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I THINK THIS IS IT!

SHE’S APPROACHING!

YES! THE ANSWER IS YES!

Length: Short

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Last October, I gave a special assignment to my sixth period Literature Arts class on the Friday before Halloween. The instructions were simple. Write a story or poem that is scary, about anything as long as it is school appropriate. That meant no excessive use of gore, no vulgarity, no sexual content, and no overwhelmingly descriptive violence. Just scary enough to horrify me.

They took it as a challenge. Well, most of them anyway. I taught a class of teenagers and as with all high school classes, not all of them worked. Some talked and laughed with their friends or focused on sending texts back and forth or watched YouTube and Netflix. Classic teenager stuff.

To be fair, there were a few students who actually worked on the assignment during the period.

Anyway, after the bell for seventh period had rung and my students left for their next and final class of the day, I read over their papers. A majority of them were unfinished sentence fragments and paragraphs detailing cliche horrors. The Slender-man. Ghost girls crawling up from underneath little children’s beds and out of closets. Killers who wore masks and went after teenagers. A girl having a rattlesnake slither up her throat. Monsters already seen in countless horror films and stories and shows. Nothing too original, mind you.

Only one stood out of the pile. It was written by one of my least social students, Amanda Gonzalez, a brown eyed, black haired Latina girl who kept to herself. The other students didn’t like her, not all of them but enough for her to keep her hand down when I asked for volunteers. They threw racial slurs at her. I didn’t help because I didn’t see any malice to it. Almost everybody in our southern town throws those words around without a care.

As I read what she had wrote, my face went cold. It was only a single sentence.

“I’m sorry Mr. Richard, but I don’t want to hear those names again.”

A few seconds later, the first gunshot rang out from down the hallway.

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