Characterization Piece

I sat quietly in class, staring at the chalkboard as the teacher went on and on in her monotonous ways. Suddenly, the door swung open and a man none of us had ever seen before appeared. The whole atmosphere of the room immediately changed completely. The teenager, seventeen as I would learn later, entered the room with a big grin across his face. The boy, without saying a word, strolled towards an empty seat in the back. He seemed to have a hop to his step as he walked with his long hair moving every such way under his large flat-brimmed hat. This seemed to make me sick to my stomach. It was when he sat down that I realized the whole room had been staring as well, not in disgust, but in curiosity. Only the teacher seemed to know what was going on.

As my mother would have put it, the boy dressed a little bit differently than others from North Salem High School. He wore bright pink and yellow shoes along with his baggy, dark-blue jeans. The hat, now that I could see it up close, was white and yellow and contained a logo of the Washington Nationals, a terrible baseball team from Washington that nobody from New York would ever root for. After a few seconds, the boy removed the hat and his long, curly, and brownish hair was uncombed and jutted around in all different places, but it didn’t seem to bother him one bit. Then, out of surprise, but happiness, the bell rung and everyone went on with their day, as I still wondered about the unpredictable event that had just so quickly occurred.