The New Kid
A School Story
The new kid’s name was Blaine. He was intelligent, kind of quirky, and he wore glasses with a thin wire frame. One day when he showed up to school, his glasses were busted – snapped down the middle of the bridge. He wore the left half of them – God only knew what happened to the right side.
Naturally, his teachers asked him if everything was okay, if he needed any help with them – if he wanted to move his seat closer.
“Oh, I’m fine. It’s nothing, really,” he replied, again and again, turning red in the face, and shrugging it off throughout the day. “It happens sometimes.” All the kids looked at him funny or laughed behind his back.
Miles Simpson, who sat next to Blaine in Biology, saw the hurt settle somewhere beneath the surface, though.
Blaine showed up for a week straight, still living life through a single lens. Doing this gave him headaches, but it was better than not seeing at all.
“Hey,” Miles said to him one day as they moved back into the lab. “You still have the other half? All the parts?”
“Yeah,” Blaine replied. “The whole frame is messed up, though. Why?”
“Just bring em tomorrow, okay?”
“Uh…okay,” Blaine said. He laughed awkwardly but wrote himself a note to remember.
The following day, at lunch, Miles came into the cafeteria with a mini screwdriver set and a determined look in his eyes. “You got em?”
“I do,” Blaine replied. He slung his backpack to the floor and dug through the front pouch until he fished out the right side of his glasses and a few tiny screws. He handed them over to Miles.
Miles went to work. He had clearly done this before, maybe even to the thick black frames he wore. Blaine watched him.
“And…there you go. Fixed.” Miles handed the glasses back to Blaine.
“Thank you,” Blaine said, holding them delicately, examining them as if he’d never seen them before. “Seriously, thank you so much.”
“No worries,” Miles replied. “It’s happened to me before…I know it’s not much fun. I’m Miles, by the way.”
“Blaine.”
“And I’ve got to say, I was getting tired of looking at you in Bio like that.”
The two teens shared a laugh.
“Who you sitting with?” Miles asked.
Blaine cleaned his lenses. “Me, myself, and I.”
“Come on, man. You want to sit with a few of my friends and me?”
Blaine put his patched-up glasses back on. “That would be awesome.”
The two set off across the cafeteria and slid into a half-occupied booth at the far end.
Thank you for reading “The New Kid” — I hope you enjoyed it.
I’m starting to think we should try to shoot for two monthly writing challenges. Alas, we are still going to aim for our kickoff on Friday, September 30th. The prompt: write a fifty-word story that uses the word “season” or “seasons”. For an extra challenge, begin or end your story with the prompt word. Here are the other guidelines:
Make sure your piece is exactly fifty words. Feel free to use Word Counter or whatever word processor you use.
Write a title with the genre in the first line. (Example: Saving Spellbound, Fiction)
The title does not factor into the word count.
I’m looking forward to reading some “fifties” by the fire!
Have a great weekend, and thanks again for reading my work.
"...living life through a single lens" A lot of people live life through a single lens, don't they - far too many. But this little sweetheart had an excuse. You made me want to know more of his backstory. I love stories of kindness and friendship. Thank you, Justin.
I love how you keep your stories lean. We don’t need to know the cause of the broken glasses. You are so good at using a tight focus on the emotional core of the story