Checkpoint

Let's put everything together in a checkpoint piece. Here's the original snippet:

One minute the teacher was talking about the Civil War. And the next minute he was gone.

There.
Gone.

No “poof.” No flash of light. No explosion.

Sam Temple was sitting in third-period history class staring blankly at the blackboard, but far away in his head. In his head he was down at the beach, he and Quinn. Down at the beach with their boards, yelling, bracing for that first plunge into cold Pacific water.

For a moment he thought he had imagined it, the teacher disappearing. For a moment he thought he’d slipped into a daydream.

Sam turned to Mary Terrafino, who sat just to his left. “You saw that, right?”

Mary was staring hard at the place where the teacher had been.

“Um, where’s Mr. Trentlake?” It was Quinn Gaither, Sam’s best, maybe only, friend. Quinn sat right behind Sam. The two of them favored window seats because sometimes if you caught just the right angle, you could actually see a tiny sliver of sparkling water between the school buildings and the homes beyond.

“He must have left,” Mary said, not sounding like she believed it.

Edilio, a new kid Sam found potentially interesting, said, “No, man. Poof.” He did a thing with his fingers that was a pretty good illustration of the concept.

Kids were staring at one another, craning their necks this way and that, giggling nervously. No one was scared. No one was crying. The whole thing seemed kind of funny.

Gone(2008)

Here are the examples we've been building:

The checkout operator was deciding which bag to put the apples into when everything went black.

Light.
Dark.

It was like the power had suddenly gone out but felt oddly different.

Noah was standing in the checkout queue fidgeting impatiently, wondering if he’d get home in time for his favourite show. His dad had sent him shopping even though he knew he wouldn’t get back in time. It was the season finale!

This was annoying. The darkness meant delays. So annoying!

He knew she wouldn’t know, but Noah couldn’t help himself. “How long until they fix the lights?” he asked in the operator’s general direction.

“I’m sure they’ll work it out soon, sir,” she drawled, sounding as bored about the blackout as she had before it happened.

“Is that you, Noah? Geez… it’s darker than a bat’s bum around here! What happened?” Noah recognised the voice immediately. Eve was his best mate. They were the same age, lived next door to each other, sat beside each other at school, and saw the same bands. People meeting them for the first time thought they were boyfriend-girlfriend. Or, sometimes, twins.

“Just a power outage,” the checkout operator sighed.

“I’m not so sure,” the shopper who was in front of Noah suddenly piped in. “There’s something weird about it, if you ask me.”

We were standing, waiting patiently for the problem to be fixed – for the lights to come back on. We thought that someone could help and everything would go back to normal. We should have been panicking, screaming, crying. Back then, all we were was just irritated.

It was an ordinary Sunday afternoon when a full blown tyrannosaurus walked past the kitchen window.

Not a robot.
Not a costume.
A real-life dinosaur.

One minute there was an empty backyard. Then a t-rex, strolling past like it was nobody’s business.

Then the empty backyard again.

Trixie was leaning against the kitchen counter pouring milk into her gran’s tea and wondering what it would be like to be the bass guitarist for an all-girl punk band. She’d been thinking it’d probably be pretty rad. Loud. Fast. Screaming fans. Dive backwards of the stage and keep playing while the crowd carried you round. Sick.

She put the milk down. She knew she’d seen a dinosaur, but there was no way it was real. They’d talked about this in health class. There was a word for this, she just couldn’t remember what it was.

She took the tea in to her gran, who was sitting in her armchair watching a dating show and clucking her tongue in disapproval. “Nan, what’s the word for when you see things that aren’t there?”

“Crazy,” snapped Gran. “Starkers. Too much milk.”

Trixie’s phone buzzed. It was Bronwyn. She’d sent an eye-popping emoji, quickly followed by WHAA??? Bronwyn was Trixie’s closest friend but it was a weird friendship. You couldn’t find more different people. Where Trixie was chill, Bronwyn was all about the melodrama. The only thing they had in common was nobody else at school liked them.

“If you’re seeing things it’s because you spend too much time on your phone,” said Gran, slapping the remote and pressing buttons randomly because her show had stalled and was just showing that loading circle you get sometimes.

Trixie’s phone buzzed again. A melting-face emoji from Bronwyn. Then a bunch of random notifications on different social apps. People sure were being chatty all of a sudden.

Trixie felt strangely detached from it because she was still convinced she’d been imagining the dinosaur. Delusional was the word she’d been looking for. She wasn’t alarmed. Not hyped. She was feeling fine, fine, completely fine, because there was no way this was real.

And below is your version, joined together. You might need to delete some excess paragraph breaks.

Is there anything you want to edit? This is your last chance to make improvements before we conclude the lesson!

Do you:

have a strange event that's simple to describe?
introduce your hero and a second main character?
show reactions?
finish with foreboding that will make the readers want to keep reading?

Delete excess paragraph breaks and polish your scene.

High-concept storytelling in Gone 1: Big concept, small beginnings