Submitted into Contest
#188 Tom Bombadil writes about a character who’s attending a dinner
thrown in their honor, but deeply embarrasses themself during their speech.... view
prompt
“Stop daydreaming Mr. Delano.”
In a moment, Mrs. Frampton, subjecting
the tender wallflower of my affection to the grotesque spotlight of her own
indifference, made cease the contemplation of my life’s own end, the one theme
of my existence: Andrea Taylor.
It’s the Spring of 2005; I am a 7th
grader at Fort Sumter Middle School, home of the Trojans. Andrea sits enthroned
one row ahead, three columns to my right. I have mixed feelings about this, for
while it affords me an almost uninterrupted view of her during second and fifth
period, it also places her immediately adjacent to Kyle Schwimmer: another
seventh grader, possessed of summit-less bicep peaks, which forces me to a
fixed conclusion that he’s been injecting steroids intravenously since infancy,
and whose hair, defying no less than two laws of thermodynamics, I am sure,
manages to appear wet and shiny hours after we all have a just expectation that
it should be dry. I despise Kyle Schwimmer.
Andrea herself, ah! Andrea, crowned with
brown tresses, and bangs; layered alternately and Kevlar-like in Abercrombie
and Hollister tank tops; floating on a cloud of all-white Etnies; and
tastefully adorned in torn and acid-washed denim: if Helen, Esther, Cleopatra,
Meghan Fox herself stood before me, they could, collectively, aspire to light
but a Yankee-candle of affection before the blast furnace that is my love for
Andrea Taylor.
