Desktop Suitcases

Lavender whisked past a crowd of high school seniors as her desktop suitcase clinked and clattered against the not-so-smooth tile flooring.

She couldn’t believe she was going to be late.

She shoved her long dark brown hair out of her face and continued running towards her first period class. Naturally, freshmen at Rocket Sky High School had their classes on the other side of the campus building from the bus gate. And they were required to bring in their desktop computers, as the computer labs on their side of the school still didn’t have proper Internet connection two months into the school year. Lavender was stuck using her father’s old suitcase and computer, which was on the verge of falling apart after being dragged around the school every day after a lifetime of being dragged around his company’s office.

Her luck was unbelievable.

The bell rang to signal the start of class as Lavender swung open the door to her first period class. Gripping her suitcase tightly in her left hand, and her school binder in the other, she tread carefully on the floor transitioning from hard tile to rough carpet and made her way to her seat in the front of the room.

“Just on time, Colley,” said Mr. Ray, the freshman social studies teacher. “Set up your desktops quickly, everyone. We have lots to do today…”

Lavender placed her binder down on the ground and carefully unzipped the raggedy suitcase, hoping that everything inside it was still intact. She sighed in relief at the sight of her computer parts looking exactly the same as when she got on the bus.

“Yo, Lav, what took you so long?” Grayson, her desk neighbor and best friend, asked. “I know for a fact the bus was mostly on time today.”

Lavender first unboxed the PC box, briefly checking the outside for any bruises or cracks she’d have to explain to her father. Counting none, she placed it inside the basket to the right of her feet, plugging the cords into the desk’s power strip on the left. 

“It was nothing, Grayson,” she replied as she picked up the monitor from the inside of her suitcase. “Just didn’t want to rush too much and break my computer.”

“You’d be doing that poor thing a favor,” Grayson wiped some dust off of her monitor’s screen. “You really need a new one.”

“Don’t you have your own computer to set up right now?” 

Grayson pointed to his desk, where his shiny-looking desktop was neatly set up. “I clearly don’t.”

Lavender scowled, putting her monitor on her desk. “At least leave me alone so I can set mine up.”

“Whatever you want, Your Highness.”

Grayson turned away from her and turned his monitor on, typing in his computer’s password on his brand new keyboard. Lavender felt her face flush with jealousy as she connected her monitor. She couldn’t believe his parents had changed their mind on letting him use their old desktop so quickly and bought him a whole new setup and a navy blue suitcase with dinosaurs on it for him to transport it all with. When she brought up the idea to her parents, they laughed in her face and showed her this past month’s bills.

“Is a new computer going to pay our rent?” her father had said. “It’s gone up by one percent this month, sweetie. The one you have now is just fine to get you through the rest of high school, and hopefully college too.”

She believed him about the rent, but not about the computer.

Untangling the wires, she managed to get her keyboard and mouse plugged into the back of the PC within the last minute of the designated desktop setup time. As the desktop bell (as the students and staff called it) rang, her teacher stood up.

“Hopefully you used your time wisely and actively set up your desktop, because we will need it from start to finish of this lesson,” Mr. Ray told the class. “Let’s begin by opening up the curriculum page…”

Everyone around her began searching for the website, but Lavender struggled to type in her password for her school account. While she had fairly gotten used to keyboards in the past couple months, she still felt way behind everyone else, especially when she saw Grayson watching her with a sympathetic look.

“You need help?” he asked her, his emerald green eyes boring into her plain brown ones. 

She swallowed her pride and nodded. 

Grayson stood up from his chair and walked behind Lavender’s. He gently grasped her hands in his.

“Remember, it’s easier to hold the shift button down at the same time as the letter that needs to be capitalized, like this.” He guided her left hand to the shift key on the left side of the keyboard, pressing down gently as her right hand pressed the ‘K’ key. “The caps lock button is useful, but not when you have to alternate between uppercase and lowercase letters, like we do for our passwords.”

She nodded as she typed the next lowercase character, a ‘p’, and tried the shift key trick again for the ‘O’ that was after it. 

“I think I got it now,” she said. 

“If you need more help, just ask me,” Grayson smiled softly at her before letting go of her hands and sitting back down. 

