Alexander wasn’t really paying attention to the teacher when he walked in and started rambling. Placed comfortably in the back of the room, Alex was able to pay attention to what really mattered: some Tetris clone on his phone. When he heard the magic word--’paper,’--come from the teacher’s mouth, Alex regretfully slipped his phone into his pocket, mourning the high score he’d never be able to get, and looked up. Colors? Seriously? College? Was he supposed to be thinking about that now…? After highschool!? This was insane. “I’m not a fortune teller,” Alex muttered, looking down at the piece of paper he’d pulled out of his pack, and sighing as he clicked the pen in his left hand, twirling it as he considered the answers to the survey he’d been asked to fill out. “Uh… Green, I guess.” He said, scribbling it down on the paper in his barely legible handwriting.

Letting another breath through his lips, he scribbled down more words onto the paper: ‘College plans? Haven’t thought that far. Should probably get on that. Maybe I’ll just go to my parents’s college, I can probably get in pretty easy on their recommendation, you know.’ He decided, shaking his head as he thought about after highschool… What did he plan to do after all this ended? It was the most structure in his life: get up, go to school, go home. Every day, with work sprinkled in when he was needed at the restaurant, which was becoming more and more often. Placing the pen back onto the paper, he began to write again: ‘Come on, man. I haven’t even thought about college, you think I’ve thought about [i]after high school?[/i] I guess that’s way closer, so I should probably get on that. I’ve always imagined I’ll just hang out in my parent’s basement and play videogames and watch movies and cartoons all day. Maybe get a lil high. Maybe not. Depends on the time of day. In reality, I’ll probably be shipped off to college, forced to [i]work[/i] for a living and actually [i]apply[/i] myself to make sure I get a job that [i]doesn’t suck[/i] and [i]isn’t fun[/i] so my parents aren’t, y’know, [i]totally[/i] disappointed in me.’

He began to fold the slip of paper, when he remembered the last bit he was supposed to write down. One thing he’d like to improve about his high school career… This wasn’t really a career, was it? Shaking his head now, Alex quickly wrote down a few words. ‘I don’t know. I guess I could go for a couple more free periods, that might be pretty cool. Yeah… Free periods. And better lunches. Don’t you think we can afford better lunches here? I mean, I know [i]I[/i] could, if I just took money from my mommy and daddy. But, yo, they feed us the worst food ever.’ He started to fold it again, then grinned and flattened the paper again, this time doodling on it.

Eventually, Alex was satisfied with the drawing, filling in the last few bits with the blue ink of his pen. He’d drawn a man sitting on a lake of ice, sawing a chunk out of it so he could get to ice fishing, with a tiny caption: ‘Hope this breaks the ice well ‘nuff.’ Perfect. [i]Now[/i] he folded it and sat it on the edge of his desk, looking up at the teacher. “Kay, done. Now what?”