 And here we arrive at the final installment of this series. The last four years of public school. Buckle up, this will be long and it might get angsty. But that's all right. It turns out all right in the end, because I'm here writing this. Let's go! This is the start of "high school" where I live on Earth. The goal of this section of schooling is to, supposedly, prepare you for life after school or college. I say "supposedly", because trade classes have gone by the wayside. Gone are the wood shop, metal shop, and other shop classes of yesteryear. Classes that would have prepared young men for lives as mechanics, woodworkers, electricians, plumbers, and the like. I say young men, because that's who would usually take such courses, but of course there are young ladies who would be interested in such things sometimes. High school in my era just prepares you for more school. It's like an endless treadmill of schooling. So it seems anyway. Ninth grade. Oh, this year is a doozy. It's painful. My family moves house and so the school I go to is not the same as the school I would have gone to prior to the move. The building itself is located out past several farms on the edge of the community, and I look out the bus window and see cows as we drive by. (Unironically, I lived right down the road from this school later in life. I can throw a rock at this hated school. The cow farm turned into neighborhoods and a city park.) Home room is full of people I don't know. They all listen to country music, which I don't like. And all they can talk about is who is having sex with whom, and which girl gives the best blowjobs. This makes me blush. It's not something I'm thinking about yet, and I feel young and awkward and I want to get away from these people. I don't like them. I don't like their off-handedness. I don't like the way they talk about other people like they're objects. On the wall is a photo of a castle. It's a photo of Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria, Germany. The scene looks pleasantly familiar and like it's out of a fairy tale. I spend a lot of time fixating on the photo, trying to put myself there instead of where I am. (This castle follows me around a little bit this lifetime. I see it pop up on people's walls a few more times. Just kind of...off handedly. "Oh hey, remember Bavaria?" it asks. I do but I don't but I do but I don't.) I take French classes and do well. A couple of the girls in the class fixate on me and become my bullies. They make fun of my glasses and my hair, which has gone from pin straight and platinum blonde to a reddish, blondish, frizzy mess. They also ride the bus. I really cannot make up my mind about these girls. One day, on the bus, one of them asks me if I'm wearing contacts. I ask why. She says, "Your eyes are purple. They look really pretty." Then the other girl goes on to make fun of me. Yuck, what a dynamic. Things start getting weird with classmates. I'm finding myself staring off into space. A lot. I'm just going somewhere. I'm not even trying to escape. I'm just...not there. And unfortunately, this means at lunch I accidentally end up staring at someone. I try to tell them, "I don't even see you. I'm looking right through you." They find it creepy. I've also stopped wearing earrings, and the piercings are closing, and one side isn't healing well. It looks like I wear only one earring. To which someone concludes I must be a lesbian. I get annoyed. "No, I'm not." "Then why do you keep staring at me." "I don't even see you! I'm not even aware you're sitting right there!" I have to train myself to look out the window instead. There's an English class I take, and I love it, but a few people in there can't stand me. A couple of classmates who sit around me like me, but even they find me a little odd. They call me "walking thesaurus" because of my vocabulary. I'm finding I speak differently from other people. I don't know why this is or when it started, but I just talk different. The words I pick are different, and it's not because I'm reading a lot. It's like I'm unconsciously translating from a different language into English and it comes out a little formal. Still, I take on every single project that involves illustrating text. I have a ball with Edgar Allen Poe stories. Other kids in the class don't like that I'm good at art. At the same time, in my spare time, to take my mind off of these people who don't like me for reasons I don't understand, I start to create an imaginary world. Well, not really imaginary. I'm pulling it from somewhere. But I've seen the first Lord of the Rings movie, and I decide if Tolkein can create a world, so can I. So, I draw maps. Create a whole alphabet. Language. There's a big, romantic love story in there, but I can't quite tease it out. I illustrate the stories I write, and sometimes I write parts of the story in the language. This is fun. It's very fulfilling. There's a bestiary that starts to form. I get a glimpse of the culture. (The closest approximation I can come up with is something like a fusion of Naboo from Star Wars Episode I and feudal Japan.) My English