Ring

If you need adulation and applause,

be careful where you turn to get your fix.

A vapid, empty-headed audience

responds resoundingly to kindred spirits.

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Playing to the internet is insipid. Do it long enough, and it will reflect your vacuousness to everyone.

___________________________________________________

Ring

The classroom hummed with late morning restlessness. Sunlight spilled across the desks, illuminating the scratched covers of notebooks. The teacher straightened her notes at the podium.

“Today we begin our presentations on political systems. Each group—”

A sudden click came from a middle row and a ring of white light flared. The boy had clipped a ring light to his phone and switched it on. The glow bathed his face, making it ghostly and unnatural.

“Live,” he said, angling the phone upward. “Welcome to civics class. Let’s see what the sheep are being told today.”

The teacher did not respond. She outlined the assignment: constitutions compared, trade-offs noted, two pages due tomorrow. She did not raise her voice or demand the phone be put away. He wanted a clash. She gave him none.

The boy grabbed his worksheet packet — the one every student had been told to complete before class. He held it up to the lens, riffled the pages. They were bare. He had not written a single answer. “Garbage,” he muttered for his feed. “Nothing here worth your time.” He tossed it back onto the desk as if it were a stinking fish.

For a moment he looked up. The teacher’s eyes met his. His cheeks flushed. He blinked, then snapped his shoulders back into his defiant pose.

She passed the next stack of assignments down the rows. Paper slid hand to hand. Pens clicked. Notebooks opened. Across the room, packets already scrawled with notes and answers lay beside fresh pages that the students were filling with ink.

The boy lingered in the glow. His packet lay untouched, its white pages catching the ring light and throwing the glare back at him. The beam flattened every feature of his face—the flush in his cheeks, the gloss of sweat on his upper lip, the twitch at the corner of his eye. Around him, heads bent low, pens moved steadily. No classmate looked up.

The teacher erased the board. Pages rustled. The class continued. The boy sat silently in the glow. It left him looking empty, as if the light had burned straight through the face to what lay behind—nothing at all.