Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey

It has been a crazy weekend. I wish I'd had time to post on Friday night, but my family was busy planning for our trip to northern Wisconsin for my cousin's graduation. Friday was one of the weirdest days at school ever, ranking up there with the time the lights went out during lunch in seventh grade. It started fairly normally, besides being the last regular day of the school year. At lunch I played Catch Phrase with the "lunch bunch": Sonya, April, Ellen, Alexandra, and Sandra; the bunch also included Maya, who was a senior, and Emily Anderson, who didn't always come to lunch. Third hour's main development was Ms. Greene's discovery that I'm not signed up for Spanish next year, prompting a long lecture. I know that I'm pretty good at Spanish, which was her main argument--I got a third-place "Rosa Valdes Cruz" award this year, which is given to students who do well in the cultural contest and the National Spanish Exam--but I cannot stand another year like this one. Spanish easily was one of my least favorite classes, even worse than calculus, maybe, as far as the actual time in class went, because in calc I could talk or let my mind wander. I'll probably take Spanish classes in college, but I am done with Ms. Greene as a teacher.

Fourth hour: the insanity began. The class started with people talking about raging food fights and water balloon throwing in the halls, particularly the fact that Mr. Shaver had gotten knocked down and was being taken to the hospital, possibly with a broken leg. I was shocked, but then the class went on as usual, as we took notes from Critical Theory Today about how postcolonial criticism applies to The Great Gatsby (that sounds horribly boring, but I do enjoy studying Gatsby from all these different viewpoints). Suddenly, we started hearing a lot of yelling outside, and pretty soon we couldn't help but get out of our seats and go over to the windows to see what was going on. Mrs. Longhenry's class is on the second floor in the upper corner of the school, so we had a good view of everything. A huge crowd of students was running around in front of the school, waving posters and yelling. A few were banging on the windows. Several hall aides, police officers, and various staff members came out, and the students all ran out by the street. Eventually, they started marching around in a line, as Mrs. Wilson tried in vain to talk to them. A lockdown was announced, and after we finished our criticism notes, we just sat around, signing yearbooks and keeping an eye on the situation outside. Jenna, Allison, and I had to sneak out to use the bathroom. It turned out to be pretty fun.

We were released from class and told to go "quickly and peaceably" to our next class. (People kept saying that peaceable wasn't a word, and made fun of Mrs. Wilson, but I was pretty sure I'd seen it before, and confirmed my suspicion by consulting a dictionary during sixth hour.) Fifth hour was less than twenty minutes long; Mr. Stokes was our sub, and he ranted for a while about all kinds of things. He's a small, elfish man with a white beard and glasses, who always wears gray suits. He used to teach at Auburn, and now he subs a lot and coaches bowling. He has some strange idioms, like "You'll all come rushing up here like flies on dooky," and "That's about as cheerful as a bag full of dead babies." After fifth hour, I saw Laura and Ellen in the hall, and ended up talking to them for so long that I didn't have time to get to sixth hour. I was scared that I'd get in trouble if I was in the hall, and I knew that I wasn't going to be doing much during sixth hour, so I ducked into Mr. Longhenry's class and spent the hour there. It was...interesting. I can definitely see where Mr. L. gets all his complaints about the freshmen. Maybe they were especially bad, though, given the atmosphere of the day.

After school, I went outside to board the bus and go home, but the bus apparently wasn't there. Twice I walked toward the end of the line of buses and met people from my own bus coming the other way, shaking their heads worriedly. I probably should have checked for myself, but there was a fairly large group of kids from my bus, and so I knew it wasn't just me. The only problem: my sister was missing. All the buses pulled away and I was left standing there with Kat An, my neighbor and a member of the frosh-soph QB team this year, having no idea where Maureen was. I went inside to look for her or have her paged, and all of a sudden I started crying. All these people kept coming up to me--Mrs. Heisel, Ms. Floming, Mrs. Drummond--and trying to comfort me, saying things like, "She's a big girl; she'll take care of herself." I was really embarrassed. Mrs. Heisel had her paged twice, as Kat and I sat in the main office. Mr. Hurder came in and saw me and asked me what was wrong. He acted really annoyed, like, "Oh, no, her again." (I cried in his office when I got in trouble for the fake ID thing.) He informed me that bus 216 had been there and left. Kat and I went outside to wait, and soon bus 216 pulled up with about five people on it, including Maureen. I don't know why the driver left with so many people obviously missing; maybe he just figured that all of those people weren't riding the bus that day.

