"The Student"
Dated: pre-Jurassic period.
Title: The Student
Rating: T just for some language, being that it's Jesse's POV
Summary: Detention at J.P. Wynne, pre-meth partnership
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"Ah. Look who finally decided to grace us with his presence. It's ten minutes before the end of class, Pinkman." Mr. White speaks curtly, but with a weird kind of hostile cordialness, and he watches you with one of those 'teacher smiles' that's anything but friendly.
"I know, man. I missed the bus and I couldn't get a ride." You don't try very hard when you make excuses, because you don't give a shit and you know Mr. White doesn't either. You just want to get the formalities over so you can sit down and wait for detention or something.
"Well, you must want to catch up on all that work you've been missing. That's the only reason I can think of for why you'd even bother coming in today. But that's good, Jesse. You can stay after class."
You just groan and take your seat. That was genius, showing up right before the bell rang. You thought your entrance would be more inconspicuous, but, sadly, it was not. You haven't been to class for three days and you for some reason thought Mr. White wouldn't notice you sneaking in through the only door at the last minute. Pretty dense, even for you. And why did you bother showing up today?
Because... You think, but no answer follows for a good number of moments. You finally decide that maybe you wanted to show that you weren't a lost cause. You're starting to hate the dismissive way Mr. White treats you now, how he seems to be thinking that he's watching a bum in the making every time he sees you goofing around in the corner of his classroom. It's really starting to get under your skin and you want to do something to make him tone it down. Yeah, you'll take that as your final answer. You're here to prove something.
After everybody else leaves, Mr. White gives you a stack of missed work that'd probably be taller than you if you stood next to it.
"Jesus!" You exclaim. "What do you want me to do with this?"
He almost rolls his eyes. "Look through it. Work on it. Have you been gone so long you forgot what to do when I hand you a worksheet?"
You gesture dramatically to the stack placed in front of you. "A worksheet? I got half a goddamn forest on my table."
"Well, don't do it all at once then." He pulls the first few papers off of the stack and slides them in front of you. There's three pages stapled together and when you look down at the first one, you're lost before you even begin. Mr. White taps the textbook on your desk. "Start on page two-nineteen. Tell me if you have any questions."
Mr. White sits down behind his desk to work on what ever it is teachers work on when class is over, slashing "F"s across everything or whatever. You crack the textbook open to a random page and look down at the worksheet again. You take a pencil in your hand and make a big show out of writing your name at the top. You take so much time doing this that when Mr. White looks over at you he probably thinks you're actually working.
You feel sort of guilty about that, so you make up your mind that you're actually going to try this time. Everybody else in class can do it, so there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to. You're going to read over this page and you're going to answer every question even if you don't really know the answers. You figure there must be a lot of guessing in science. You'll be all right.
You flip to page two-ninteen and absently run your eyes over the examples. Ten minutes of staring at the page and you wanna tear your hair out. All the symbols and letters and little numbers beside the letters just look like gibberish. All the questions across the worksheet are blank. The only thing written on the page is 'Jesse Pinkman', scrawled carefully and deliberately at the top. Nothing else on the page looks like English to you, but you're determined to get through this. You've set a goal, and you're supposed to reach it today. You want to finish this goddamn worksheet and see the look on Mr. White's face when you hand it to him. You wanna show him that you're not gonna be a bum. Maybe you aren't a science wizard, but you're not an idiot, and you want him to know that.
Trying to comprehend why Mr. White's opinion of you seems to have such a bearing on your self-esteem sometimes is as difficult as trying to comprehend his stupid chemistry worksheets. You guess you respect the guy. A little bit. It's not just that he's smarter than a lot of people can claim to be. He's also made efforts to be patient with you, he's tried to give you breaks you don't deserve. Mostly you still kind of like him because he doesn't pull that shit calling your house and telling your parents that you haven't been coming into class when you skip a couple of days. Mr. White can handle not seeing you for a couple of days.
