Computer Class – A Short Story

The mornings began with prayer and announcement. They all stood up as the principal’s voice greeted us over the intercom system, stretching and yawning since classes started at 7:45. A song would follow, and we would all sing the hymn before sitting down to the first-class period of the day: religion. Math would follow, and then it would time for language arts, before lunch.

The second floor was home to the older kids, the fourth to eighth graders. We never saw those teachers and students, usually, during the day. These older students seemed like gods among men. They were infinitely bigger, wiser, better at coloring. Last week, the sixth graders had come to help us prepare our science fair projects. My partner was a tall, brown-haired fellow named Mithran. I watched him draw lines on our poster board. They seemed impossibly straight to me. “Draw a mark here, about 3 inches long,” he told me. I wasn’t sure how long that was without a ruler, but he marked the board confidently. “Just between here.”

“Will I be able to tell how many inches a line is without a ruler someday? How did you do that?” I asked, struggling to draw my line perfectly. It still came out wonky.

“Oh yeah,” Mithran said, breezily. “Comes with practice.”

It didn’t seem all that simple to me.

“Look at you two!” The sixth-grade teacher had approached us and snapped a picture for the school newsletter. “You could be siblings!”

Mithran and I looked nothing alike, in my opinion. We were both the only Indians in our grades but that was where the similarities stopped. I looked suspiciously at the teacher as she congratulated Mithran on being a helpful partner. Mithran gave me a strange look. “You good, Nithya?”

Second grade had been filled with confusion for me. There was some difference between myself and the rest of the class, but I couldn’t quite understand what it was. I was also beginning to realize there was a whole lot that I didn’t know about the world. The metric system and trying to memorize the times tables had laid bare to me my own inadequacies.

Once a week, during language arts, we went upstairs to the computer room on the second floor. Here, the Computer Teacher taught us about the marvels of Microsoft Word. “Today,” she began, “we’re going to practice typing. Everyone, type your name here, on the first line of the page, where the cursor is. Find your letters on the keyboard like we practiced!”

We all began typing our names, using fun fonts like Curlz MT and Apple Chancery. Walden Waters used the Dingbats font, of course. Next to me, Sherry beamed as she highlighted her name in bright pink. Matthias, on my right, was busily making alternating letters bold. My name was the only one in the room underlined in a wobbly red line. My neighbors stopped to look at it.

The teacher approached me to look. “Herculanum, nice font, Nithya. It’s underlined because your name just isn’t in the dictionary.”

Different, I thought. Unique! My name looked just as cool as everyone else’s. 🌹