Click
I am going to vomit.
Five minutes into first period and I had never felt so nauseous in my life. Suddenly, this all seemed like a very bad idea. I glanced around anxiously. Nobody else looked sick.
Why am I doing this to myself?
Of course, everybody else already knew each other. They were already passing notes, already mouthing inside jokes across the room, already talkingflirtinglaughing and lounging comfortably in their seats.
How did I ever convince myself that this would be okay? What was I thinking? I could have gone somewhere else, with all the rest of my friends. I didn’t have to do this.
The room looked impossibly huge—cavernous, gargantuan—but somehow the walls felt uncomfortably close and the ceiling unnervingly low.
Maybe it isn’t too late. Maybe I should just leave. I could just get up and run out the door and never come back. They would talk for a couple days about the weird girl who sat quietly at her desk for five minutes and then bolted, but they’d forget soon enough, and it wouldn’t matter anyway because they don’t know who I am and I’d never see any of them ever again.
I struggled to listen to the teacher, to ignore the screaming in my head. But his lips just moved, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t hear a word that was coming out of them. My stomach turned over.
I am going to vomit.
* * *
Maybe it was the Novocain, but I remember the scene with fuzzy edges, like a dream sequence on TV.
“Fourteen, huh? Almost in high school,” Dr. Lopez looked down at me. Something silver and pointy glinted in her hand.
“Uh-huh,” I heard myself grunt.
“Do you know where you’re going next year?” I wondered why dentists asked questions that people couldn’t possible answer without biting their fingers off.
“Berkeley High,” my dad sighed from his chair in the corner.
“Oh really? That’s different.”
“Yeah, it is.” The reluctance in his voice sounded far away.
“It’s a big school. How many people is it?”
“Something like 3,000.”
“Is anyone else from Bentley going there?”
“No, she’s the only one. She was going to apply to College Prep, but she changed her mind.” There was a pause. “It’s just so many kids. It’s hard in a high school like that, you know? But she’ll probably be fine. It’s her choice. It’ll just be a big change.” I grumbled with frustration. I was sick of those words. Big change. Big change. I couldn’t count the number of conversations I’d had with my friends, with their parents, with my teachers where that was how the referred to my plans for next year. Half the time, the phrase was loaded with doubt, with questions. Would I really be able to hack it in a big bad public school? Would I be able to adjust, to meet new friends, to survive in a place lacking the insulation, the protection of sky-high tuition? The rest of the time, the words were rife with condescension. You know what else would be a big change? they seemed to say. Dropping out of school altogether to work in the shampoo aisle at K-Mart. That would be a big change, too.
But I could take it from everyone else. If they couldn’t understand that I had gone to same school with the same forty kids for nine years and I was just plain tired of it, so be it. If they couldn’t see why I wanted to step out into the real world where kids didn’t have birthday parties on yachts and where a PTA of pristinely made-up soccer moms fresh from the tennis courts didn’t run the show, that was fine. But with my father, it was different. He had to understand. I wasn’t used to Daddy’s disapproval, and I was bothered by the edge of doubt in his voice every time he talked about next year.
I watched my eyelids droop farther and farther down in front of me. The dentist’s light hurt my eyes, and I was very tired.
* * *
Somehow I talked myself down, convinced myself of how embarrassing it would be to throw up and drop out of high school all before 9 o’clock on the very first day. But I could have kissed the ground outside the classroom when the bell rang.
Every high school student in the Western Hemisphere thronged the hallways. My eyes darted back and forth from my schedule to the room numbers as I struggled from the second floor of the H-Building to the first floor of the C-Building, like a very small fish (with a very large backpack) swimming upstream.
Oh no. Oh nonono. I double-checked the room number. I triple checked.
French 5/6 in room C112.
But it couldn’t be. Everybody in room C112 was enormous – there just had to be some kind of mistake. It didn’t make any sense. There are only four ages of students in high school, so why did these kids look so much older than I did? Compared to them, I was like a kindergartener sucking my thumb at the threshold. I could not possibly be in a class with all these—big kids.
