Mittens on the Midterm

This story isn't actually about cannabis, but I got the idea for it while I was really blazed. So.. tell me what you think.

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Mittens on the Midterm

I woke up feeling ugly.
I can't describe why. Normally, I don't think about my appearance at all, except maybe if I'm standing in front of a mirror, in which case it's kind of hard to not think about my appearance, since my appearance is staring me right in the face. But this Tuesday morning, I woke up and felt wrong. Unbalanced. Breaking out in a cold sweat, I checked my body thoroughly, and sighed in relief upon realizing that I still had all my extremities, and (so far as I could tell) internal organs. As I climbed out of bed, the feeling of wrongness just got stronger. It surrounded me, poking at my pressure points with cruel fingers of ugliness. After a minute or two of nervous pacing, I realized that no matter how I felt, I had to get ready for school, because first period that day was my English midterm. I showered, dressed and ate breakfast feeling very nervous. How on Earth could I write a decent midterm essay in class if I couldn't stop thinking about how wrongfully ugly I felt? Trying (and failing) to shake the feeling off, I threw on my coat and reached into my pockets. At that moment, I had an epiphany.

My epiphany was fairly simple. My gloves weren't in my pockets, where I normally kept them. I tracked backwards in my mind and groaned upon realizing I had left the gloves in my car the night before. It was below freezing outside, so my gloves would for certain be very very very cold. Knowing I didn't have time to waste, I made a quick search of the area near my doorway, and found a pair of lime green mittens. As I stepped out the door I pulled the mittens on, one at a time. I studied the mittens as I walked to my car. They were cheap knit things, probably purchased at a local dollar store. And they were beautiful.

I stopped dead in my tracks. Then I started again, because I really didn't have time to stand around staring at my lime green mitten hands. But as I got into my car, my mind was racing. I no longer felt ugly, or wrong. In fact, I had never felt more right in my life. The mittens completed me. Like the last shovel full of snow being scooped off of a freshly shoveled driveway, or the hair on a cat, the mittens made me who I wanted to be. As I maneuvered my car awkwardly through the crowded streets (the mittens, as attractive as they were, slid off the steering wheel far too easily), I could only think of what a waste my life had been up until that point. Imagine, eighteen years of not wearing lime green mittens, when all that time I could have been wearing the mittens. If only I had known. I parked in the school's lot and began the short but cold walk to the school's doors. Looking at the other students arriving, I reflected how lucky I was that it was winter. If it had been spring, I would have looked rather odd wearing lime green mittens, not to mention how sweaty my hands would get wearing knit mittens in springtime temperatures. I breezed through the school, deposited my coat and books in my locker, and headed to first period, feeling confident about my midterm. How could I possibly write a bad essay, feeling as good as I did with those mittens on?

As it turned out, my problem was not the possibility of writing a bad essay, so much as it was being able to write the essay at all. Holding a pencil is not easy in lime green mittens, and writing is nearly impossible, especially inside the tiny spaces between the blue lines on the paper. Ten minutes into the midterm, I had only managed to write what vaguely looked like my name at the top of the page. I sat there, staring at the pencil held by my mitten covered hand, and I sensed my teacher sneaking up behind me. My English teacher is one of the type who likes to startle pupils by moving up behind them silently then asking a rhetorical question in an unnecessarily sudden manner. Even though I felt the teacher's impending presence, his voice still startled me. I had been trying to write "The" on the top line of my paper, and at the sudden sound of my teacher's voice, my mitten pushed the pencil down too hard. The pencils point snapped off and zoomed over my shoulder. My head whipped around, following it's trajectory, and I watched as the pencil point ricocheted off the teacher's glasses, then arced its way into the waste bin. My teacher's face went from pale to dark in less than a second, and I couldn't help but think that if someone built a car which used human emotions for acceleration, that that would be a very fast car, and as long as it was fuel efficient would probably sell quite well.

