Arnold Spirit sighed as he took out his pencil and started thinking. He needed to compare the novel that he read in English class to his life. The book was called Ultraviolet or something like that and was about some girl who could see a bunch of colours everywhere, went to space, and liked music. What was her name again? Alissa? Alice? Allison? He thought it was Allison. Allison sounded right.
He sat at his desk and stared at his blank page. After a couple minutes he got bored and started to doodle on his page. Arnold had never been good at wording things, and now he needed to write a whole essay! Essays usually had a lot of words. He was glad he was able to go to this school, but schoolwork had always been so much more simple back at the reserve. Everything was so complicated at Reardan.
He thought for a moment. He could compare their school lives! That would probably work! He hurriedly wrote "school lives" next to a small drawing of a talking basketball. Now what did they have in common?
Well, they were both kind of awkward and stood out from their peers. While Arnold had always stuck out simply because of his strange looks. Strange looks meaning his weird proportions and the fact that he was an Indian at an all white school.
Allison however, was different because of what she did and the way she acted. Allison's peers and classmates seemed to think she was some sort of stuck up elitist because of how she never seemed to want to talk to any of them. While she may not have actually been a stuck up elitist, Allison did tend to space out a lot and only really spoke to one person.
So now Arnold had one idea about what he would write. What else could he think of? He started on a new doodle; this time trying to draw the front of the school from memory and began to sketch out the basic outline while he thought.
Was there anything that he and Allison both liked? If he remembered correctly, Allison liked music and playing on the piano more than almost anything. Arnold really liked his drawings and basketball. Not many similarities there, though one could consider his drawings and her music to both be forms of art. He could say that they both had art forms that they were passionate about. That would work.
Finishing with the windows and doors on his doodle, he wrote "art" next to his first point. Maybe he could compare their experiences. Well, Allison had been put in a mental hospital and she had gone to another part of the universe. Arnold hadn't ever been put in a mental hospital and he certainly never went to another part of the universe.
Maybe he could say something about them "reaching out to unknown places". He wrote that down. He could say that Allison had gone to an unknown place while he had transferred to an unknown school. Allison had arrived in that spacey place not knowing if she would ever get back to earth while Arnold transferred to Reardan with the knowledge that he could probably never go back to Wellpinit once he went through with it.
Arnold completed the background and shading in his sketch. He was surprised at how easy it had been to think of his ideas. He didn't usually come up with ideas this easily.
He got out a new piece of paper and to think of how to word things for his rough draft. He may have his ideas down but he still had a long way to go if he wanted to be able to finish this assignment before the next basketball game.
A/N: So this is a thing I wrote back in 2013. It was for my final English assignment and I had to think of a creative way of relating the two characters from the books that I read. In class we read Ultraviolet and as my independent novel I read The Absolutely True Diary Of A Part-Time Indian. The options for creative things were mostly artsy-crafty things or stuff like that (which I suck at). The ideas for writing were mostly things like having the characters meeting or writing letters to each other and I thought "man I really don't want to do that. That sounds like basically every crossover ever". So instead I wrote about a character from a book I read for English class, writing an assignment for English class, about a character from another book I read for English class. English classception.