Forgetful Timothy

A Story by DerryTheGret

A story about this boy who can't seem to keep his grip on life. Join him through his hilarious adventure through school. Wow, doesn't that sound like a story you would want to read m8?

I was a bit more nervous about performing than I should have been.

It was getting to the point where I couldn’t walk without my legs shaking worse than my oldest brother’s sub woofer shook his car. I don’t really favor the idea of the whole show I was about to put on for the fifty parents that couldn’t care less about how terrible their kids act.

Someone opened the door behind me.

“Twenty minutes to showtime,” a female voice said.

I sighed a reply. The door closed quickly. Was that Sandra? Maybe it was Caroline. Isn’t she the director? I guess I should have showed up to one of the practices. Well, it could be that girl with the brown hair. What was her name? Amber? Bailey? No, I think its Hailey. Yeah, that's her name. I remember back in the beginning of the year, the teacher always pronounced her name a weird way. She always had trouble pronouncing English words. Actually, I don’t think names are considered English. I guess you could be named after an English word, but I don’t know anyone named Frog, Hat, or even Refrigerator. Well I know the neighbors have a dog named Panda. How is that supposed to work? You know…

My thoughts continued until I concluded that nine pizzas are better than four tater tots. I looked at my watch. Five minutes until curtin. I’ve missed fifteen minutes of script studying time. I’m used to distracting myself on accident.

Focus, Tim, I thought in my mind in a deep voice. Go get dressed and show these parents they still came out here for nothing.

This thought encouraged me to go and get ready. Five minutes pass and I’m almost to the stage. I go in on the fourth scene and stay until the thirty seventh scene. I’m not sure why it’s so long, I don’t even know what this play is about.

I step onto the stage. The stage is set up in a medieval way. Maybe we are doing Karate Kid. Most parents stare at me, the rest are talking and sleeping. George, my best friend, is on the stage dressed up as a king. I walk to him.

This must be the part of the movie where Daniel is knighted like his father was, four years earlier. I concluded.

I reach George and he says his line in a deep commanding voice. “John, I want you to go and find the one and true powerful God.”

“Sure thing George,” I said, mocking his tone. “I’ll make sure I bring my Bible for reference.”

The king laughed nervously. “Uh… I am not certain what thou means by George, My na-”

“Yeah, yeah.” I interrupted. “What should I call you, Mr. Miyagi?”

This gets a few people in the audience laughing. Hailey is motioning for me to get off stage. So is everyone else on the stage, even a few people in the audience.

Some kid with bleached hair came out from behind the curtain and tried to pull me off stage. I think he is like eight or nine, all I know is he is younger than me. He is wearing a shirt that had the single word Hollister on it.

That must be his name, I thought. I don’t remember this part of the movie. Shrugging it off, I pushed Hollister down.

“Slow it down, Hollister,” I laughed.

Still assuming that we were acting out Karate Kid, I start to do the finishing move Daniel does towards the end of the movie. I bring my foot forward, and fall down like Charlie Brown when kicks the football. Everyone in the audience laughed.

A few minutes later, the theater teacher, Miss Jolly, was scolding me for not even bothering to learn anything about the stupid play. I scolded her back for being a worse teacher, but then she started to complain about how talking back to a teacher is “not respectful” and “extremely rude”.

I completely zoned out after she started to gripe about her pay and how she strongly dislikes her job. I don’t understand, why you would lean towards a profession that you hate and never research the details to the job in the first place?

“How is it my fault that you are a teacher?” I complained. “It’s not like you accidentally come to school everyday!”

Well, I regret saying that. To make a long and painful story short, she gave me a detention for tomorrow. That’s the way I’ve always wanted to spend my Wednesday.

She then told me to go find my parents and give them the bright pink detention slip. I couldn’t find them, the hallways were crowded full of parents congratulating their kids for trying, even though most of them didn’t even see the spotlight.

I opened my backpack and pulled out a Sharpie. I then scribbled “McGlunt” on it. I then pulled over to the entrance of the school and held it as high as the Statue of Liberty holds the torch. My parents passed me after five minutes, and were looking straight forward, sweating.

I can’t blame them for being embarrassed. Turns out, I spelled our last name a bit wrong, because I actually wrote George’s last name. Now I was left at school, without transportation home. So I walked outside, not sure what to find. I strolled about, asking other kids parents whether or not I could ride with them.

