Poor Little Rich Girl | ✓

Chapter 7: Don't You Know Where You Live?

Chapter 7: Don't You Know Where You Live?

“Today we have a new student.” The male stage-craft teacher, Mr. Cavanaugh according to my schedule, says, clapping his hands together as the bell rings and the students go quiet. “Miss Stephanie Vandergeld.” He says, reading the paper in his hand. “Stephanie, where are you?” He wonders, scanning the room. “Oh, you look new. You must be Stephanie?” Mr. Cavanaugh asks, smiling warmly.

“Yeah, that’s me. It’s just Steffy though.” I correct him.

He takes the pencil from behind his ear, and scratches something out. “Just Steffy.” He repeats, and, I assume, writes it down on the paper. “Everyone that’s Steffy, and we’re all gonna be super nice to her and she’s gonna just gonna love it here. Okay? Now, today we’re gonna be constructing the Garden Scene set for the school’s production of High School Musical.”

Wow, he talks a lot. And really fast. Much more than Ms. Abrams of Kevin. Or was it Keith? The computer apps dude - Mr. West.

“Laurel, you and Steffy can work on the painting. How are you with painting, Steffy?” And he says my name a lot. Like, hello, ever heard of a pronoun?

I shrug, “I’m not Van Gogh or anything, but I can paint I guess.” I say noncommittally.

“Great, Laurel get the girl a smock and be careful. Make sure you get the right kinda white for the fence. It’s not milk white; it’s eggshell white.” He calls after us as Laurel leads me out of the classroom.

This classroom is set on the stage, which I guess is kinda cool, you know, unless you fall off of the stage. Like, you come up the stairs to the stage and across the front there are three doors, three classrooms.

“Don’t you totally just love him?” Laurel asks sarcastically, pulling open a storage closet on the stage and pulling out a smock for me.

“Oh yeah, he’s amazing.” I reply, my tone matching her as I take the smock from her and slip it over my head.

I look down at it, seeing that it’s the color of a nasty mix of eggplant purple and chartreuse green. If this were California and I was at school, we wouldn’t be doing something stupid like painting sets for some stupid play. We had people over at Holcomb - the inner city public school that was about five miles from my private school - do that for us.

And we definitely wouldn’t be doing High School Musical - such an immature, childish performance at such a prestige school. Not that I was a member of the fine arts or whatever they called themselves club, but I was forced to go to some of the performance and I daresay they were even good. Some of them that is. I remember them doing Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth. Wow, thinking back, I think my school may have had a slight obsession with Shakespeare. 

Laurel takes out a smock for herself then redoes her messy bun into an even messier, yet firm messy bus. Messy but firm. Does that even make sense? Like, the words, they’re contradicting each other, aren’t they? Oh well, that’s what it looks like. A messy bun that’s firm in looking like it’s not gonna just fall and flop all around her head. I myself am sporting a cute low ponytail today though, so I leave my hair as is and sigh.

“So what do we have to do exactly?” I ask Laurel as the rest of the class files out of the classroom, Mr. Cavanaugh behind them, giving them their orders on what they need to do today. Sounds more like a boss than a teacher, I think.

“See that ‘fence’ over there?” Laurel says, gesturing to a long plain picket looking fence thing.

I nod, “Yeah, what about it?”