[ON HOLD] 36 Students in a Classroom

2. Um, no, I'm pretty sure Beyonce is better looking . . .

                     2. THE ATTENTION-SEEKER

On a random Monday afternoon in the school year, my art teacher told us we could switch seats.

Now, if you’re a thirteen-year-old attending my old school, you know how rare it is for that to happen. Because every teacher there knows the importance of assigned seats.

Get real, guys. Thirty-six kids sitting next to their friends, talking, secretly eating, laughing, drawing moustaches on each other, crying, gossiping about each other, sleeping, and possibly even dealing drugs? That’s a huge handful.

. . . Not the drugs, I mean everything else.

. . . Not that we actually were dealing drugs or sniffing them behind our desks . . .

Okay, fine. Someone had some salt on them and we thought it’d be fun to make the teachers think we were dealing.

But that’s completely beside the point.

The point is, when a teacher tells you that you’re allowed to sit anywhere you want, the first thing you do is latch onto your best friends and run to an empty table. 

But guess what happened to my table? Well, we got an extra person. And this extra person just so happened to be an attention-seeker.

So let me explain exactly what these kinds of people do, from experience.

[side note:] We all have our moments of low self-esteem. We all have those things that we know we’re just not good at. Or things that we see in ourselves that we think aren’t attractive. And we all know how stupid we’re being, because really everyone is beautiful no matter what they look like or how many flaws they think they have.

That’s normal. It comes with being human. Sometimes you doubt yourself, and sometimes you wish you were different.

Everyone is like that, maybe only sometimes or maybe most of the time. I’m not talking about that kind of person.

What I’m talking about are the real attention-seekers. The ones that you try to run away from before they see you but they see you anyway, so you go, “Oh, hey! Sorry, I can’t talk now, I gotta go . . . um . . . feed my pet . . . bear?”

And I’d just like to point out that that excuse doesn’t always work. Because sometimes people ask to come with you, and when you get to your house you have to run and dig out your stuffed bear from your closet, and then shove a spoonful of baby food into the stuffed animal’s face, going, “Oh, you thought I meant a real bear? Pshh, where would you get that from? . . . You crazy human . . .”

And then while they’re looking at the stuffed bear you run for your life. In your own house.

But sadly for me, on that Monday and every Monday for the rest of the school year, I was stuck sitting next to this girl. Let’s call her Attie.

So one Monday, everyone at the table is painting whatever crap the art teacher that can’t even draw is forcing us to paint, and cracking inappropriate jokes. And at first we’re having a good ol’ time, when all of a sudden our conversation switches topics to how pretty we are.

How did we get to this topic?

Attie.

“Oh my gosh, Blaze, you’re so much better than me at drawing,” is how she started it.

And I may or may not have agreed with her, when I first laid eyes on her messy painting of a caterpillar. Or maybe it was supposed to be a piece of string. Or was it a flower stem . . . ?