The Yellow Umbrella

Chapter Four: Last Friday

Seeing her made my brain dizzy. Was this infatuation?

"Talking about the football game. Didn't win I heard." I smiled.

Mia wagged her finger at me, "Jake Morrow, I know you don't like football."

With that, she skipped into the building, a cream colored purse bouncing on her hip.

Wyatt yanked my passenger door open with a creak, "I need details, now!"

I grabbed my grey messenger bag and hopped out of the car. "Time will tell. Now I gotta get inside before Pona kills me."

I headed inside, Wyatt trailing behind me. I knew it was driving him insane, the secrecy, but there was just so much to tell and I didn't even have words to describe my happiness.

"Yeah lucky you, the video production studio is right there, I have to cross buildings to get to Chinese." Wyatt grumbled.

My school was split into two buildings, the East and the West. Between them was the bus parking lot. So if you had a class in the East, you had to go outside and cross, whether it was swelteringly hot or hailing full sized cats. For the most part, freshman owned the East and upperclassmen ran the West, but language classes were still in the East and most electives were in the West. There was no reason behind it other than to completely annoy the hell out of students.

Turning the corner, I saw Mr. Pona in an instant. Pona, as most of us called him, was single handedly one of my favorite teachers I had ever had. He was a bit on the heavy side and had a brown beard that wrapped across his face. After taking three years of video production with the goofy yet sadistic humored man, I applied to be a student teacher for him as an elective to kill some senior year credits. Basically, I got to spend forty-five minutes every morning being his bitch.

"Whatcha doin?" Pona said in a mock high pitched voice.

"Sup Pona." I nodded and walked inside, "I'm gonna be in the studio working on stuff."

"Okay," He called, "But Dowd man wants you to import those clips from the green house interview."

Dowd was the other video teacher who's existence I enjoyed just as much as Pona's. They were a dynamic duo, like the funny brothers on a sitcom. We even had this joke that they were secretly lovers. While Pona had a more relaxed approach, Dowd once sent a series of angry emails to a film festival because they didn't pick our classes' film. The film eventually got in, but our school wasn't welcome to enter any future contests after that.

I crossed through the empty classroom to the door in the back that led to my favorite place in the whole school, the TV studio. There were so many reasons to hate Southern Regional High School, but we had the coolest video program in the district. Concealed behind a thick navy curtain, was a green screen with a mini stage set for students and video club kids. Any video was possible with the wild prop closet exploding with the most obscure and random costumes. I spent about four free periods a day there, whether it was watching movies in the corner or doing interviews for our school's television station, STV. The room adopted me, it became my home away from home.

I slid my beat up laptop out of my bag, sat down, and started typing. I had all these stories and thoughts cluttering my mind everyday and I needed a way to let them out. There were only two things I was truly passionate about, writing and filmmaking. Yes, I know, both are very hard to make into a career, but I could not imagine myself ever doing anything else. Let me tell you, my dad was not very pleased with my decision to apply to film schools instead of law or something boring and happiness draining. That morning, my writing was mindless at first, something to keep me preoccupied, but then I realized I was writing about Mia. That morning, she was literally all I could think about.