My Life As I Knew It

Section 1 – 2nd Semester, My life, and People like Chris

I stood at the bus stop on a dismal gray day with my ratty old sneakers in two feet of cold snow.

It was December 17th and we were having very bad weather. I stood there in the cold slushy snow with 40 pounds of books in a backpack, waiting for the bus to arrive. I turn my head and saw Marshall dredging through the snow down the street. " Hello," I shouted to Marshall.

"Hey man," Marshall shouted back. "Whach'ya doin?"

"Waiting for the bus, what is a look like I'm doing?"

"I du'no." Marshall shrugged his shoulders. "Schools almost out, ya excited?"

"I guess, but I really like school you know that." I said while kicking snow with my shoe.

"Yeah man you're like that, but I know you really like vacation...don't ya?" Marshall asked.

"It does give me time to work on stuff, but you are wrong I really do like school."

"Man, you're just crazy, why can't you be like normal people?" Marshall asked. I was about to tell him that normal people are crazy for not liking school but the bus pulled up and we got on. I was going to sit down next to Marshall, but he sat down with people from the "in crowd." So I was forced to sit in the seat behind the driver next to Chris.

"Hi Zack," Chris said while shaking his hand violently.

"Hi Chris, please don't talk to me I'm in a bad mood." The truth is I just did not want to talk to him. You see, Chris has a way of being very annoying without knowing it. It makes everyone shun him, even his fellow geeks. So I rode the rest of the bumpy cold ride to school in silence, sensing Chris really wanted to talk to me.

When I departed from the bus, I trugged on into school. I placed my feet very gingerly to avoid slipping. My efforts were useless though, because halfway to my locker I stumbled. I deposited all the books in the locker, save for the dictionary. I headed off to band, it was my first hour class. On the way into the band room, Emily noticed I was carrying my dictionary.

"Well well well," Emily sneered. " The nerd's trying to read through his ass again." Everyone in the vicinity started laughing.

"Emily, you know that is impossible." More laughter. It didn't bother me though, when that happens to you everyday you become oblivious to it. I walked over to my band locker and pulled out my music. I put the dictionary on my seat and the music on a stand. Then I went back to get my tuba. I don't know what caused me to pick such huge instrument, but the teacher wouldn't let me switch to something smaller. I hauled the tuba out of its case, and dragged it to my seat. That was very hard for me, because I wasn't very muscular. In fact, I was rather puny. So for the next hour, I struggled to play my massive instrument.

Our school is very strange, we have block scheduling for one. For two the second semester starts two days before Christmas break. The school board thought that because kids don't work befor break anyway, why not make that the same time as the first days of a new semester, when kids don't work either.

When band was over, I headed to my world history class. It was easy, as it was everyday. PE was hard as always. Then was geometry. Geometry was freakishly easy. We took a pretest that covered the whole years work, so the teacher knew what the class need more work on. I knew every answer, but some how I failed! When the teacher was passing back the tests he stopped in front of my desk. "Very disappointing Zachary, very disappointing."

"An F? HOW could I get and F? I answered all the questions right!"

"That you did, but you didn't do the work yourself. I mean no one can do all the problems with out some written work so you must have cheated."

"But I..."

"Shut it! I've herd it a million times, 'I did it in my head', give me a break."

"Sir, I did. Now before you tell me I’m lying let me prove it to you."

"Go ahead and try."

I sat down in the desk in front of his and waited for him to give me some problems. He handed me a work sheet and I started answering questions. After about a minuet I handed him the paper. He started to read it with a smug grin, but once he understood what I had done his grin vanished. He went to his desk and handed me another work sheet. This one was harder, it was geometry with variable equations for length measurements. It was harder but not hard. I finished and handed the sheet back to him. He read it and started to get angry. He kept giving me harder and harder work sheets. He has given me every level of algebra and geometry when he handed me another sheet.

"Sir, I can’t answer this with out a sheet of scratch paper."

"Hah, I knew there was some thing that you couldn't do that I could!" He said in a patronizing smugness.

