Embrace Your Fate
From Create Your Own Story
Laughter awaits you as you step into class. The teacher shakes her head at you and clicks her tongue. "Well, well, well, our guest of honor is fashionably late today - and how." She gives you the usual kind of lecture you come to expect, about taking your education seriously, how you won't have such privileges of coming on your own timing when you enter the workforce. You are sentenced to detention for two days after school, but she otherwise says nothing too degrading and points you back to your seat. Considering that detention usually involves an indifferent teacher and you scribbling your daydreams onto a pad, you feel like you got off easy and proceed to your seat without complaint. Your mood is further lightened up by your classmates nudging you as you walk by, cracking inappropriate jokes about the cause of your lateness.
You step into the designated classroom reserved for detention and look around. One look among those seated and you are reminded that this isn't a place for people like you. Despite your tardiness, being late was the closest you ever came to breaking the school rules. Sitting across this room, however, are a mixed bunch of violent delinquents and eyeshadowed punks with bad attitude, all of whom are deviant individuals you wouldn't normally hang out with. You try to make out any familiar faces among the crowd, only to earn yourself a few death glares from those who don't like to be stared at. Unfortunately, only you among your circle of friends are unlucky enough to land yourself in detention today. You are on your own in this desolate wasteland.
But you are used to it. This is your second trip to detention, and you've already made friends among the deviants. Usually, these are the type of bad influences your peers would warn you to stay away from, but upon knowing them better, they came across as troubled people who are quite normal, each having their own dreams, aspirations, and of course, a weight of worries on their shoulder.
Crabby McCrabson, for example, is a frightening-looking fellow despite his obesity, being the size of an African hippo. But you came to realize that he just likes to be left alone, and merely compensates his lack of self-confidence with his binge-eating. Clara is a bespectacled bookworm, but she's also into death metal. She thinks people care too much about putting up a false image to cover up their insecurities. Naturally, she thinks of McCrabson as a higher form of entity who's at least honest with himself. Then there is the worst of the lot: Carl, an accused molester. It could have been rape, but he didn't have the balls to go through with it and started bawling in front of the girl. He's full of self-loathing, and cuts himself as atonement for his "dark thoughts". And yet, even him, you had a nice chat with him about gardening of all things; he says it grants him peace when he tends to the flowers.
Of course, there are genuine bad eggs among the crowd that beat up others just for the fun of it; those you would gladly stay away from even if your parents never warned you. But you feel comfortable finding such normal people in this would-be abyss.
"Grab a seat," says the teacher who doesn't even bother looking at you as he concentrates on on his trashy tabloid magazine. You think about remarking how he's a shitty teacher whose attitude is somehow worse than the captives here, but you decide to say nothing instead and merely let out a tired sigh. You roll your eyes at the apathetic teacher and move to an open seat. Clara gives you an indifferent wave as if she expected your arrival. You return the gesture as you pull out your colorful notepad full of sketches on its cover and begin scribbling the hours away.
What shall you do?
