself until next time, Ashley." As soon as the words left my mouth, I knew that she would take them the wrong way. She'd definitely tell her friends that I cared about her in a inappropriate way. She wished. I simply didn't want her to fail gym class. Ashley smiled happily at me and went to sit with her friends.
There was always a few students in each of my classes that always told me that they were hurt or gave me a lame excuse to not to participate. I didn't know if it was because they rather wanted to gossip, or if they were extremely lazy. In this class, Ashley, Jessica, Peyton and Jason were the students who always came with an excuse.
I glanced around the gym and noticed that most of the students were here by now. Too bad for those who weren't, because I decided that I would start the class now. I grabbed a pencil and one of the annoying attendance sheets. Somehow, they always managed to get lost. "Welcome back, class! I hope you all had a terrific break and that you got a lot of rest, because we're going to work very hard this term. Let's take some fun attendance, then..."
I called out their names in alphabetic order and marked that their either were absent or present. "Melanie Howls?" I smiled when I called the name of one of my favorite students.
She grinned at me. "Sir, yes, sir!"
"It's great to see that you haven't lost your bad humor over the break, Melanie," I teased her. I continued to call student's names until I reached Jessica Stanley's name and saw that she wasn't dressed for P.E. class.
"What's your excuse this time, Jessica?" I groaned and caused the class to laugh.
Her voice sounded to embarrassed that I was sure that she blushed under all those layers of make-up, even though I couldn't actually see it. "M-m-Mr. McCarthy, I have, you know, girly issues..."
I almost choked on the air I breathed. I remembered last year: she had used that excuse each week, but since I was her male teacher, I couldn't argue. I couldn't exactly say "you sure have your period a lot".
"What a surprise," I mocked her under my breath but let her off the hook easily.
When I was done with the role call, I took a deep breath. It was time to tell the class about their writing assessment.
"Okay, I'm only going to tell you this once, so listen carefully. You are going to get some P.E. homework. Calm down, it's not as bad as you think... it's worse. You have to write an essay with at least five thousand words."
I chuckled as they all gasped. It took them about five seconds to start complaining. Between the "no way" and the "about what" comments, someone muttered "idiotic teacher" .
I raised my voice. "If you have a complaint, talk to Mr. Voltura about it. I'm not the one who came up with this idea." The students immediately fell silent. The thought of Mr. Voltura was too intimidating for them to take the risk.
I spent a part of the lesson explaining their assessment and answering questions. For the rest of the hour, I made them run laps. When the lesson was over, I had two more classes left – one of them was another senior class.
It felt like a relief when I finally ended for the day and could go home to chill out. Or at least I thought so, before Mr. Hickler caught me in the parking lot. "Emmett, I'd like to talk to you about the routines of detention. As you know, I was in charge of it last year."
Oh, great. Mr. Hickler was probably the most boring teacher in Forks High. His subject was chemistry – the dull tone he constantly used might explain why very few students passed his class. He also had a thing for talking extremely much.
"So, here are the things that I learned while I was in charge of detention," he begun. This would certainly take a while. "Most students like to send notes and talk, but that is not allowed. You know that the detentions are in the French classroom, after all classes are over, and some students will say that they have things to do. They also have to put their phones on your desk… so they can't text their friends…"
"Mr. Hickler, I've been in detention once or twice. I'll figure it out. I'm kind of in a hurry." That was a lie – I had spent more time in detention than in my actual classes. But when it came to Mr. Hickler, every trick to get rid of him was allowed.
He let me go then, and I continued to walk to my car. On my way home, I thought about ways to find out which girl that was Jasper's cousin. Because I would find out. In the meantime, I'd get tons of boring essays to correct.
Who said living in Forks wasn't exciting? Oh, right… it wasn't.
A/N: But it's soon going to be a lot more exciting, Emmett, trust me…
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