In the end, I got to borrow a bike off of a guy’s RV. And I had pedal for forty five minutes straight until I got home.

I put the bike on the porch and tried to open the door. Locked. I tried the window next to it. Locked. I walked around the house and tried the back door. Locked. Of course, who doesn’t lock their doors. I walked back to the front.

Wait a second, I thought. I just had a wild idea.

I looked at the garage door. The automatic lift system never worked, but it was connected to the house and the best way for me to get in. I slipped of my backpack and grabbed the school’s laptop I was borrowing. This is going to be a rush. I slammed the laptop into the garage door and made a small dent in the door. The laptop though was smashed to bits. The school can’t be mad at me for that, I signed Henry’s name when I checked out the computer.

I dug through the contents of the backpack once more. Nothing useful, of course. I stepped backward and looked at the house. I always left my window unlocked, but it was on the second story. I guess there is a first time for everything. I went over to my neighbor’s trash cans and dug for something for a homemade ladder.

Cardboard, paper towels, random food containers, and a large blob of oozing green stuff at the bottom of one of the sacks were just a couple of things I found in there.

“This just won’t do,” I complained to myself out loud. “I need something good.”

I looked around for a couple of minutes before I found a small tree with wooden boards leaning against it. I personally thought that it would be the solution to the problem. It wasn’t. It went down like this: I uprooted the tree and brought it over to my house. I leaned up against the wall. Then I started to climb the tree, which was not the best idea. The tree snapped, leaving me in the hands of gravity.

I laid there in pain, covered in bruises and One Direction’s newest song playing in my head. It was well after dark before I decided to go and retrieve the spare key in the fake rock we have. I walked over to the hiding spot, astonished it wasn’t there! It didn’t help that we put in our gravel road.

Don’t try this next part at home kids. Unless you have a responsible person that can stop a car whenever they choose.

I went out in the road and picked up every rock, tested it, and threw it in a pile in our lawn. When I finally found it, we had a new lawn ornament the size of our house, and now everyone can’t complain about the gravel roads. Also, as a bonus, Dad didn’t have to mow half the front lawn now.

I opened the rock and found the key to the door. I didn’t really feel like moving anymore, so I just shoved the key in my pocket and slept in the road.

I opened my eyes. There was a blue sky and an older woman standing over me. I rubbed my eyes and stood up.

The lady started screaming at me, “Don’t get up! You could hurt yourself! What happened to you? You were just laying there in the road, did you get hit by a car? Are you hurt at all? How many fingers am I holding up? Can you . . .”

The lady obviously didn’t think about the situation at all. I mean, would I get hit by

a car and just shrug it off, like it was nothing? No, of course not, who would?

This lady is starting to get on my nerves. She looked a bit familiar, maybe a neighbor or part of the police squad. Have I seen the police squad recently? Maybe I have, I just don’t remember. Well, I did see them at school once . . . Oh no, I forgot about school! I have a detention to serve.

I bolted down what was once the road, and checked my watch.

Twenty minutes late, I scolded myself. My first period teacher was not going to be happy about me being tardy to class for the sixth time. Well, all I can tell is that she is going to be mad at me.

Finally, after two hours, I arrived at the school. I walked up to the doors and went through the automatic wheelchair doors. Mrs.Jamie, the office lady, scowled at me and asked where I was.

“I was . . .” I faltered. I did not want to say what I had actually done. Two weeks ago, I used this as an excuse for being late to 2nd hour.

“I was at home sleeping, right? And then my mom comes in my room, missing her keys. I got out of bed, did four hundred sit-ups, and proceeded to help her find them. After a hour, she gave up and asked me to hot wire the car. I was like ‘Wow, I don’t know how to do that.’ She gave me a pat on the back and a cookie while telling me I could do it. That got me motivated enough, and I tried to do it. Turns out, fingers don’t really work as keys. So she decided to skip this week and live off Dad’s paycheck.”

Mrs.Jamie looked at me as if I were a vulture eating a dog. “Right. Timothy, your story tells me that you made no effort in going to school. Was it because of that play?”

“Yeah,” I was getting impatient with the woman. I needed a pass to get to class. “Can I go?”

