Character 1: Murphy's Law

From time to time, when I don't have any other stories in the works, I will just do some writing exercises and post them for fun. My first draft is always lousy. If I think something has promise I can usually make it decent with a few revisions. I welcome feedback on these exercises, since they are useless if I don't learn something.

One of the exercises will be to just write a scene where I attempt to develop a character. The plot isn't the goal. And there is always the task of showing instead of telling . . .

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Murphy ran his fingers through his curly hair and stared at the paper on the desk. It was as if he no longer knew how to read, the letters becoming heiroglyphs, their meanings lost over the centuries. He was toast.

He sat up, the buttons on his shirt straining as he stretched his arms, hoping that the movement would somehow unlock some knowledge that was lying dormant in his brain. He squared his body to the paper, straightening everything from his flip-flops to the bridge of his nose. It is time to to do this, he told himself, but even as reaffirmed his purpose, memories flooded into his mind.

He was 8 years old, and his mother was shaking her head at his spelling test. At 13 he hid his new class schedule that showed two repeated classes from his friends. He was 15 and he saw his brother's amazing SAT score on the fridge, and knows that no magnet will touch his results.

He twiddled the #2 pencil between his thumb and finger. How could one test mean so much? If you couldn't answer these questions right here, right now, you were doomed to be a second class citizen for the rest of your life. The pencil slipped from his fingers, bouncing as it hit the ground. One long sweep of his hand and the pencil was back, never finishing its bounce. Too bad I can't snatch test results out of the air, he thought.

Mr. Reynolds, the test timer, announced that 10 minutes remained for this part of the exam, and once again Murphy's head lowered over the paper. He knew what he had to do. He skimmed the question, and then picked answer. Skim, pick, skim, pick. He had known that it would come to this, and at least he was consistent, he thought.