"Excuses Excuses" by Cori E. R. Trout

"Excuses, excuses." My teachers would say as I turned in mangled math assignments, eaten English, beat-up biology, crinkled creative writing, fractured photography, and horrific history papers. "But it's all true!" I would reply. You know teachers though; they never listen to what you have to say. Well, here is the truth about what happened to all of my assignments that were due today; I even bothered to put it down on paper! They have to believe me this time.

I was walking to my locker after sixth hour to get my backpack. When I opened up my locker there was this weird glowing thing on the back wall, I put my backpack on my shoulders and reached out and touched it. Little did I know at the time that it was a portal to another dimension! Is pulled me in and locked my locker behind me. It thew me out in the middle of the desert.

There were no buildings in site, but one thing I did recognize was the red mountain with the crooked plateau at the top. It was Red Mountain! I walked to the East; at least I think it was the East, all day and night. I got thirsty so I pulled out a box drink that I had in my lunch. As I walked through the night I got hungry. I pulled out my math assignment and chewed off the corner. Before I knew it half of my math paper was gone! What was I gonna tell Mrs. Martin? That I ate my math assignment?! She’d never believe me!

I trudged on throughout the night, and guess what happened? I fell off a 20 foot cliff right into the Colorado River, right at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, apparently I was going West instead of East.

By the time I drug myself out of the river I was soaked, as well as the rest of my assignments, so I emptied my backpack and placed them on various sunny rocks. I even spread out my math and English books to dry. I stripped down to the bathing suit I happened to be wearing and went for a swim, hanging my clothes to dry.

I wasn’t paying too much attention to my stuff while I was washing up, but when I got out of the water a Mountain Lion had decided to make a meal out of the rest of my math as well as the cover of my math book. I left it alone and it eventually walked away. “I’m glad someone likes math.” I said, gathering up my now-dried assignments.

I threw on my shirt and shorts and again put my backpack on my shoulders. I started to climb up the East Side of the Grand Canyon. Guess what? One of the handholds I put my hand in contained another portal, before I knew what was going on I was flying through the portal and short right into the bathroom of a movie theater. I was glad, because I really had to go, but there was no toilet paper. So I ripped a few more pages out of my math book, it was ruined already. Flushing the toilet I walked out.

I looked around and realized that I was in the men’s bathroom! I ran out as fast as I could, but my math book got left behind. Now I couldn’t even re-do my assignment that night. Since I was in the Movie Theater I might as well see a show. I walked into a movie and watched it. Strange, the main character in the movie looked exactly like me.

Once I stepped out of the theater and into the light I was mobbed by people who said they were my “biggest fan”. One pulled out one of my reports and started handing pages out to everyone because I had written (they said autographed) my name on each page. There goes my history report. I thought as I looked on. I darted out of the theater only to find more people! Man! News definitely spread fast here. I then noticed that almost everyone had a cell phone or lab top.

I ran to a fence and started to climb up. More papers were pulled from my backpack. And yet another one of those portals met me on the other side when I jumped down.

That one spat me out down the hall right after the bell rang. So as you can see my backpack is empty, torn-up and now brown. I’m still wearing the same thing as yesterday though it is torn and you can see my bathing suit. Now teacher, listen, that is really, really why I don’t have that paper in today.