It was a dry, hot day in the 6th grade. I had just finished eating my mystery meat and what they seem to call “milk”. I felt like I was drying in the sun like a dying fall leaf. The school bell rang, reminding everyone that the freedom of lunch time doesn’t last forever. I put my backpack down on the delaminated mural near the woodshop room. It must have been there for hundreds of years, for it barely resembles anything of a mural now. As I head into class, I sit down in my old, rusty, scrap metal stool while others stand as there are not enough chairs for all of the kids. As Mr. Moustakas goes through the normal routine, I sit there, looking into the ceiling, at all the left behind wood works. 

     Then, he dismisses us off to work on our projects. Some kids enter the paint room, a once white, clean room but now a vandalized mess that smells like grease and is covered in messages from the kids the years before us in paint. Such happy things written there, new words to discover! Other kids head to the saws, clamp the wood, and hope they don’t cut their fingers off. I head to the drills to put a hole in whatever I was working on at the time.

     I first needed to change the drill on the machine so the hole would be big enough and the project wouldn’t look like a total mess, just somewhat of a mess. I got rid of the previous drill, and inserted the correct one. As I was setting up the machine, I noticed a girl in the distance. She walked up to the machine like nobody was there. My hands were still on the drill making sure it was in place correctly and wouldn't fly and hit a kid in the head when I turned it on.

     What happened next all seemed to happen so quickly. As I realized what happened, it was too late. The girl, with no regard for the people around her, turned the machine on. The drill started to whirl, and as I sat there, in the moment, with my hands still on it, all I could do was look.