Four

School was noisy. Having spent the last three months in a stockroom by myself had gotten me adjusted to silence. After that, coming back into an environment that contained nearly three thousand adolescents, aged fourteen to eighteen, was like being woken up in the monkey pit of the zoo. In fact, a zoo was a good description for the whole thing.

Surely these people had seen their friends at some point during the summer, hadn’t they? One would think, judging from the shrieks of, “You look so tan!” and “Omigod, I missed you so much!” that they hadn’t. But, unless the world was playing a giant trick on me, friends did things like hang out and see each other over the summer months. This kind of noise simply wasn’t necessary.

Thankfully, my schedule was filled to the brim with Honors and AP courses, which meant that as soon as I entered a classroom, the chatter of the spider monkeys I went to school with decreased in pitch and increased in intelligence. Though, the discussion of what they had each learned at Harvard Summer Camp that year—as opposed to gossip about who had hooked up with who—was both less annoying and more. I don’t know how I ever thought that school would be relieving in its regularity.

But, for my classes at least, the bell would then ring, and everyone would quiet down so they could hear what requirements each teacher had, save for a stifled groan when we found out that we had to do oral translations for French every morning, or that for each lab in AP Chem we had to do a formal lab write up. I was not among the groaners.

By the time third period Poetry Crafting had rolled around, I had more or less had enough. For the past three hours I had sat silently, reading the spec sheets that were passed out to me, and ignoring my peers while they scribbled furious notes. I couldn’t fathom what they were writing down, as it had been handily typed out and given to us by even the most hard core of teachers. I had written down a thing or two per class, but I was finished long before everyone else, and I wrote so much more slowly.

But for Poetry Crafting I had Ms. Moreno, who also happened to be the advisor of the
Middletown High School’s literary magazine, Memorandum, which also happened to the only extra-curricular I had ever bothered joining. Ms. Moreno knew me, which was relaxing, because she knew that just because I didn’t raise my hand didn’t mean I didn’t know the answer. She knew my poetry, and had a relatively high opinion of it. She may even like me, for all I knew. She was the only teacher who I could think of going to for a college recommendation letter.

Her welcome lecture was the least stupid of all the ones I’d had to listen to so far. Instead of talking about getting-to-know-you, she dove right into the parameters of the class. Unlike my others, this class wasn’t full of Harvard-Summer-Camp-goers (those kids all took AP Physics for their elective); this class consisted mostly of the “emo” kids, or the “art nerds,” the quieter group that, while they talked, didn’t so much prattle. It was refreshing, that, and the fact that I knew most of the faces in the room—all but two—because many were Memorandum staff, and the rest had taken poetry classes like these with me since they were first offered.

“Deirdre,” Ms. Moreno whispered to me on my way out of the classroom, “come by after school this afternoon and I’ll give you the new staff list.” I nododed once, as if I hadn’t known this already. The big event of the first day of school for the lit magazine staff was the release of the officer positions; it was a big deal to see if you had gotten the job that you’d so coveted. It was assumed by general consensus that I’d be Editor in Chief for this year—I was the only student of my year to have started Memorandum at the advent of freshman year, I had held an officer position since sophomore year, and had been production manager (literary magazine code for second-in-command) the year before, being the only junior in memory to claim a typically senior position.

Ms. Moreno smiled at me, and I made my way to AP Calc, to merge once again with the Brains. The noise of the hall wasn’t as numbing as it had been, so presumably I was adjusting. The spider monkey’s voices seemed to be less a single mass, and I could pick out individual conversations.

For example, after sinking into one of the chairs in the back of the room in Calc, I absently tuned into that of the two girls in front of me. “…he’s in my second period, and again in this class, and my God, he’s gorgeous,” said the first, a brunette with Shirley Temple style curls.

The second—dirty blonde—sighed dramatically. “New boys never show up around here. Did you get the scoop on him?”

Brunette nodded. “He’s an athlete, and on the newspaper or something.”

Dirty Blonde gave an appreciative mmmmm. “Sport?”

“Cross country,” Brunette grinned wickedly. Was there some odd cross country significance that I didn’t know about? Sometimes I wonder if I even live on the same planet as everyone else. Either I don’t, or I’m missing the popular culture gene.

Groaning, Dirty Blonde flipped her flatteringly-cut pageboy. “I love athletes. All those muscles…” I find it on the whole difficult to communicate with my gender, I really do.

They continued on this vein for a while, discussing the school’s various athletic programs and how “hot” they considered the participants of this sport to be. There were six minutes between classes, but Poetry Crafting was close. If this obnoxious, insignificant nonsense was a preview of what I would have to spend my year listening to, clearly some sort of greater power was conspiring against me.

The bell rang, and the room became mercifully silent, dependable honors students that we are. The teacher stood up from where she had sat at her computer, and leaned against her desk to address us, stack of spec sheet handouts at the ready. Just as she had opened her mouth to speak, the door creaked open, and a boy stuck his head in sheepishly. He was one of the two unknowns from my Poetry class.

Brunette’s arm shot out to claw the wrist of Dirty Blonde, in a grasp that looked like it hurt. “That’s him!” she hissed—unnecessarily, in my opinion. Ms. Evened cocked an eyebrow, and beckoned to the boy with her stack of handouts, flagging him into the room. He obeyed. “Let’s hope that this isn’t an indication as to what can be expected for the rest of the year,” she said airily, as if her comment had no direction. I disliked her already.

Having plunged into the closest seat, presumably as to not disrupt the class further, the boy spread his hands in an apologetic gesture. “Sorry, ma’am, I got lost.” He ducked his head, as if to say “meaning no disrespect.” I had to hand it to him, the “ma’am” was a nice touch.

Ms. Evened wasn’t having that, though. “One would think,” she snapped, no longer pretending to be speaking to the class at large, “that by senior year, you would know your way around the school.”

The boy shrugged. “I’m new,” he offered. Well, that accounted for my not knowing him. He wasn’t yet part of the poetry clique.

With a dissatisfied hmph! Ms. Evened turned back to the class at large. She was a bit bitter, wasn’t she, for someone who was only maybe twenty five? But then again, hardships aren’t mutually for the old, so I may be too quick to judge.