You wonder about those days and if Mr. White speculates about what you're doing instead of coming into class for a few minutes before you remember that you're supposed to be on task. Back to work. Yeah, you gotta get crackin'. You put your pencil to the paper under the first question, only to set it down again. The wheels of your mind toil anxiously, but in the end all you can do is look down at the worksheet and be mystified. This goes on for a quite awhile before Mr. White clears his throat noisily, and you figure he's spotted you doing nothing. You look up and give him a combination of an impish grin and a carefree shrug. He tilts the corner of his mouth up like he's trying not to smile. You've disarmed him, but he doesn't really buy your sly confidence. He never does.
"Questions, Jesse?" He asks.
"Nope. I'm good."
He nods, unconvinced, but unwilling to offer his assistance until you confess to needing it. "Get to work, then."
"Right."
You go through the motions of writing something just to make him feel better, but a handful more minutes of racking your brain for any bit of knowledge you might have on the subject of atoms and electrons and Bohr diagrams leads only to stress. Nothing comes to you, nothing at all. You can't remember a single one of Mr. White's lessons in its entirety. Pieces of random lectures drift aimlessly through your memory, but it's nothing you can use. You figure he must have talked about all this stuff at some point, and you must have been here for at least some of it, so you should be able to remember it. There's no reason why you shouldn't be able to.
But you can't. So you give up. You throw in the towel. You are fucking stupid. That's all you've proved by coming here. You rip the first page of the worksheet out and flip it over and start doing the only thing you're good at: drawing. Instead of asking for help and verifying that you're a moron, you make like you don't care about any of this crap, that you could do it if you wanted to, but it just doesn't interest you. You don't care about chemistry, this school, about whether Mr. White thinks the world doesn't need another kid like you. You don't even care if Mr. White's watching you screw around right now or not.
You forget about science completely while the lines and shapes of something that makes sense begins to manifest itself on the back of a page of stuff that you think is totally useless to you. You draw all over the back of that page, like you're validating yourself to it, like you're proving something that way. Mr. White hasn't said anything and you don't know if he sees what you're doing or not, so you just doodle to your heart's content. When you're finished, you get bored, and you're dismayed to realize that the other two hundred and ninety-seven pages of science is still on the table in front of you. You have to find something else to keep yourself away from it, to keep yourself away from having to admit that you don't understand it. At all.
Because you don't want his help. You've had teachers help you before, and it makes you feel small. Mr. White's not really as aggressive as your past teachers, he's not even short frequently, but if you tried to ask for help, that'd probably change pretty fast. You don't retain much, even when you do listen. He'd probably just get frustrated trying to explain anything to you, as you need to be run through things a couple of times until you get it. He'd just wonder why you and he are still trying, still pretending that you have some potential to be something other than a future garbage man.
He also can't wrap his head around why you are the way you are. He's met your parents before, and if asked to describe them, he'd probably say something gay like "They're nice, respectable people." You suppose that's true, they are nice, but they can be so... Overbearing, is that the word? Anyway, they can (and do) drive you crazy with their expectations that you can't possibly live up to, since half the shit they try to get you interested in makes you wanna gag, and they refuse to acknowledge the stuff you do like. Plus they're always putting your friends down and trying to get you to hang out with losers that fit their standards of decent human company. Sometimes all you feel from them is disapproval, about everything you do, and that only causes you to make more mistakes.
But if Mr. White knew any of this, he'd just think you were being whiny, and he'd probably be right. He sees you, a relatively privileged kid from a nice neighborhood and a nice family, who doesn't get bullied and who doesn't have trouble talking to girls or something else dumb like that, screwing around like you do, and it probably makes him wonder what the hell's wrong with 'kids these days'. It probably makes him turn around and heap the pressure to be great in life onto his own crippled little kid, just praying that he doesn't end up like you.
Well, fuck him and his mustache! You get mad thinking about it even though Mr. White hasn't really done anything but occasionally give you that stuffy look that makes you feel like you're no good, like you're worthless. Your parents give you looks like that enough already, and you don't need any righteous teachers trying to get away with doing it, too. You've decided today, once and for all. You hate Mr. White, and nothing he says or does from this point on will affect you.
