3. Chapter 3
Chapter 3
Sloane
H omeroom is after French class and is organized by our last name. When I get to my room, the teacher is waiting at the door. "Welcome, I'm Mrs. Hyde." She is a petite older woman with short dark hair and a genuine smile, wearing a long navy skirt and plaid blouse with a bow tied at the neck.
"Hi," I smile back, "I'm Sloane Warren."
Mrs. Hyde scans the paper on her clipboard and makes a check by my name. "I have the seats set up alphabetically. Yours will be in the last row on the far side of the room, up against the wall as I only have the beginning of the 'W's'." She points her pen to the far side of the room.
"Thanks," I say as I enter the room and head to find my spot. My name is on a piece of paper in the middle of the row. I actually like that I'm in the last row because I can see the whole room. I sit and watch as my fellow classmates make their way to their seats before the final bell. I've grown accustomed to not having acquaintances in my homerooms over the years. I don't know why, but alphabetically they were elsewhere. At least homeroom isn't long.
After the bell rings, Mrs. Hyde closes the door and welcomes us before going over how things will work in her room. She seems nice and easy-going, so that's cool. After she's done, the morning announcements start with the Pledge of Allegiance. As we all stand at attention, reciting the Pledge, I think back to elementary school. My mind has a tendency to wander. At the very beginning of elementary school, when we had a male principal, they would play the Beach Boys' Good Vibrations as the theme song of the announcements. That might have been the first time I heard the Beach Boys. I loved that song so much. It's nostalgic because it reminds me of elementary school. Looking back, the song in full may not be appropriate for elementary school morning announcements, but it was pretty cool that our principal used it, and he only used the chorus. "Good, good, good, good vibrations." Gosh, those harmonies! And the instrumentation! The Beach Boys made some really beautiful music. If our principal used that song to begin our day with a good start, with good vibrations, it totally worked for me. Maybe that’s where my love of music started?
After the Pledge, a familiar voice resonates through the speakers. "Welcome back, Wildcats!" The booming voice is that of our fellow senior Brian Applequist. Brian is a football and baseball player and is the "Voice of Dunwoody High." He emcees all the events at school like the Mister and Miss DHS competition, the Battle of the Bands, and the morning announcements. Brian and I always seem to be in the same math classes and English last year after I dropped down from advanced to general to have Miss Rockett again. We're not friends but friendly to each other. As I listen to Brian, I recall that he's best friends with Tyler Finlay, the boy who I bumped heads with this morning. Now I'm daydreaming about the dreamiest boy in school again.
Colt Walker, a diminutive blond guy who's on the wrestling team and can be a bit of a troublemaker turns sideways in his chair, "I heard Brian is starting his own TV show on a cable access channel."
I cock my head, snapping out of my daydream. "Really?"
Colt nods. "Yeah, he apparently interned at Channel 2 over the summer and I guess he decided to start his own show."
My eyes grow wide. "Wow, that's cool. Like his own Wayne's World?"
Colt chuckles. "Uh-huh, I guess so."
"I wonder if it'll be funny like Wayne's World." I say as I open my spiral notebook and start doodling.
"Knowing Brian, it'll probably be about baseball, football, or cars."
"That's cool," I say, still doodling.
"But I also heard something about him documenting the lives of high schoolers, so who knows what he's up to."
"Good for him." I mean it, too. People should go after what they really want. It's finding out what you really want that's the hard part, and Brian Applequist seemed to be well on his way to having that figured out at seventeen. How lucky. He's definitely not letting life happen to him.