In keeping with the course objective to show and not tell, each student chose a secret at random, which they then had to demonstrate through indirect characterization. It's easy to say that your character is in love with his best friend or harbors conspiracy theories about the government, but it is an entirely different affair to show who your character is, what she cares about, and what skeletons lurk in her closet.
Here's my character...can you guess his secret? Lifting the sheet so he could rotate underneath it without getting tangled up, Alan attempted to settle his bones into a comfortable position. He peeked through one slitted eyelid, as if trying to sneak up on the clock. 1:38 A sad sigh escaped his lips as he thought, of course. It wasn't only that he had to wake up in a few short hours to take an adequately long shower, humming so loudly his lips buzzed long after he was done so that he wouldn't think about the rotting polar bear carcasses that once roamed alone across a continent in search of a seal or two but just couldn't roam any longer. It wasn't only that the flecks of lint and fiber the blanket shed on the sheets formed a pattern remarkably like that of the line-of-best-fit scatter plot he still couldn't manage to grasp in Algebra. It certainly wasn't the ping from his sister's constant text-tweet-yik-snap-gram-book alerts still ringing and echoing in his ears, a residual taunt counting off how many more friends, better friends, cooler friends she had. It wasn't that. Those were things not worth worrying about. Not like the mold that had spread from a single dot in July to a full on toxic explosion in the shape of the The Philippines, albeit, if The Philippines were the size of a silver dollar. Not like the nearly imperceptible but so totally evident tightening around Ms. Walsh's mouth when she got to his name on the roster. Why did she even still take attendance anyway? It was November already. Did she really not know their names? Oh no, she must have a brain tumor growing in leaps and bounds, pressing in on her temporal lobe. Would his extra credit transfer over if Ms. Walsh dropped dead and the school hired a new teacher? Alan heaved a shuddering sign, squeezed his eyes in a silent prayer for a decrease in the swelling of Ms. Walsh's brain tumor, resigned himself to the chronic bronchial inflammation the black mold spores currently fostering, and braved another glance at the clock. 1:42
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AuthorMs. Jopling teaches English at Broadway High School, eats an unseemly amount of cheese, and laughs as often as possible. Archives
November 2017
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