As a credit to this resolve, you angrily make permanent creases in your stupid drawing, fold it up, ruin it. You don't care about it either. Surely Mr. White has noticed that you're not working by now, but who gives a damn? Not you. You fashion a plane out of that unholy combination of dumb unanswered worksheet questions and a dumb ugly drawing and, without even thinking, you send it flying at Mr. White's desk. It lands right in front of his hand, probably right on top of the work he was just grading.
He looks at you with a mixture of annoyance and disappointment, and then picks up the plane. For what ever reason, he starts to unfold it, and you almost want to jump out of your seat and stop him.
"I hope this is your way of telling me that you're done, Jesse," He says, without interest, and without seriousness. He's expecting to unfold the plane to some crude message or some obscene doodle. He's fully prepared to see something like that, and then to just sigh and tell you to go home. That's all he expects of you, you know it. Bastard.
You put your face in your hand and stare morosely out the window, not even bothering to watch his reaction to that blank worksheet. You're just waiting to be told that you can go now that you've demonstrated that there's no point in you being here.
Mr. White does sigh, quietly, but you hear it, and you get ready to leave when you hear that dissatisfied and impatient noise. That's your school bell. "Jesse," He says, and you gear yourself up for a lecture about applying yourself. He motions for you to come over to his desk and, reluctantly, you do. He lays the page out on his desk, as flat as it can go. "This is a very good drawing." You say nothing. You're perhaps more taken off-guard than you should be, a lot more, because Mr. White almost laughs at your reaction. "Did you do this?"
What a stupid question. A stupid question deserves a stupid answer, even if a smart guy's asking. "Naw, man," You lie carelessly. "That was already there when you gave it to me."
"Oh?"
"Yeah. Somebody else musta done it when you weren't looking."
"Hm." He looks down at the drawing again, with his fist under his chin, looking at it with great consideration. He looks at it for a long, long time. It feels long anyway. Even though you've already told him it's not yours, you linger, like you're waiting for him to say more about it, and, really, you guess you are. After a few more seconds of appraisal, he smiles and shakes his head. He looks back up at you. "Well, who ever did it is very talented. Don't you agree?"
"No," You say quickly. He looks surprised. "That's why I folded it up. It was distracting me."
He sighs again, but it is a different kind of sigh than the kind you usually hear, and it invokes a different but still uncomfortable feeling than the kind you usually get. "Well, I happen to like it," He says, and you watch - probably with the world's dumbest expression on your face - as he carefully folds it back up and starts to put it in his desk.
"Gimme that," You demand suddenly, the words flying from your mouth without your consent.
"Why?"
"'Cause it's mine." You don't want to think of how stupid you must look right now. You don't even really know why you're so embarrassed. Mr. White's using one of the oldest teaching techniques you can think of: pretending to be interested in what you do to establish the kind of rapport that might motivate you to do some schoolwork. It's bullshit. And it pisses you off. So when Mr. White extends the folded up drawing to you, you snatch it and tear it right down the middle. You drop both halves on the floor, but you don't want to look at Mr. White again after you do. You almost want to cry, that's how humiliated you feel, and you're also getting increasingly angry at yourself for being such a pussy. You shouldn't have even come in today. "I'm going home," You tell him, just like it's up to you. Something to save face.
There's no more amusement in Mr. White's voice. Only a sober, dignified tone of understanding, or what he thinks is understanding. "Okay, Jesse. Have a nice weekend."
"Whatever," You mutter. Your unevenly paced footsteps swipe the pieces of paper aside as you trudge back over to your table to retrieve your backpack, which you may as well have left at home. You probably will have a nice weekend, since Badger's been talking up this killer pot he's apparently found, but you probably won't have another comfortable school day with Mr. White again. Not now that you've decided that you hate him, not now that he's condescended to make a few pleasantries about your sketching. The dude's smart as hell, but he really doesn't know as much about people as he seems to think he does.
All the same, you kind of regret your behavior, and you manage to tell Mr. White good-bye before you all but run out of his classroom, hauling your backpack furiously behind yourself. For a second you wonder what Mr. White is going to do with the halves of that drawing. But you stop yourself, because for some reason you think he's not going to throw it away, and that just makes you madder.
