The sound of pens and pencils scratching on paper filled the classroom.
Everyone stared down at their desks silently as a familiar tension filled the air.
We were all hard at work on our history exam. We were in the middle of finals, and once they were done, we would be that much closer to summer break.
History was my last subject…so this was the final test standing in my way.
A little over forty minutes had passed since we sat down, and I’d already finished the test and checked over my answers. We had sixty minutes to complete it, so there were still around fifteen minutes left.
I had all that time, but nothing to do. If I had the talent, I could’ve doodled on my answer sheet. But the only thing I could draw was stick figures and passing the time stamping out stick figures didn’t sound very fulfilling. In fact, it’d probably feel like an even bigger waste of time.
If I started looking around the room, the teacher might think I was cheating. So, in the end, I just decided to put my head down on my desk and wait.
When I did, a strange feeling came over me. I didn’t like staying up late, and I was the kind of person who went to bed early, at the exact same time every night. So I almost never got sleepy at school and almost never put my head down on my desk. In other words, this was a pretty rare move for me.
Since it felt even weirder to keep my eyes open, I decided to close them. My vision went dark, and a red silhouette flickered in the blackness, like the afterimage of the light filling the classroom. As I watched it flicker—though, I suppose I wasn’t really “watching” it since my eyes were closed—my mind began to grow hazy, and I found myself dozing off even though I wasn’t sleepy.