She finished typing the rest of her password, opened the web browser, and clicked the favorited “Mr. Ray’s 9th Grade Social Studies Curriculum” at the top of her screen to open the webpage. Grayson was the one to show her how to favorite websites to save time opening them, and she was grateful to him for it, especially with how much she had been struggling to type on a keyboard. 

“Now that the curriculum page is open, please go to the textbook PDF and find chapter four. We are going to be doing an activity with it,” Mr. Ray said. “I would also highly appreciate it if you could open a blank document right away, as I did not have the time to make a template for this assignment.”

Lavender internally panicked. A blank document? She had no idea what he was talking about. She could barely figure out how to properly use the assignment templates Mr. Ray posted on his website nearly every day. 

She pressed the new tab button, and stared at the array of features she could choose. One of these had to be the blank document button. She first pressed a button with an envelope icon, and was confused when brought to a screen titled EMAIL.

“Need some help?” Grayson asked her, turning away from his desktop to look at her screen. “Woah, how do you not have any emails?”

“What’s an email?”

“An electronic message,” he replied. “It’s sort of like sending a letter, since you need someone’s email address. But it’s all done online.”

“Weird,” Lavender told him. She craned her neck to look at his screen and was bewildered when she saw a blank screen with tons of short words and icons at the top. “How did you get there?”

“You have to press the plus icon first.” He pointed a back arrow at the top of her screen to redirect her to the main page, and then pointed to the “+” icon next to the envelope. “Then, press the phrase ‘blank document.’ It should bring you to the screen.”

She followed his instructions and smiled brightly when she found an electronic version of a blank piece of paper displayed on her monitor. “I did it!”

“Colley!” Mr. Ray shouted, scaring away the smile off her face. “Is there a reason you feel the need to chat with Mr. Smith during my lesson?”

“Sorry, sir,” Lavender apologized. “He was showing me how to find a blank document.”

“Surely you should’ve known that by now. How did you finish the eighth grade?”

She felt her cheeks flush with embarrassment as people turned to look at her. “I..I didn’t use a desktop computer during school until this year, sir. And if I did, it was for searching information at the library.”

“Excuses, excuses.” Mr. Ray shook his head. “Very well, then. That’s one lunch detention session for you, miss. Any other interruptions you would like to share?”

“That’s not fair!” Grayson stood and shouted in her defense. “How is Lavender supposed to magically know how to use a desktop computer if she doesn’t always have access to one?”

Her face was getting redder by the second, and her eyes began to well with tears. She knew Grayson’s heart was in the right place, but she still didn’t fully appreciate him bringing up her family’s finances in front of the entire class.

“That’s a lunch detention for you as well, Smith,” Mr. Ray told him. “Now, both of you be quiet so we can finish this lesson in a timely manner.”

Grayson’s face paled, and he sat down without another word.

Mr. Ray’s lesson was a bit of a challenge for Lavender. She wasn’t used to switching tabs so fast, or copying and pasting texts from one page to a document, or even typing such long paragraphs on a document, since the templates usually had short sentence boxes. But she managed the best she could and was relieved when the desktop bell to pack up their computers rang. 

“We will have to continue this lesson tomorrow then due to the…interruptions today,” Mr. Ray said to the class. “Pack up.”

The class began packing up, the room overwhelmed with the sounds of cords being yanked and zippers being zipped and unzipped. 

“You’d think they’d figure out how to make smaller desktops by now,” Grayson whispered to Lavender as he carefully put his computer monitor inside its designated spot in his suitcase. “Or more portable ones. This is a pain, dude.”

Lavender’s lips twitched with a smile as she disconnected her keyboard and mouse. “They’d probably cost just as much, if not more. And what would we do with our desktop suitcases? They were designed purely for this purpose.”

“Good point,” Grayson replied as he zipped the last parts of his desktop away. “I do love the dinosaurs on this thing.” He pointed to one eating a hamburger. “But, still, wouldn’t it be so much nicer to carry something lighter?”

Lavender mulled over the thought as she finished up carefully packing away her father’s old desktop computer and picked up her school binder. “It would be.”

The bell rang to get to the next class. Grayson and Lavender made their way through the large crowd of students and suitcases exiting Mr. Ray’s classroom and into the hallway, both trying their best to not roll over other students’ ankles. 

“Hey, at least we have bio next,” Grayson grinned at her. “We don’t need our desktops in there.”

Even with the stress of social studies still lingering, Lavender beamed back at him. “Thank goodness for that.”