by Elizabeth Brighton

Created on: December 31, 2008

So Friday came and went, with little more from Walt than a glimpse at his adolescent psychology book, a TV dinner, and flipping through channels without finding anything to watch. Outside his bedroom, John and Ken stumbled and laughed and told lies to girls. Walt just turned the television up and pretended they were gone.

November came and went, and Walt got himself a small apartment in a large complex. He looked forward to the peace and quiet and freedom that comes with living without roommates, but just found himself feeling more cramped and lonely.

Mrs. Green's biology class came and went every single day, and so did Molly, though she didn't understand the subject at all. The more Mrs. Green taught, the less she learned, and after awhile, Molly just began to tune it out.

Walt didn't really feel like he was learning anything, either. His college work was redundant and uninteresting. As a rather new substitute teacher, the only thing that he ever did at work was take attendance and hand out worksheets, exams, or sometimes lab sheets, doing little more to teach the students than guide them to microscope slide covers and extra protractors. In November, he gave an actual lesson to Mrs. Green's fourth period biology class, and despite everything he'd learned about teaching adolescents, it did not go the way his books said it would. Walt held a near-perfect grade point average throughout his college years, and although he had taken meticulous notes and gotten many A's on reports and exams about keeping students engaged, these students did not care about the reproductive systems of plants. They didn't care because he didn't make them care, and he could hear himself as he gave the lesson, reading off the instruction sheet and stumbling over its words. It was as though what he'd spent years studying had given up on him, or possibly just didn't work. Two boys in the back snickered as they tucked a piece of gum into the messy hair in front of them. A girl in the middle spent the whole class writing some elaborate love letter that a red-headed boy spent the whole next class analyzing and replying to, and the young lady with the highest grade in the whole school doodled at the top of her notebook in a daze. Molly spent half the class staring blankly at the blackboard and the other half with her head buried by a waist-long rope of hair in the textbook.

The bell rang well before he was finished and the students filed out the door in the middle of his sentence. He closed it

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