teacher is amazed by this. She's very supportive. Maybe the only supportive adult I know at this point. I take other classes, and that I don't remember them (except I don't do well with geometry) likely means they weren't too spectacularly interesting. Just more of the same with plenty of awkward bullying in between. Tenth grade. Back at the same school, but there's good news. A new school is being completed right down the road from where I now live. So, next year I get to go there instead. I am elated. About the only thing I remember from the first part of the year is September 11, 2001. I'm in art class when it happens. There are a couple of Brazilian brothers who are in this class together. I find them strange. Their culture is strange. Not unpleasant...hmm...just "not for me". But the pudgier one likes me and sits across from me at the same table a lot. We're doing collages, and mine is dark with shadows and fire and mountains. There's an announcement on the PA system, and the teacher turns on the TV in the upper corner of the room. Everyone is shocked, and some of the girls are crying. I'm also shocked, but I don't feel like it's real for a moment. I completely dissociate and watch what happens. I feel like I'm watching a movie. Even more than that, I feel like I'm watching myself watching a movie. It doesn't sink in that the event really happened and many people died until later in the day. I go home feeling crushed, drained, and sad. My parents want to watch all about it. I don't want to see anymore. I've seen enough. But no, I go back to school and they're replaying it. And replaying it. And replaying it. I start to block out the scenes on the TVs. I look out the window. Focus on writing a story. Anything to get away from this repeated blasting of the tragedy. I wonder why the hell they're doing this. This is not good for people to keep rubbing their noses in it, especially teenagers. Hysteria grips everyone, and school starts to feel a little bit like a prison. There are sweeping changes to schools and laws that are being passed. I feel like everything is going rather too fast. Now "zero tolerance" is the phrase of the year. I don't like this phrase. It sounds wrong. I read Animal Farm in eighth grade, and this feels like the book happening in front of my eyes. The rest of the year passes uneventfully. The bullies from the year previous seem to be losing their teeth, and I find I know how to avoid them. I learn how to become invisible, so people don't bother me about whatever thing they don't like about me that day. Eleventh grade. New school. New lease on life. The school is wonderful, huge, new, with big windows everywhere that let in natural light. I feel like I've gone to heaven. Also, all of my friends from my gifted classes in elementary school come back! This is wonderful! And we all have the same classes together, because "gifted classes" became "honors classes". They are more rigorous than your normal level classes, and I do great in these. Plus, the people are better. Matthew may be gone, but here is my Spanish friend and we have new friends too. She's grown up quite a bit, but is still a handful. For example, she gets detention a lot. I ask her about this one day, and she says she does it on purpose. All the people in classes distract her, because she wants to talk to them. When she's in detention, she has nothing to distract her and she can actually learn. I feel in my heart she is being done an injustice by the school system, and that there are probably lots of people like her who need one-on-one teaching. We form a friend group. We're a bunch of misfits. Mostly male with my friend and I as the only girls. All three of the boys are in JROTC, which is a bit like preparatory classes for joining the military. You could not have three more different males. One is huge, tall, with pale blonde hair, blue eyes. We call him "Moose", because of his big, deep voice. He's very much an authoritarian type and thinks the country would be better off run by the military. He looks very intimidating, but I happen to know he's a softy on the inside just from looking at him. He is also excellent at debate. If you can't tell, I rather liked him, but he already had a girlfriend by the time we met. Another is a smaller, lithe, darker skinned guy who is incredibly intelligent. He has fast reflexes and enjoys martial arts. He has a cynical view of government and feels no problem countering Moose at every turn. The third, I'm not sure how he fit in, because he's a little bit obsessed with sex. I feel kinda bad for him, because it's like that's all he can think about. Anyway, we spend our lunches together talking politics and trying to solve all the world's problems. When we aren't playing Yugio card games or discussing anime. I love this group of misfits very much, and I'm glad we got to be together the last two years of school. My English teacher this year is also a gem. He has us reading The Giver, 1984, Canterbury Tales, Fahrenheit 451, and a number of other books that no teacher would be caught dead with having in 2024. I eat them up. I also start