1
Singh
Ishmeet Singh
English 71
23 October 2018
The Shark Tooth - Draft
“'Cause you make me feel like, I could be driving you all night, And I'll find your lips in the street lights, I wanna be there wi—” The upbeat and happy music stops as I hit the snooze button on my too-bright iPhone 5c and drop it somewhere on my bed. My hand frantically searches the bed right after (seriously, how far could this little yellow device have gotten?) and I pick up my phone again and look at the time: 06:30. My head reevaluates my priorities, and I wonder whether I could just forget about school and my countless responsibilities; maybe I could just fall back asleep… Heck, maybe I could just skip high school and not go to college.
Amidst these bizarre morning thoughts of mine, I fell asleep again. I woke up to a jerk; my mom trying to pull my blanket off of me and was panicking about how late I was. In my mind, it had only been an extra five minutes of sleep, things were fine. Upon opening my eyes again, my clock fast forwarded a whole hour. It was 07:30. I had twenty minutes to get up, get ready, and get to school. My already pessimistic mind didn’t help my mood one bit—I woke up grumbling, “I hate my life.”
I got to school late and embarrassed myself on my way into my first period world history class. How, you ask? My backpack strap got stuck in the doorknob and as I tried to walk in, I stumbled backwards and slammed the door. I could feel everybody’s gaze on me as I, the incompetent mess, slid into my seat all the way across the room. I felt a hard tap on my shoulder and heard a loudly whispered, “Hey Ish!” My cross face turned to hear we’d finally gotten our World War I exam scores back. Of course, I get the test score back that I’d been dreading for the past month the one day I walked in late. I got up, shuffled to the teacher, and I saw my C. It was barely 9 am and my day already made me want to hide away.
At this point in my life, it seemed like rough days were just becoming a common occurrence. Something went wrong every day—I never got a break, and it was taking a toll on my health. My friend was visiting from Canberra, the capital of Australia, and we were talking nonstop, taking full advantage of our time zones being the same once again. He was getting minute by minute updates of my miserable morning and by the end of first period, he’d sent me a grey bubble that I thought would turn my day around: “Want me to come pick you up? Ditch class today, let’s go hang at Mavericks.” Little did I know, this small gray text would have an impact on me for the rest of my life.
Jordan showed up a long ten minutes later in his blue Subaru. He had two shortboards laid out from the middle seats to the trunk, his wood-colored one and my bright, multicolored one. Ironically, a shortboard is one of the highest performance surfboards made and generally easier to manage than other types of boards[footnoteRef:1], and I was thinking about how nice it’d be if my mood ...
