Flash Fiction #10

The idea was used from a random writing prompt generator: "Think about something that happened at school that you will remember for a long time. Tell what happened."

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All throughout my school life from elementary to university, I have always been labelled the shy quiet kid. I sometimes felt that my presence in the class was invisible and nobody really noticed me. One of the few moments where I had the spotlight for 5 seconds was when I wasn't even there. How ironic is that? But because of that, it is something that I won't forget even if I was never there to experience it. My imagination from what a few classmates told me helped create the memory.

On the day I was absent, we had a substitute teacher for math. She was a nice person, but had no control over the students in our class. Some of my classmates had made fun of her behind her back, and even though I admit sometimes it was funny, it wasn't particularly kind to do that. The times before when she was our substitute teacher, I was one of the few students that would quietly do my work and not make any ruckus during class time. On that day, she was doing roll call at the beginning of the class as usual. In previous roll calls, she would call each of our names as it was on the attendance list.

This time when she reached my name on the list instead of calling me by my first name, she said, "Jackems?"

After a moment of silence, she said again, "Is Jackems here? Hello?"

One of my friends that later told me this story replied, "Jackie isn't here today."

The whole class apparently burst in laughter at the nickname for me. The teacher's face turned red in embarrassment and quickly continued on the list after making note that I was absent. If I was there in the class at the time, I too would have turned red but I sort of regret not having that spotlight at the time. Nobody had called me "Jackems" before in my life, but I'm grateful that was the start of the nickname. Why you ask? That is because the person that I now love in my life is calling me that.

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