Because that's just how much you don't care about what he thinks.
x
Title: The Student
Rating: T just for some language, being that it's Jesse's POV
Summary: Detention at J.P. Wynne, pre-meth partnership
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"Ah. Look who finally decided to grace us with his presence. It's ten minutes before the end of class, Pinkman." Mr. White speaks curtly, but with a weird kind of hostile cordialness, and he watches you with one of those 'teacher smiles' that's anything but friendly.
"I know, man. I missed the bus and I couldn't get a ride." You don't try very hard when you make excuses, because you don't give a shit and you know Mr. White doesn't either. You just want to get the formalities over so you can sit down and wait for detention or something.
"Well, you must want to catch up on all that work you've been missing. That's the only reason I can think of for why you'd even bother coming in today. But that's good, Jesse. You can stay after class."
You just groan and take your seat. That was genius, showing up right before the bell rang. You thought your entrance would be more inconspicuous, but, sadly, it was not. You haven't been to class for three days and you for some reason thought Mr. White wouldn't notice you sneaking in through the only door at the last minute. Pretty dense, even for you. And why did you bother showing up today?
Because... You think, but no answer follows for a good number of moments. You finally decide that maybe you wanted to show that you weren't a lost cause. You're starting to hate the dismissive way Mr. White treats you now, how he seems to be thinking that he's watching a bum in the making every time he sees you goofing around in the corner of his classroom. It's really starting to get under your skin and you want to do something to make him tone it down. Yeah, you'll take that as your final answer. You're here to prove something.
After everybody else leaves, Mr. White gives you a stack of missed work that'd probably be taller than you if you stood next to it.
"Jesus!" You exclaim. "What do you want me to do with this?"
He almost rolls his eyes. "Look through it. Work on it. Have you been gone so long you forgot what to do when I hand you a worksheet?"
You gesture dramatically to the stack placed in front of you. "A worksheet? I got half a goddamn forest on my table."
"Well, don't do it all at once then." He pulls the first few papers off of the stack and slides them in front of you. There's three pages stapled together and when you look down at the first one, you're lost before you even begin. Mr. White taps the textbook on your desk. "Start on page two-nineteen. Tell me if you have any questions."
Mr. White sits down behind his desk to work on what ever it is teachers work on when class is over, slashing "F"s across everything or whatever. You crack the textbook open to a random page and look down at the worksheet again. You take a pencil in your hand and make a big show out of writing your name at the top. You take so much time doing this that when Mr. White looks over at you he probably thinks you're actually working.
You feel sort of guilty about that, so you make up your mind that you're actually going to try this time. Everybody else in class can do it, so there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to. You're going to read over this page and you're going to answer every question even if you don't really know the answers. You figure there must be a lot of guessing in science. You'll be all right.
You flip to page two-ninteen and absently run your eyes over the examples. Ten minutes of staring at the page and you wanna tear your hair out. All the symbols and letters and little numbers beside the letters just look like gibberish. All the questions across the worksheet are blank. The only thing written on the page is 'Jesse Pinkman', scrawled carefully and deliberately at the top. Nothing else on the page looks like English to you, but you're determined to get through this. You've set a goal, and you're supposed to reach it today. You want to finish this goddamn worksheet and see the look on Mr. White's face when you hand it to him. You wanna show him that you're not gonna be a bum. Maybe you aren't a science wizard, but you're not an idiot, and you want him to know that.
Trying to comprehend why Mr. White's opinion of you seems to have such a bearing on your self-esteem sometimes is as difficult as trying to comprehend his stupid chemistry worksheets. You guess you respect the guy. A little bit. It's not just that he's smarter than a lot of people can claim to be. He's also made efforts to be patient with you, he's tried to give you breaks you don't deserve. Mostly you still kind of like him because he doesn't pull that shit calling your house and telling your parents that you haven't been coming into class when you skip a couple of days. Mr. White can handle not seeing you for a couple of days.