reading Lord of the Rings. Because I'm in a new school, I can make up new routines. I start walking around the school (it's shaped like a donut with a courtyard in the middle) in the morning before home room. I get to know my teachers this way. They think it's interesting that I walk around and exercise this way, but mostly it's to get extra energy out of my head. My mind keeps expanding faster than I can integrate, so I have lots of physical and mental energy. I take a writing class and expend some of that energy writing. I don't have any stories from that time, but my writing teacher was fairly impressed with what I was expressing. Sometimes she gave me more attention in class than I liked, and I'd kinda...try to hide a little bit. I find I love chemistry and excel at it. I do terribly in all of my math classes, because something about the way we're doing math doesn't make sense. I almost fail an entire course, and that worries me. Hmm. I also take lots of art classes and meet someone who should have become my friend, but it didn't pan out. My teacher, Ms. Bradley, is like Miss Honey out of Matilda. We get along immediately. I end up taking almost every class she offers, including photography, which I find so fascinating. I enjoy it. By the end of high school, we have become friends, but because we're student and teacher we can't break that "professional" line and be regular friends. Unfortunate. After taking her ceramics class, I'm allowed to volunteer for the ice cream fundraiser they do every year. You see, they sell pottery at the fundraiser and that money goes on to support whatever charity they've chosen. I do it because I love making pottery, and I'm good at it. That I'm helping a charity is a bonus. I get along better with all the students in general. My bullies disappeared into thin air. I have friends. I like the people in my classes. Everything is going much better. Life feels sane. I also make friends with the school librarian, because my mind is hungry and moving faster and faster all the time. I need to keep it busy. So I check out 4-6 books at a time and finish them all before the two weeks is up. The librarian finds this fascinating, and she starts recommending books to me. I read literally everything I can get my hands on. Everything. From trashy teenage romance novels to classics to Stephen King. I find I like Stephen King's work a lot, especially The Gunslinger. Twelfth grade. Final year. This year is the year I start taking college-level courses. They are called "Advanced Placement" (AP). I take AP calculus, literary analysis, and art studio. You may wonder why I'm taking an AP calculus course when I'm so bad at math. Well, at the end of the previous year, the swim coach and calculus teacher approached me and asked if I was going to take AP calculus. I said I didn't think my grades were good enough. He says, in that gentle, encouraging, and perceptive voice of his, "I think you should give it a try. You're going to be better at it than you think you are." Something about his energy is just so amazing and encouraging. I decide to do it. (I have infinite love for this man. Thank you for encouraging me.) Turns out, I'm great at calculus. Finally, math that makes sense. I discover all the math word problems in calculus are actually written backwards and the fastest way to solve them is to reverse engineer the problem. So, I read all the problems backwards. Basically, the word problems always start out with a bunch of extraneous data and an explanation of what's going on (a bunch of blah, blah, blah). Until you get to the end of the problem where they ask what they're looking for. I think to myself, "Well, let's figure out what you want, and then I'll go backwards and get all the relevant data." Much faster, and it leads me to problem solve in the workplace later on in life with a speed that astonishes most people. Plus, I like that calculus has real-world usage rather than theoretical usage. Anyway, I also take physics that year, and I smash that course because of the calculus course. Also because our teacher lets us have an index card with notes. Most people keep notes of the principles. I keep notes of all the formulas, because I suck at memorizing specific things, but am excellent at remembering concepts. So, I know what formula I need easily--I just need my reference for the formula itself. Physics ends up being an important class for another reason. One day, we take a field trip to Six Flags, which is an amusement park with roller coasters. We're going...FOR SCIENCE! (Of course. And to ride roller coasters. Let's not kid ourselves.) We go, and we have a worksheet with rides and some physics problems to work out. This is all to make the trip "legitimate" in the eyes of the school board. We're all having a blast. My soul decides it's time to address our phobia of falling. (At this point, I'm becoming more and more aware of my soul's voice in between my normal thoughts.) So, we go on the ride called "Acrophobia". It's a 200-foot ride where you sit in a seat with a heavy-duty harness. The seat is raised up to the top of the 