I bit my lip and glanced around the crowded room for a seat. There was only one left. I sat down at a tiny desk directly behind a thick white pillar at the edge of the room. I couldn’t see the teacher. I couldn’t see the board. My desk was missing a piece of one leg and wobbled through the entire class.
Later, on my way to lunch, a boy behind me unzipped my backpack and tried to take my CD player.
* * *
I couldn’t stop jabbering in the car. On my way to a pre-orientation meeting for private school kids who would be entering Berkeley High next year, I knew this wasn’t just a assembly – it was my first real venture into the school, my first chance to meet future classmates, to make an impression. I kept pulling down the mirror on the window shade and flashing myself sparkling smiles, smoothing frizz back into the bun on top of my head.
In the Little Theater I craned my neck trying to find the couple people I knew who would be there. Kids talked in groups and ran down aisles and between rows to greet each other; girls were pulling down their shirts and laughing too loudly and boys were pulling up their jeans and trying to keep their voices low and steady. Eventually a woman with wild gray hair told students to sit in the center and adults to stay in the side rows. She talked endlessly about how different this school would be for us and answered questions of concerned parents while we whispered and giggled in our seats. Everything was fine until we were given schedule forms to fill out. They were full of boxes and dotted lines and every class had a requirement and a reference number and letters and x number of credits and everyone was talking at once trying to figure out what to do with it all. Our parents were too far away to help, and we were giddy with worry that we would do it wrong and destroy the rest of our academic careers on this one night before high school even began. I smiled and laughed with the people in the rows around me, bonded to these unknown faces by a mutual confusion, suddenly not caring that I had no idea of what I was doing. I was just glad I had company.
***
My panic subsided and I resigned myself to being late to fifth period. I gave up on asking for directions, because three people had already tried to show me the way and I was still as lost as ever. I gave up worrying about what the teacher would think of a kid who showed up late on the first day of class, because there was nothing I could do about it anymore. I even gave up wondering if I would get in trouble for walking around campus after the bell rang, because I had had a long day and that would just be too much to bear.
Dragging my feet across the courtyard, my mind wandered. I thought about the girls in fourth period who exchanged a joint across my desk while the teacher was facing the board, neatly transferring it from the pocket of one binder to another. I contemplated how every conversation I had had that day had felt like work, like a means to an end, whether that end was scoping out potential friends or trying to make myself sound as interesting as possible. I wondered where my friends from Bentley were right then, knowing that they weren’t seeing what I was seeing.
As I trudged up the concrete stairs of what I hoped was the A-Building – stepping neatly around what I sincerely hoped was not a condom – I thought about how long it had been since that morning, how different everything looked. Maybe everyone else was right. Maybe this was all a mistake. Nothing was working out the way I had expected it to, starting from the moment I set foot inside a classroom. The tensions and stress that came of my own natural timidity, of trying to prove wrong so many doubts from so many others (not to mentions my own doubts that I had been so long trying to ignore), of venturing into an unfamiliar world full of unfamiliar people – every anxiety that I drowned out in excitement that morning had been trickling back to me all day long, weighing heavier and heavier on my chest.
* * *
“I know, Dad, IknowIknowIknow.” I wish there was a way to roll your eyes so people could hear it over the phone. “I know. Listen. I gotta go, my ride is here. I hafta go right now! Uh huh, Dad, I got it – I promise I’ll have a good day. Yeah, right, love you too. GOD! Dad. I really have to go. Bye.” I hung up and opened the door for Leanne. “Hey, sorry. That was just my dad reminding me not to use the bathrooms at school. Again.”
“Wasn’t he telling you that right before orientation last week?”
“Yep, that he was. I swear, if he honestly expects me to go all the way up to his office in the middle of the day just to pee, he’s crazier than I thought.” I picked up my backpack, a shrine to 8th grade jokes that my friends and I had immortalized in black sharpie and White Out pen during last year’s endless study halls. “Mom! I’m leaving!”
