Watching the fat end of my mother’s light blue station wagon slide away from me down Lawn Ave. in August of 2001, I wondered if she was crying in that sad, lonely mom way. I remembered how happy she was months before when I told her, casually, “Mom, I got in.” She had been silent for a moment, then flew at me, shrieking, and wrapped herself awkwardly around my shoulders. One arm held me normally, the other accidentally squeezed my boob. After a while she pulled away, glowing, breathless. “I’m sorry I touched your breast just then.”
The first day of school I developed a terrible heat rash across my forehead. I was so nervous and sweaty all day that it sprang cruelly to life in the afternoon. I’ve never seen anything like it. For the next few days, when I met people I’d throw my arm up and across my forehead in a gesture of feigned nonchalance that must have resembled Tourette Syndrome or extreme melodrama.
But still I tried to be cool. I wore my cool sneakers, I put cool pictures on my door (in retrospect I realize this is impossible), and I wore a cool t-shirt with a beer logo on it because I knew beer was cool.
The first beer-drinking party I went to, I tried to be cool. Rich Aybar was going around putting masking-tape name tags on everyone and I felt the urgent need to write my own name in my own handwriting so I could write it “cool.” But then I just looked like that one kid with the rash who did it wrong, who must have failed to get Rich’s attention and therefore had to make her own masking tape label.
One thing that was not cool was getting lost, daily, for three weeks. The second day of school, I found myself standing, hopelessly lost, on the corner of Pine and Lawn. I turned in slow circles, looking for a sign. And then across the street I saw Omar (who has since transferred). I had met Omar the day before when his mother introduced us in the stairwell. “This is my son, Omar,” she had said to me, aggressively. He looked mortified, and I was mortified for him. He ducked behind the large piece of desk furniture he was carrying and focused intently on the stairs. It felt like preschool. “It’s nice to meet you,” I said, staring at the banister.
He was turning around and around under the street signs, so I called out, “Hi Omar,” and he said, “Oh hey,” and for a moment we both pretended we were exactly where we wanted to be. But then we realized simultaneously that there was no possible legitimate thing we could be doing silently, helplessly on the corner of Pine and Lawn, so we looked back at each other and I said, “Do you know how to get back to Butt C?” and he said, “No, not at all.”
The first day of school, after my mom had driven away, after I had unpacked, after I had completed every last meaningless task I could possibly occupy myself with before it became necessary for me to actually introduce myself to people, the power went out. I was putting my sneakers in order for the second time, listening to strangers laughing in the hallway, when everything plunged into darkness. Everything was dark except for the window, where the sun was setting. In fact it was gorgeous and golden, falling through the trees onto the side of Butterfield C, and I felt a sort of charming loneliness settle over me. I went to the window and sat on the radiator. I knew things would happen to me, that life would get complicated, but for that moment I was perfectly alone and everything was simple.
Four years both is and isn’t a long time. Four years ago we all looked pretty much the same way we do now, we still wear the same sweatshirts, we still make the same kind of jokes, we still have the same posters up in our rooms. But four years ago I was seventeen, eating cereal, waiting for the big envelope. And then it came. Four years ago I crouched by the mail slot, holding it, thinking things are going right.
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