You wonder about those days and if Mr. White speculates about what you're doing instead of coming into class for a few minutes before you remember that you're supposed to be on task. Back to work. Yeah, you gotta get crackin'. You put your pencil to the paper under the first question, only to set it down again. The wheels of your mind toil anxiously, but in the end all you can do is look down at the worksheet and be mystified. This goes on for a quite awhile before Mr. White clears his throat noisily, and you figure he's spotted you doing nothing. You look up and give him a combination of an impish grin and a carefree shrug. He tilts the corner of his mouth up like he's trying not to smile. You've disarmed him, but he doesn't really buy your sly confidence. He never does.
"Questions, Jesse?" He asks.
"Nope. I'm good."
He nods, unconvinced, but unwilling to offer his assistance until you confess to needing it. "Get to work, then."
"Right."
You go through the motions of writing something just to make him feel better, but a handful more minutes of racking your brain for any bit of knowledge you might have on the subject of atoms and electrons and Bohr diagrams leads only to stress. Nothing comes to you, nothing at all. You can't remember a single one of Mr. White's lessons in its entirety. Pieces of random lectures drift aimlessly through your memory, but it's nothing you can use. You figure he must have talked about all this stuff at some point, and you must have been here for at least some of it, so you should be able to remember it. There's no reason why you shouldn't be able to.
But you can't. So you give up. You throw in the towel. You are fucking stupid. That's all you've proved by coming here. You rip the first page of the worksheet out and flip it over and start doing the only thing you're good at: drawing. Instead of asking for help and verifying that you're a moron, you make like you don't care about any of this crap, that you could do it if you wanted to, but it just doesn't interest you. You don't care about chemistry, this school, about whether Mr. White thinks the world doesn't need another kid like you. You don't even care if Mr. White's watching you screw around right now or not.
You forget about science completely while the lines and shapes of something that makes sense begins to manifest itself on the back of a page of stuff that you think is totally useless to you. You draw all over the back of that page, like you're validating yourself to it, like you're proving something that way. Mr. White hasn't said anything and you don't know if he sees what you're doing or not, so you just doodle to your heart's content. When you're finished, you get bored, and you're dismayed to realize that the other two hundred and ninety-seven pages of science is still on the table in front of you. You have to find something else to keep yourself away from it, to keep yourself away from having to admit that you don't understand it. At all.
Because you don't want his help. You've had teachers help you before, and it makes you feel small. Mr. White's not really as aggressive as your past teachers, he's not even short frequently, but if you tried to ask for help, that'd probably change pretty fast. You don't retain much, even when you do listen. He'd probably just get frustrated trying to explain anything to you, as you need to be run through things a couple of times until you get it. He'd just wonder why you and he are still trying, still pretending that you have some potential to be something other than a future garbage man.
He also can't wrap his head around why you are the way you are. He's met your parents before, and if asked to describe them, he'd probably say something gay like "They're nice, respectable people." You suppose that's true, they are nice, but they can be so... Overbearing, is that the word? Anyway, they can (and do) drive you crazy with their expectations that you can't possibly live up to, since half the shit they try to get you interested in makes you wanna gag, and they refuse to acknowledge the stuff you do like. Plus they're always putting your friends down and trying to get you to hang out with losers that fit their standards of decent human company. Sometimes all you feel from them is disapproval, about everything you do, and that only causes you to make more mistakes.
But if Mr. White knew any of this, he'd just think you were being whiny, and he'd probably be right. He sees you, a relatively privileged kid from a nice neighborhood and a nice family, who doesn't get bullied and who doesn't have trouble talking to girls or something else dumb like that, screwing around like you do, and it probably makes him wonder what the hell's wrong with 'kids these days'. It probably makes him turn around and heap the pressure to be great in life onto his own crippled little kid, just praying that he doesn't end up like you.
Well, fuck him and his mustache! You get mad thinking about it even though Mr. White hasn't really done anything but occasionally give you that stuffy look that makes you feel like you're no good, like you're worthless. Your parents give you looks like that enough already, and you don't need any righteous teachers trying to get away with doing it, too. You've decided today, once and for all. You hate Mr. White, and nothing he says or does from this point on will affect you.
