The Protagonists

JO >>> 01

"Show honor now, show a stony heart and sink them with it!"

-Arthur Miller, The Crucible

 

High School Musical got it all wrong.

High school is not a stage. There is no spotlight trained on you and there is no audience to cheer you on, no matter how loudly you sing or how gracefully you dance. There is no happily-ever-after followed by a curtain call, only a never ending stream of work and stress followed by more work and more stress.

High school is more akin to a battleground. Students grapple among each other in order to survive and, for some, to thrive. There are those who barely keep from drowning, but there are also those who easily keep their heads above water. The latter are the ones who arm themselves with skills ranging from state-level athletics to impeccable fashion senses. Their superior skills act as superior weapons, and they dominate the top tier of high school.

In this ruthless round of survival of the fittest, Josephine's weapon of choice is her silver tongue. She can soften her words to induce even the front row of a crowd to lean forward in anticipation and she can lead words into crescendos billowing out to touch even the coldest and furthest of hearts. She can even transform words into almost tangible spearheads, sharpening them into deadly points to penetrate the spirits of her opponents.

Josephine is a force to be reckoned with and the impressive number of trophies and awards she has garnered from past debate tournaments can attest to this fact. Her peers know it, her teachers know it, the whole world knows it, and most important of it all, she herself knows it.

This knowledge gives her the kind of confidence that allows her to sit in the uttermost front and center seat of her English class with her chin held high. It doesn't matter that the class is useless due to the incompetent teacher in charge. What matters is that Josephine dominates in this class, and she makes sure to remind people of this fact through planned seating arrangements, hopeless sighs at their stupidity, and extreme class participation. Little things, but these are the things the makes Josephine the fearless winner she is.

Said fearless winner knows a lot of things. What she will never understand however, is why their English teacher bothers attempting class-wide Socratic seminars anymore. At this point, it would be more apt to name them 'Josephine rants for 30 minutes while the rest of the class plays Candy Crush on their phones'.

Today Mrs. Harrington must be feeling especially desperate, because she tries to threaten her students into participating. She reminds the class that this activity will be graded as a test grade so it will be equally hard to recover from a big fat zero, but half the class is already pulling out their phones.

The only person who seems to straighten at Mrs. Harrington's pitiful attempt of a scorning is Benjamin Fallow, but he doesn't count. He's the type of person who would jump off a cliff if an authority figure requested it.

Josephine watches the boy with an unimpressed look on her face. He fumbles pitifully as he shuffles through a stack of note-cards covered in his minuscule hand written notes. Her full lips pull into a disdainful frown as she takes in his lanky figure and the unsure smile he offers her when he catches her staring. She responds with her signature condescending look (one raised eyebrow, tilted chin by an approximately fifteen degree upwards angle, and a slight wrinkle of her nose), which causes him to drop his smile and nervously turn his attention back to the flashcards in his hands.

Pathetic. She is sure that he won't last long against her, if he dares to participate. Not even his encyclopedia-like notes or aspirations for a perfect grade point average could make up for his lack of spine.