If Sparklers could win Pulitzers, thenameselodie would be RICH.—Sparkitors
The clock has been counting down for weeks. Seniors are longboarding through the hallways and coming to class by climbing through open windows. Teachers spend whole class periods showing YouTube videos. Yearbooks are flying back and forth and people are collecting signatures. But the finality of it all didn’t hit me until I cleaned out my locker for the first and last time.
My locker is a monstrosity. I share it with a few other people, and over the course of this year we’ve accumulated a plastic sword that is legitimately sharp and probably not allowed, a poster of Lord Voldemort (we stole it from the library around Halloween), a fancy black fedora (I’m not sure where this came from), and the obligatory mountain of crumpled notebook paper and mechanical pencils that have long since been out of lead. I did not want to clean my locker. I didn’t want to lug around all this crap until I found a garbage can and, yes, okay, maybe I’m a bit of a pack rat who’s also really, really lazy. But as I stood before this veritable agglomeration of items, I realized there was something heartbreakingly final about throwing away that stupid plastic sword.
I want to throw out a piece of advice to all you miserable high school students (all who are perfectly content may skip this section and scroll down, and know that the rest of us hate you), and especially to tiny little freshman Elodie if I can secure a time machine: high school will end. No, you are not trapped in a Groundhog Day scenario where the same thing plays over and over. High school—all four strange, embarrassing, and stressful years—inevitably comes to a close. I’m not telling you to cherish it—let’s face it, high school sucks if you’re the kind of kid that has a breakown every time someone passes you the ball in gym class, if your writing skills aren’t up to par, if you melt into a puddle of spontaneously combusted mush when it comes to taking tests, if you sometimes think that putting a bag over your head should be considered some sort of public service. Yeah. It sucks. Take it from the girl who always responded with blank stares because she was shocked someone actually talked to her. Take it from the girl who always felt like she was standing still while the entire high school social scene whooshed by in a whirl of gossip and cliques.
If I could give some advice to thirteen-year-old me (picture an approximately elf-sized kid with braces and a really unfortunate haircut), I’d say:
1. Give up that dream of wanting to be a singer. You sound like a beached whale.
2. You’re going to be in that unenviable position of being stuck in a gym class with none of your friends. A word of advice: bring your iPod, and stagger your bathroom breaks so as not to arouse suspicion.
3. Start reading the textbook.
4. Do not bemoan the break-up between yourself and Alan Bennett. You’re thirteen, and he was an idiot. Plus, he’s going to ask you out again in a few years, and your sixteen-year-old self will really let him have it.
5. Lose the eyeliner. You look like a raccoon.
6. Finally—and I hope you’re still paying attention—I know high school sucks, and being 13 and awkward really sucks, but the good news is it pretty much sucks for everybody. (Except for Jenny Larson in your English class. Her hair will always look perfect. But let’s disregard that.)
It’s no fun to be too awkward or too weird or too fat or too skinny or too pale or too zitty or too shy or too loud. But we’re all made of these tiny imperfections and to pretend otherwise is counterproductive. It’s hard, I know it’s hard, to take stock of the world and realize that high school does not embody the universe—it’s hard now because it is your world, it’s what you do, it’s where you’re forced to go every day for eight hours and sometimes it feels like this is it. This is all there is. Just homework and good teachers and bad teachers and having the kids in the back of the room chucking wads of paper at the back of your head and backstabbing friends and catty girls and immature boys and the agony of having nowhere to sit in the cafeteria and the undefined but still sizable social boundaries of this stupid, stupid thing called high school.
I don’t miss it. I wouldn’t go back. I wouldn’t revisit the drama, the unrequited love between myself and some jock god who doesn’t know I exist, the stammering over words while presenting a project to the class. But if I could go back, if I could whisper one sentence in the ear of my former freshman self, I’d say, “It will get better.”
And it does. Some days you wake up and reality washes over, and you just feel worthless. You feel ugly in a world that only appreciates pretty. You feel far too weird and annoying for anyone to genuinely like. You feel stupid. You feel like everyone hates you. Sometimes you hate yourself. You feel all of this at once in a chaotic medley of emotional turmoil, and you carry on as if you haven’t got feelings to hurt or a heart to break, and it’s rough, Sparklers. It’s just rough.
And so I wondered, as I stared at the plastic sword and Voldemort poster in my arms, why I felt the traces of nostalgia stirring deep down somewhere. I can’t pinpoint exactly when high school went from being a social hellhole to a tolerable environment, but I know it was closer to the end. There is something curiously liberating about the this is it factor, the feeling that a journey is ending. I didn’t exactly stand there sobbing in front of my locker, but there were definite waterworks coming up that I had to contain.
Tomorrow is my last day of high school. My locker’s cleaned out and I’ve turned in all my books. I have two presentations to make and a senior assembly to attend and then I’m free, Sparklers. My only regret is that it took me so long to receive the crystal-clear enlightenment unique to the end of high school. All I can say is this: don’t take it too seriously. High school will end. This is not all there is. It will get better.
Guys, listen to Elodie. SHE IS A GENIUS. Did she hit the nail on the miserable head when it comes to the ups and downs of high school?
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