Avalanche, or The Red-Faced Planet

In elementary school, I developed an appreciation for the skillful art of procrastination. Waiting until a calculated moment to begin a school assignment, I would normally spend long present moments in the rapture of impetuous youth (say, playing video games and reading comic books) while willingly conceding that short expanses of space and time in the future would be anxiously and feverishly consumed completing an impending assignment. I began this habit initially because of complacency towards my assignments but continued it indefinitely because I always excelled using the described method. In the third grade, the woman I called a teacher also happened to be called a mother by another student in my same grade but of a different class. He was regarded by his teacher as an intelligent creature, much as I was also considered myself at the time, and students sometimes talked between classes about which of us was more intelligent. Near the end of the year, after I had "gone steady" and "broken up" with a girl from my third grade class, my teacher assigned each individual student an aspect of the solar system from which each student was to present to the class an oral presentation. To me she assigned the planet Mars. As normal, I burned the last hours of the night before the assignment due date engaging in Mortal Kombat and relishing in the illustrated tales of Mutants who were hated and feared. I set my alarm that night with the intention of waking up at 3 AM and completing the Mars assignment before my class began at 8:30 AM, a feat which would have easily accomplished had I not unintentionally set my alarm for 3 PM the next day. I awoke the next morning to the sound of my parents preparing for work at 6 AM, which at once registered to me that I had failed to rise at the intended time and that I had an extremely limited amount of time from which to prepare the presentation. Jetting around the house as stealthily as possible to avoid alarming my parents, I managed to secure an empty shoe box which I imagined could suspend in its vacuous interior an orange I had taken from the fridge by a piece of yarn I took from the sewing materials of my mother. Having been unable to construct the model before I caught the bus to school, I attempted frantically to piece it together through the rhythmic shaking motion of the Big Cheese but realized in consternation that I had not obtained the means to secure the yarn to one inner side of the box nor the means to secure the yarn to the orange. When I arrived at school, the elaborate model and presentational designs of other students struck me repeatedly like a boxer who had quickly gained the advantage and, like one who sadistically continued pummeling an opponent even after the declared KO, I was unable to construct any model more impressive for the assignment before I heard my teacher call my name to begin my presentation. I stood up in the front of the class, the girl whom I had broken up with facing me in anticipation that I would confirm why she ever liked me, and held up the box I had brought with me. Inside the box, the orange rolled around lazily in response to the gravity of Earth, impotent as a symbol to convey relevant information about the planet Mars; information like how Mars was suspended in space around the Sun, how its size and relational distance to the Sun compared to other planets, or even simply (as the fruit reflected orange light instead of red light) the color many people would cite as a common titular reference to Mars as the "Red Planet". I stammered through the few uncertain facts I had attempted to memorize about Mars, the while trying at once to display and obscure the destructively insufficient model I had created. This markedly unprepared presentation having been completed, I shrank back into my desk. Increasingly millisecond by millisecond I felt an awkward silence condensing in the room around me, as if the room were a bowl containing a liquid gelatin mixture which was congealing in the cold response to my presentation. The girl I had broken up with was flushed in the face and avoided revealing her embarrassment for me by similarly avoiding eye contact with me. Nervous giggles bounced around the room like 25 cent rubber balls with impossible momentum. The teacher looked sternly at me, as if to confirm that every one of those ballistic giggles should strike my face as red as that of the girl avoiding my gaze and the surface of the fourth planet from the Sun. She then pronounced in earshot of every tympanic membrane of the local universe, "Phillip, I am disappointed in you."