200-foot tall pole, the seat is then tilted forward 15 degrees, and you're dropped. Okay, so, I'm scared shitless to go on this ride, but I do it anyway because my soul is literally walking my legs over there whether I like it or not. I get in the seat, we go up, I think "Oh, this will be okay. This won't be so bad. The view is actually nice." Then the seat tilts forward, and I have a momentary thought "I am going to die, aren't I." The ride drops, I miraculously do NOT piss myself. The air brakes catch the ride 20 feet from the ground and we're gently lowered. I get off shaking, and my friend I'm with asks me if I'm okay. "Well, I'm not dead. Let's not do that again." Instead, I go over and ride something called the "Ninja", which is a low roller coaster with loops, twists, and turns. I love the feeling of the g-forces. My classmates don't. They get queasy. But I go back and ride that a few more times. It's like a drug. Do I conquer my fear of falling that day? No. But we make a lot of progress. The last step in that process was to climb up a lighthouse and lean over the railing at the top, because that's how I died and started that phobia. That doesn't happen for another 6 years or so. Anyway, back to school. AP art studio is easy. I just make art pieces for a portfolio to be submitted at the end of the year. Literary analysis is also a fun class. We write timed essays every Friday, and at first I don't like it because it's nerve-wracking. But as my mind goes faster, I get better at it and end up scoring excellently. I also have a proper history teacher. She teaches us both sides of the American Civil War, and I deeply appreciate her making that effort. She is the only person other than myself who I have known to take the time to fully understand both sides of the story. She also does a special extra credit trip on Saturdays to historical sites in the area. I LOVE this, and go whenever I can. I don't do it for the extra credit, which many classmates accuse me of. I don't do it to butter up the teacher, which they also suggest. I do it, because it's interesting and I love history. Because I enjoy it. At some point that year, I am forced to take one "normal level" class. It's like "home economics" all over again, but with money. I already know how to do all the things in the class, but I have to take it to check the box on my school record so I can graduate. This is not an enjoyable experience. I'm suddenly in a class with people who are not very bright. Several of them have children, and I find this shocking. (How do you make that mistake?) One of them listens to a band called "Insane Clown Posse", which scares me in terms of its visuals. I somehow make it through that experience and put it behind me as much as possible. I make a few new friends that year. One is a girl whose family is Indian and she lives right down the street from me. She's two years younger, but sometimes we hang out and play video games at her house. We walk home from the bus together every day, too. The other two are a boy and a girl, and hmm. All right. So, the girl is also a little younger than me. I don't remember where she's from, but she has hair so long it goes past her butt. She's excellent at drawing anime, and at one point she tells me she likes me romantically. I am not interested, and this makes things a little awkward. I remember when she tells me this, she's hugging me around the middle with her face buried in my stomach looking up at me. It's very cute, but I just don't like her that way and I tell her. She's only a little disappointed. I think she knew it was a stretch, but I didn't appear to have a boyfriend so she had to try, right? You know, it's funny. Where's all the guys telling me they like me? I ask the universe at large this. My soul tells me there were lots of guys who liked me, but I made them so nervous they felt like children trying to approach me. So they didn't. To which I feel my teenage self rolling her eyes and sighing. She would have very much liked someone to approach her and say they liked her. But it never really happened. I complete that last year smashingly. Great scores in everything. I even manage to wheedle out of doing the AP exams, which my teachers do NOT understand. (I was taking them for the challenge, not for the college credits.) I graduate with high honors, and my public schooling is complete. Somehow, I managed to escape a lot of the programming that's prevalent in schools. I did get a little bit, because that's just unavoidable. I could chalk it up to general obliviousness. But I think I was being mentally protected a lot of the time. I truly do. Being programmed was not on this soul's agenda of things to deal with, so we kept it minimized somehow.
Anyway. Thank you so much for joining me on this journey. I hope you got as much out of it as I did writing it. It's been a joy to remember all of this, even if I've left a lot out. I think I've given you the important bits--the bits that shaped who I am as a person. I thank you for your time. Adiamas. --Kyriel Comments are closed.
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