“Yes, but this will be on your record and will add another hour to your detention sentence,” she said as she handed me a pass.

“Okay, whatever.”

I left her and made my way to my locker. 34-0-44.

I pulled up on the latch. It didn’t open. I put in the combination again. That didn’t work either. I knocked on a nearby teacher’s door. By the looks of her classroom, she was a gym teacher. I could tell by the poster in the back of the room with a quote and somebody racing. Why a gym teacher would have math textbooks, though, can never be answered.

She whipped open the door. She was old, with a large frown.

“What do you want? I was in the middle of teaching a class! What could be so important right now?”

I gave her the most appropriate smile. “Well, I was missing something from class, and the teacher told to go get it. It is kind of important.”

“What is it?” she asked with a deadly tone.

“Well...It’s...It’s a signed Michael Jackson guitar. Signed by Michael himself. I need it for Show and Tell.”

She looked at me funny. “In middle school? I don’t know anyone who does that.”

“Nah, a lot of people collect guitars, especially ones with autographs. And now you know someone who does own one.” I gestured to myself for full effect.

“No, I meant…” she sighed. “Let’s just get this out of your locker.”

She went back into her classroom for a few minutes, and came back out. She told me that I was to wait for the office person. They were going to unlock my locker.

I waited two minutes before someone came. Turns out, Mrs.Jamie was the one with locker keys.

“Forget something Timothy? Maybe you need to stop buying guitars, and study more. Now which locker is yours?”

I pointed her in the direction of my locker. She opened it with ease, but not before I realized that the locker wasn’t mine.

I shrugged. “Whoops.” Not my fault though. The school told me I couldn’t paint my locker, because all the lockers had to stay the same color.

After the whole locker mess was sorted out, I grabbed my stuff and headed to class. It was going to be an interesting day.

I arrived to my third hour class, history, in time for Mrs.Power to yell at me.

To sum it all it up, she was frustrated because I failed to show up for the explanation of whatever we were studying. She proceeded to tell me anyway.

“Today, we were starting the introduction to…” She kept blabbing, so I zoned out.

Why do we call it zoning out? Isn’t a zone like a plot of land or something? What if our minds were the zones and when we zone out, we rezone our thoughts. That sounds cool. I’m going to have to write that one down, you never know how useful that could be. Where exactly did I put the list? Was it under my nightstand or the couch? Oh, no. I think I left that on my bed. What if my parents saw that? Wait, there’s nothing to hide on that paper. They would die laughing if they read that. I don’t think they’ll actually die laughing, but there is a possibility. What if-

“Timothy!” Mrs. Power screamed in a stern voice. My name echoed through the halls. A few doors opened simultaneously. “I don’t need to tell you everything if you are not going to pay attention!”

I replied a bit too fast. “But you should be used to this kind of stuff, you’re married. Aren’t you married?”

“Yes, Timothy,” she answered, dragging her hands through her hair almost as if she were stressed. “I am married. Not that you need to know that. Now, if you will not bother to listen, I will let you go back into class and figure out your studies yourself.”

Despite I hated her more than giant flying killer wasps, I felt I owed her an apology.

“Don’t worry Mrs.Power! I’ll try better next time.”

We walked back into the room. I went over to my usual corner where I mess around with my friends. I was also facing the opposite direction than the teacher. This enables me to talk all I want and not get caught. Lucky me.

This month in history, we’re learning about the Constitution. Not that I need to know much about it. I mean, it is good to know what rights you have and stuff. That would only take a week to learn, at most. If we took out the stuff we didn’t need to learn, that would take a year out of high school. Maybe even two, if we’re lucky. I guess it wouldn’t affect college much though. The main reason for college is to learn what you need to know. If that’s true, why do people skip college? They already went through the boring review stuff in high school, why skip out on the one opportunity to learn something useful? There are people, though, that make millions of dollars without going to college. I remember an article that said that the founder of Kodak is, like, super rich, and he dropped out of high school. How that stuff happens though, I have no idea. It must take awhile to become a millionaire because Uncle Joe-

“RING!” the bell screamed at the students. I could swear the bell got progressively louder throughout the day. Maybe it was to keep the students safe.

As I walked out, I realized what class was next.

Band.