I knew, at the beginning of eighth grade, that I was bound to have no social life (or at least no social life at school.)  I was a self-admitted loser, and had recently abandoned my “punk-Goth phase”.  My goal was not to regain the friends I had lost, but to work so hard in school that I could get into a private school and forget about them forever.  As a result, all I did was write.  I did little else but crank out silly, melodramatic tales of orphans living in Victorian England.  I even did this in math class, but I sat in the back row and nobody ever noticed.

            English was my best subject, and it was also the first class of the day.  Our teacher, Mrs. Blunt, was a seemingly boisterous and energetic woman who had the same amount of enthusiasm for English as all of the other teachers seemed to have for coffee.  She was short and squat with curly black hair, a bright red-lipped smile, and sparkling brown eyes.  She soon proved herself, however, not to be the loudmouthed and entertaining teacher that she had seemed to be at first.  Although she wasn’t quiet, she had a habit of leaving the class in the middle of a lesson to go to the “copying room” and not coming back until twenty minutes later.

            She took a liking to me because I was one of the smartest kids in the class.  Normally that would be a really arrogant thing to say, but for some reason, the most of the other kids in the class seemed to have the intellectual capacity of slightly intelligent blankets.

            Another girl in the class, Jody, and I, became friends.  We had been buddies years before in elementary school, and she had been the girl to pull out my first loose tooth, but we had sort of drifted over the years.  We only reunited when we found ourselves in an eighth-grade English school class that taught how to take standardized tests instead of how to write essays.  

    One day, when Mrs. Blunt had wandered out of the room for seemingly no reason, Jody put on the teacher’s glasses and sat at her desk.  Even the popular girls were laughing with her-she was able to mimic Mrs. Blunt dead-on.