“Oh, honey,” Mom rushed down the stairs in her robe. “Do you have everything? Are you ready?”
“Yes, I am, and Leanne’s dad is waiting outside to take us so I have to go and so no we can’t take any ‘first day of school’ photos. Please.” I gave her a hug and walked out with Leanne, shutting the door heavily behind me. We grinned at each other.
Everything was funny on the way to school. I noticed the banana I had packed in my lunch had already been crushed in my backpack, and we laughed hysterically. We saw a golden retriever on the corner that was entangling its owner in its leash, and we laughed hysterically. That morning, everything that had happened over the past couple weeks was submerged in a swell of giddy anticipation.
We were about halfway to school when my mind suddenly flashed to the image of my class schedule sitting innocently on my desk in my room, as if it had nowhere better to be. I would spend the next few years complaining about Leanne’s compulsion to leave ten minutes early to go somewhere that was five minutes away, but at that moment it was her neurosis that saved me. We had plenty of time to turn the car around, and soon enough I was back at home, bounding up the stairs to retrieve the precious slip of paper, refusing to tell my mother what I had forgotten because Leanne was already laughing at me enough for the both of them.
Not to be dispirited, I found myself entering the gates of Berkeley High School ten minutes later with a sense of boundless optimism and excitement. There was a lot I hadn’t thought through at the time, a lot of nervousness that would catch up with me soon after the first bell rang. But I walked in thinking only that there is nothing like a fresh start.
* * *
It was almost the end of the longest day of my life, but my last class was unlikely to offer me any respite. P.E. My old school wasn’t much on hardcore athletics, which suited me just fine; now all I knew was that if anyone tried to make me catch a ball, throw a ball, hit a ball, or stand in the vicinity of any moving round object while in sweatpants, I was going to make a run for it.
I walked with a girl from my journalism class—which I did eventually unearth from the depths of the A-Building—to the dilapidated old gym. We found our way across the perpetually damp girls’ locker room, up the dark stairs, through the dreary maze of melancholy hallways, and past the musty ping pong rooms to a basketball court with 30 students chatting comfortably on brown, paint-chipped raised seats.
A warm haze of afternoon lethargy had settled over my sixth period classmates. People smiled and introduced themselves while the teacher droned on about whatever it is that teachers usually drone on about when students aren’t listening, until all of a sudden he was calling names to come up and get locker numbers and combinations. The soft reverie of relaxation in the gym quickly dissolved as a few minutes later I found myself back downstairs, pleading with my locker to just open, goddamnit, just open. It looked like it was going to be a perfect end to a perfect day. I began surreptitiously eyeing my neighbors for the least intimidating face I could find.
“Sorry, but, um, could you help me with my locker? It isn’t opening.” The lucky winner was a tall blond girl with cute shoes and more stuff than I could imagine any one teenager could possibly need.
“Sure. What’s the combination?” she set down her flute case, softball gear, backpack, and some excess books as I handed her my little yellow locker slip. I reddened as she struggled with the knob. I was on overload; the accumulated awkwardness of the entire day was finally overflowing to the point that not only was I embarrassed for myself, it was as if I were embarrassed for my locker as well.
“I think this one’s messed up,” she diagnosed. “Let’s go get you another.”
I smiled gratefully. Did she say “Let’s”? As in, “Let us?” As in, “us”? “Thanks! Sorry, but…what’s your name again?”
“Sonya.”
“I’m Lucy. And I really like your shoes, by the way.” Sonya grinned.
Climbing the stairs to get my new locker assignment, we chatted softly about what middle schools we had gone to, what classes we had. We conferred about how repulsive the P.E. uniforms looked and how hard it was to find the A-Building. The conversation was light and fumbling but pleasant, quiet, unexaggerated.
We continued talking as I struggled with my new locker. “Crap! I still can’t open it,” I tugged at the catch in disbelieving exasperation.
“Here, let me give it another try.” Sonya examined my combination number with a furrowed brow and fiddled some more with the knob. Click.
The bell rang and as we stepped outside I noticed that at some point, it had become a very pretty day.