As a credit to this resolve, you angrily make permanent creases in your stupid drawing, fold it up, ruin it. You don't care about it either. Surely Mr. White has noticed that you're not working by now, but who gives a damn? Not you. You fashion a plane out of that unholy combination of dumb unanswered worksheet questions and a dumb ugly drawing and, without even thinking, you send it flying at Mr. White's desk. It lands right in front of his hand, probably right on top of the work he was just grading.
He looks at you with a mixture of annoyance and disappointment, and then picks up the plane. For what ever reason, he starts to unfold it, and you almost want to jump out of your seat and stop him.
"I hope this is your way of telling me that you're done, Jesse," He says, without interest, and without seriousness. He's expecting to unfold the plane to some crude message or some obscene doodle. He's fully prepared to see something like that, and then to just sigh and tell you to go home. That's all he expects of you, you know it. Bastard.
You put your face in your hand and stare morosely out the window, not even bothering to watch his reaction to that blank worksheet. You're just waiting to be told that you can go now that you've demonstrated that there's no point in you being here.
Mr. White does sigh, quietly, but you hear it, and you get ready to leave when you hear that dissatisfied and impatient noise. That's your school bell. "Jesse," He says, and you gear yourself up for a lecture about applying yourself. He motions for you to come over to his desk and, reluctantly, you do. He lays the page out on his desk, as flat as it can go. "This is a very good drawing." You say nothing. You're perhaps more taken off-guard than you should be, a lot more, because Mr. White almost laughs at your reaction. "Did you do this?"
What a stupid question. A stupid question deserves a stupid answer, even if a smart guy's asking. "Naw, man," You lie carelessly. "That was already there when you gave it to me."
"Oh?"
"Yeah. Somebody else musta done it when you weren't looking."
"Hm." He looks down at the drawing again, with his fist under his chin, looking at it with great consideration. He looks at it for a long, long time. It feels long anyway. Even though you've already told him it's not yours, you linger, like you're waiting for him to say more about it, and, really, you guess you are. After a few more seconds of appraisal, he smiles and shakes his head. He looks back up at you. "Well, who ever did it is very talented. Don't you agree?"
"No," You say quickly. He looks surprised. "That's why I folded it up. It was distracting me."
He sighs again, but it is a different kind of sigh than the kind you usually hear, and it invokes a different but still uncomfortable feeling than the kind you usually get. "Well, I happen to like it," He says, and you watch - probably with the world's dumbest expression on your face - as he carefully folds it back up and starts to put it in his desk.
"Gimme that," You demand suddenly, the words flying from your mouth without your consent.
"Why?"
"'Cause it's mine." You don't want to think of how stupid you must look right now. You don't even really know why you're so embarrassed. Mr. White's using one of the oldest teaching techniques you can think of: pretending to be interested in what you do to establish the kind of rapport that might motivate you to do some schoolwork. It's bullshit. And it pisses you off. So when Mr. White extends the folded up drawing to you, you snatch it and tear it right down the middle. You drop both halves on the floor, but you don't want to look at Mr. White again after you do. You almost want to cry, that's how humiliated you feel, and you're also getting increasingly angry at yourself for being such a pussy. You shouldn't have even come in today. "I'm going home," You tell him, just like it's up to you. Something to save face.
There's no more amusement in Mr. White's voice. Only a sober, dignified tone of understanding, or what he thinks is understanding. "Okay, Jesse. Have a nice weekend."
"Whatever," You mutter. Your unevenly paced footsteps swipe the pieces of paper aside as you trudge back over to your table to retrieve your backpack, which you may as well have left at home. You probably will have a nice weekend, since Badger's been talking up this killer pot he's apparently found, but you probably won't have another comfortable school day with Mr. White again. Not now that you've decided that you hate him, not now that he's condescended to make a few pleasantries about your sketching. The dude's smart as hell, but he really doesn't know as much about people as he seems to think he does.
All the same, you kind of regret your behavior, and you manage to tell Mr. White good-bye before you all but run out of his classroom, hauling your backpack furiously behind yourself. For a second you wonder what Mr. White is going to do with the halves of that drawing. But you stop yourself, because for some reason you think he's not going to throw it away, and that just makes you madder.
Because that's just how much you don't care about what he thinks.
x