I offered Kat a ride home, since she had been so helpful, running around everywhere with me, and we sat down to wait for my mom. Pretty soon Emily showed up, having been in the chemistry room finishing up a lab, and it was fun sitting there talking to her and Kat for a while. I told them that I was, if not happy, at peace with the situation, because it's now an established rule: I have to cry on the last day of school. Freshman year it was the end of Dead Poets Society (when Todd stands up on his desk and says "O Captain, my Captain"); sophomore year we watched a film in U.S. History about all these young men getting killed in Vietnam, and besides that I was losing a lot of good friends--Melanie, Hillary, Bandy, etc.--to graduation. In fact, as I was leaving school just before the whole bus/missing Maureen fiasco, I was thinking to myself that I had not cried that day, that I should have.

When we arrived home, after dropping Kat off, my day brightened with the sight of a red minivan parked in the driveway. Okay, so it's not a party van, and I have to share it with Maureen, and my parents will probably make me do grocery shopping for them (my mom's been threatening that since I was eight or nine). But it's basically mine: I have a car now. Just have to get that license...

On Saturday morning, my mom, sister, and I got up at five-thirty to drive to the small town of Hammond, Wisconsin, home to my uncle Steve, aunt Joanne, and cousins Mark and Jeff, a drive of about five hours. Mark graduated from high school as valedictorian, so of course we had to go. Actually, we didn't even see him graduate; that was on Friday night. My sister and I basically sat in their kitchen for five hours, watching 200 people we don't know come in and out and serve themselves beef sandwiches and strawberry Jello. Like I said, it's a small town, so everybody goes to everybody's graduation parties, plus my aunt and uncle teach at the high school, so a lot of teachers came. Later that night was better; my cousins from the Chicago area came. They're in their twenties, so I generally get along with them better than I do with the older crowd. We ordered pizza and sat around talking until midnight. My mom's side of the family is extremely loud; there's always about four conversations going on, and an average of three traditional family arguments will come up at least once during the course of a day spent with them. I can't tell you how many times I've heard the story of "the cow game." My family occasionally plays it, too; when you're driving in the middle of nowhere, it's sort of a way to pass the time. Each person counts the cows they see on their side of the car; a white horse or a cemetery on that side kills all the cows. Whoever has the most cows at the end of the trip wins. Cheap entertainment, I guess. Anyway, my mom always tells the story of how she had the most cows, and her sister claimed she saw a white horse, but really it was white with brown spots. This apparently still rankles, although it probably happened when my mom was six or seven, and now she's 44.

My aunts love to embarrass my sister and I, too, as in hinting loudly that we thought some of Mark's friends were cute, while the friends were still within earshot, or proudly introducing me to some hot senior guy as "a member of the State Scholastic Bowl team." As my mom sympathized later, I might as well have a sign over my head, flashing "NERD." I don't mind being associated with the quiz bowl team at Auburn, where the only people I care about are pretty focused on academics and are proud or at least respectful of academic competitions and accomplishments. But if I'm being introduced to an unfamiliar guy, even a smart one, that's not the kind of thing I want to be hailed as. He kind of glanced at me and said, "Oh," in a condescending way, and then hurried from the room. Yeah...

I do love my family, though, and I enjoyed the weekend. I am always glad to get home, although today, Memorial Day, hasn't been too relaxing. Being gone the last two days has meant a lot of work today, especially on calculus and world history. My only goal is to get a C in calc. I want to do well on everything else, but as calc is my first final of the week, and it's the one that matters most based on my current grade in the class, that's all I really care about right now.