“Do you understand?” Mr. McPherson
asked, dryly. His eyes seemed to look through me, straight home to whatever
life he lived outside of school and being “Mr. McPherson,” under the heavy
brand of “algebra teacher.” I guess he had a real life somewhere too, and I
felt sorry for him. From the look on his face, his life was going no better
than mine.
“I think so,” I replied, out of sympathy.
Looking relieved, he moved on to the next student. I was glad not to be a
burden to him, even if my answer was a lie. I had had no time for understanding
that afternoon. All I could think of was the outstretched hand that was
crawling slowly, slowly, slowly from the two to the three. What I wanted was to
get out of that classroom and get home, where I could bury my head in the sand
and be safe from all the predators that skulked through the hallways of that
school. Every time I walked down one of the long halls, I felt like a cat on a
fence, surrounded by pit bulls. If I fell, even once, it would be death. They
were always there, waiting and hungry. But the fence was getting shorter every
day. I was almost to the other side. With every turn of the clock, I was one
day closer. Then I could fly away and escape the world of high school.
It was a world I felt I’d failed
at, not in regard to homework or getting A’s. Grades weren’t exactly a cinch,
but I could manage them if I tried. It was the rest of it, I’d failed. From the
beginning, I’d tried to get too much out of high school, and come to the
conclusion that it was not a place to be yourself, despite what all those Dear
Abbys say, but in fact a place to keep your head down and your mouth shut. Being
yourself doesn’t work well when you have no clue who the heck you are. Friends
soon turned to enemies, or forgot you, or didn’t have the time. Parents
expected more, always more, demanding perfection. Friends were unreliable.
Everything was unreliable, even
myself.
With a long breath that was in between
a sigh and a whispered whimper, I turned back to my quadratic equations and
frowned. They were no help. I scrawled the lyrics to a song in the margin of my
notebook, waiting. At last the time was up. Mr. McPherson forgot to assign
homework in his rush to leave the room, and none of us reminded him. There were
several exclamations of relief and then laughter as kids packed up and poured
out the door. I pulled my hood up over my head and hurried out with them, into
the rain. Cold droplets battered my face and the wind snatched at my hair. Half
blinded, I was too tired to pull it out of my eyesight. The parking lot was
crowded with the sounds of school: shouts, laughter, and honking, as horn-happy
minivan moms pulled up to the curb. I shuffled my way through the people,
trying to remember where I parked. There was a van in front of me, but not a
minivan, a long van. I sighed as I waited for it to move. When it didn’t I
started around the other side.
My lips felt like they were being
torn off my face as a firm, gloved hand wrapped around me from behind. And
everything I knew about high school suddenly changed. From then on, it filled
my memory as a paradise of missed opportunity, which had been snatched away
from me all too soon.
No comments:
Post a Comment