HIGH SCHOOL PLANET

For some people high school is a place and torment or a place of ascension. I mean, you can go and remember all the awful things that happened to you in the locker room before gym. The bullies that made your pain their music. The snobs who let you know how much everything cost and how little yours did; the gossips who started the rumor and then came to you as a friend, the ones that made everyday coming to school a living nightmare because it was in their cruel minds to make somebody afraid.
Or you could have been the cheerleader with the petulant boobs that had all the jocks in school salivating during a game, captain of the basketball team who kissed and told about his every conquest behind the school bleachers; the coolest guy who didn’t need a school book only the way he looked at a girl that made her want to be his, the homecoming queen who sat on her throne with a tiara in her hair waving to her subjects. Whoever you are or were in that world, it’s the only planet that matters for bus ride to school bell. For four years even though there is a world beyond those echoing halls of learning, you learn really fast, that whatever you do or will ever do, how you fare in this world will change your future for the good or it the bad, will haunt you forever.
Somehow I knew that in my freshman year. I thought if I just keep my head down and stay invisible four years could go fast. Daddy was long gone and everything in my life was measured with how much pain I could manage and still walk and breathe. My mother had lost the first and only man she ever loved. For a woman like her to have opened up her heart for just a tiny bit, his leaving her doomed her forever in a tomb of isolation. She would not risk her heart again.
Me and Mama were foolish enough to believe that Daddy’s exit would not impact our four year old Tina. We thought she would not be remember because she was so young. So her grieving heart wasn’t managed and her feelings of abandonment plague her now, her fear to trust or love anyone. And me always longing to fill in the gap of missing Daddy, I filled myself with too much food and still lived a life that was empty.
How many fathers walk away not knowing the pain they leave behind. The questions a child asks himself: "What did I do to make him leave?" And some one will say you didn’t do anything but inside you always know- they didn’t just leave Mama, they left you too.
It didn’t take long to find out who the most popular were-the most beautiful, the more affluent, the cruel one, the kind ones, the ones like me, hiding.
I met my friend, Angie, that first year. Her mother was a social climber who’d vowed that her daughter was going to be homecoming queen before she entered school. But Angie wasn’t what her mother wanted her to be. She was shy and nervous and afraid like me.
I don’t think I could have survived on that planet of pungent air and the high pitched shrieks of gym shoes on high varnished floors, or the world changing outside if it had not been for Angie. In four years Malcolm was slain, King was assassinated and Bobby was felled by another bullet. The 60s was a bloody decade. It was the bloodiest of times and we endured it all without the protector we have come to count on for air itself.
　
Remember how you cried on that last day, as your tassel stuck to your wet face-as you said goodbye to the teachers who made your life a living hell and the ones who inspired you-the ones that made you believe you could change the world?
We left our teachers who had said a thousand farewells to kids with faces like ours for the next few decades. Teachers who would remember or forget us over time- preserve the child we were or thought we were, forever. Years later when curiosity draws us back to that class reunion-to see those faces some twenty years later- that teacher who looks the same, who says you haven’t changed at all, will look into your worldly-worn face and find the you you’ve once been and smile. Somehow..it still riddles me how, Mama and Tina and me, survived the days...when Daddy left us.