My teacher's stormy face divided in two as he opened his mouth wide and inquired;
"What do you have to say for yourself?" I thought seriously about this for less than a second, glad that my human emotion acceleration had kicked in to give me a saucy comeback line.
"Karma foiled by inexpensive eyewear?" I was referring to how the pencil had (unfortunately) not struck him in the eyeball. The teacher's face darkened again, and I made a mental note that the human emotion acceleration car should not have overdrive, because no one would want their car to be that colour. My teacher clearly did not know how to respond, so he changed the subject, seizing the first irregularity he noticed.
"Why haven't you written anything yet?" A more practical person would have asked why I was wearing lime green mittens, especially since I had in fact written something which was almost but not quite my name as well as "Th" and half of a cursive "e". There was also a pencil smudge where the pencil had snapped, making the first word of my essay look like "Then". This presented me with a new problem. I hate erasing and scratching words out, so I was going to have to figure out how to start and essay about British colonialism with the word "Then". My train of thought on this was, unfortunately, interrupted by another unwelcome outburst from my angered teacher.

"Why are you wearing mittens?" Ah, a practical question at last. "Take them off, sharpen your pencil, and get to work on that essay!" Grudgingly, I rose from my seat and walked to the wall mounted classroom pencil sharpener. I had not removed my lime green mittens, though. I was nothing without them. As I turned the crank on the clever mechanical pencil sharpening device, my teacher shouted at me once more.
"I said take those mittens off!" I continued to put a fine point to my pencil, and twisted my head around to say over my shoulder;
"I'd really rather not. You see, these mittens have a certain sentimental value to me." I turned back to the sharpener as my teacher began another rude statement. He didn't finish starting it, though, because he fell silent when I screamed in horror.

Once, when I was significantly younger than my present eighteen years, a similarly young boy asked me, if my arm were dipped in a vat of acid, would I yell, or scream like a girl? Of all the hypothetical questions I have ever been asked, that was probably the downright stupidest. Well, the shock I received that Tuesday must have been almost as bad as having my arm dipped in a vat of acid, and as it turned out, the answer to that stupid boy's question was: neither. The eruption from my throat was neither a manly yell nor a womanly scream. It was not even human, to my ears, but after some serious thought and exhausting research, I believe it sounded something like the result of dipping a mountain lion in a vat of acid. The other students in my class, who had up until that point been concentrating on their work and ignoring my troubles, all twisted to stare wide eyed at me. My teacher was so shocked that he nearly tripped over a desk, but was again saved by his spectacles. I stared in horror at my left hand.

What I saw, or rather, what I didn't see, was a lime green mitten. A loose bit of yarn had become caught in the pencil sharpener, and in the short time it had taken me to turn my head to talk to my teacher, the mitten had unraveled completely, and was now no longer a mitten, but rather a long bit of lime green yarn hopelessly jammed in a pencil sharpener. I sank to my knees, gripping my non mitten hand in my mitten hand, staring at my left side extremity as though it had just been dipped in a vat of acid. The voice of one of my close friends shattered my mournful reverie.

"Dude... what the hell is wrong with you?"
I looked at him, then looked back at my naked hand. Got to my feet, and thought for a moment. I felt unbalanced, as I had that morning. After a quick check, I realized that the feeling of unbalance stemmed simply from the fact that one of my hands was now warmer than the other. Leaving the yarn jammed in a sharpener that had once been a lime green mitten where it was, I returned to my desk and sat down. I did not feel ugly or wrong. It seemed that I did not need to wear two lime green mittens to feel complete. One mitten was sufficient. It was lucky, I suppose, that the design of the school's pencil sharpener had caused it to remove my left mitten. Either that, or it is lucky that I write with my left hand. Perhaps both are lucky. Reaching sideways with my bare left hand, I picked up a pen off my friend's desk. He always brought extra pens to essay exams.
"May I borrow this? The pencil sharpener is broken..." He nodded his assent and continued work on his essay, as did the rest of the class. I looked around. My teacher had returned to his desk and was polishing his glasses. His face was idling in a neutral colour which would look great on any large sedan. Everything is back to normal, I thought. Good. I then moved on to a rather pressing problem...
How can I begin an essay on British colonialism with "Then"?