"Sir," I started. "This is a collage level calculus work sheet. I requires three prerequisites courses. I only need a piece of scratch paper. Sir, I believe that many of the students that take this course, and their teachers, need the aid of a calculator to do this level of work." He snatched it out of my hands. He stared at the paper for a moment and then at me. All anger out of his face, only awe.

"You can do this without a calculator?"

"Well some of it."

"That’s amazing, I can’t even do this. I keep it around to give to kids who mouth off and brag about being smart. Why are you in this class, your to advanced for it?"

"The councilor said that here wasn’t enough room in the AT class for me."

"AT class! You could pass every final in this school system in a heart beat! You should be taking collage math!"

"Yes I should Sir, but I prefer to stay with my peers and get to each class when I get there."

"Ok, but if you are going to stay in my class then you are not going to waste your time. I will try to give you challenging work and make this insult to your intelligence a little more tolerable!"

"Thank you Sir. Please don’t tell anyone about this though."

I went to go see Marshall and ask him how his day was. When I got to his locker his face was stuck to Nicole’s like a twenty thousand volt electromagnet. I didn’t even try to break them up,

I just left it was so repulsing.

On the way home I was forced to sit next to Chris again. "Hey Zack! Are you going to join the computer club? It starts right after Christmas brake."

"Chris, first technically its winter break because not everyone celebrates Christmas. Two, that club is stupid. Really the work you do is way below me. You just play games and screw around on the internet."

"That isn’t true!" Chris pleaded. "We have been programming too, and building."

"Oh, wow! You guys have stopped playing with teething rings and moved on to alphabet blocks. As for the building, any shmo can put one together, but wiring your own chips is admirable."

"You don’t have to be so mean about it."

"I was not. That analogy was accurate, the work you are doing is rather childish compared to the work I’m doing at home."

"Oh, really! What kind of stuff are you working on?"

Now even though Chris was really annoying, he was still the only person I knew who understood the stuff I talked about. "Ok, so right now I am working on a program to bypass normal functioning."

"How does that work?" Chris asked, practically drooling.

"Well I am trying to work a program that will access information from a distance. I made a USB tab that is simpler to an external hard drive. Only it has a processor. So when I plug it in it barrows power from the main processor. Then it accesses the information of the hard drive with out actually possessing it…"

"So passwords and security instillations don’t do anything!" Chris finished my sentence.

"Right, but it still has a few bugs I need to work out."

The bus came to a halt at my stop. I got off and walked into my house. When I got in I kicked my shoes off and shouted. "Mom I am home!"

"Hi hunny, how was your day?" My mom walked around the corner form the hall wearing her cleaning cloths, her wild red hair tied up in a bandana.

"Fine. I’m going to do my homework. When is dinner?"

"At six. Your dad sent me an e-mail today, you should check yours."

"Thanks mom, I love you."

"Love you too." She smiled and went into the laundry room to get the cloths out of the dryer.

My father works for the navy. He was currently stationed in the Indian ocean on a nuclear submarine. Because there positions need to be classified, he doesn’t get to send email unless he is in port getting resupplied. I opened up his email and read it.

Dear junior, I just got your last email. Kid you are really somethin. You make that general

sound like a total idiot. But then again it isn’t our place to judge his decisions,

still that was pretty funny. Hey, I found out that I get shore leave during spring

break so I thought you might like to go to the museum of even have a tour of

the base. Well whatever the case send back. Love, The DAD-o-nater (The one with the big muscles and a cool mustache) I sent him back an email. It was mostly comprised of code. To most people it would be meaningless garble, but to my dad and I it means a lot. He and I had developed a way to send compressed images as text files. This had two advantages, one no one but us could see it and two, it actually saves space. That means I can send him photos in a small email.

I thought about my dad and how much I wanted him home.

I finished my homework fast and got to work on by hard drive reader. I was working on an algorithm subroutine that would allow the tab to find different routs to the hard drive if one failed. The tab itself was rather impressive. I got my hands on some of the new plastic memory. Plastic memory is a permanent thing, but for the subroutines that the tab would have, it was perfect, mostly because it is a lot smaller than normal memory. The only problem with this tab is that it had to be plugged into the computer who’s hard drive I wanted to copy.

"Sweetie… time for dinner."

As I ran down stairs the savory smell of roast chicken and wild rice flooded by head.