It was raining hard as she stared out of the glass window at the back of the room. It was the only window in the classroom and it almost seemed like only door to freedom. She felt like a caged animal right then. Perhaps a tiger or maybe an elephant. She'd heard somewhere that elephants hated captivity. She turned suddenly back to the board as she stared at the writing prompt. This one was unique in its own special way. It wasn't like any other prompt she'd ever seen. It was a picture.
Actually it was more like a painting. It depicted a boat on fire and a boy was there, at least, she thought it was a boy. Maybe it was a man. Or a woman dressed as a man. Her mind followed trails and muddy roads through the dark smoky skies of the painting and the water that shone brightly as the fire burned the sail of the boat. It looked more like a skin disease than fire to her.
She looked down at the blank page before her. It stared at her and she stared back. Her pencil touched the paper, and all that she felt and desired pored on the page like water on dry land that had been experiencing a drought. It was abstract though, somehow fitting into the theme of the painting, and as she read it over she began to hate it more and more. Her heart was sinking into an abyss of dark thoughts and desires that a writer feels when they hate their work. She tried to hide the feelings but they fostered and grew till she couldn't take it anymore and she threw it into the basket and returned to her seat, where she stared angrily at her desk for about ten minutes.
She then finally calmed down and looked around her. She stared at the back of his head. It was twisted in an awkward way as he was writing the prompt. It made her feel a smile play on her face and soon she was grinning ear to ear. She then realized this probably looked weird and immediately stopped. She might hate captivity but since she was there she just wanted to play along and survive while having a minimal amount of fun and friends. That was a lie.
She depended too much on home. She knew that. She guessed that this was because she had been home schooled until the fifth grade. She loved her older sister and she was definitely her best friend in the whole wide world. They were closer than best friends. They were their only friends for many years, and had been through many tuff times together.
As she thought of this, she realized that though she said and thought those things, she didn't mean it, and that she did want friends. She just told herself those lies to make herself feel better and this was because she was an insecure teen who was PMSing all of the time.
She was startled out of these thoughts as he moved out of his seat and went to turn his assignment in. She looked at his work and realized that it must take a microscope to read his writing. She also realized that this young man had a tendency to make her smile.