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The College Years (Chapter 1)
By Vader
THE COLLEGE YEARS
Entry I: The Beginning
Continued from the Prologue . . .
CHAPTER 1
My Mom, who’d taken the courtesy of not combing her hair that morning, drove through the thick fog, down the main boulevard of our portion of the city towards downtown. As we traveled, there was an unmistakable and unexplainable churn of butterflies in my stomach – in once sense I was excited to be getting such a chance, but in another sense, I felt as if I was abandoning the place I belonged in along with my friends. If I passed this test, I would be ahead of all of them, and I wouldn’t be seeing them almost every day as I had before. It was moments like these that had held me back from making the decision to take this blasted test in the beginning.
In the end, so many encouraged me to put education and getting a head start over everything else, I finally just agreed to take it. I knew I would still see the people I’d surrounded myself with over the past years, but I could only imagine at that time how strange it would feel to be in a school without any of them and all by myself. There would be hundreds of other people around me at college, but I would still be alone. Up till then I had put that thought into the back of my head, but as the time drew nearer, the more it crept back to the front.
I felt like I was being driven to a judgment session, and that the judgment would be harsh either way. If they felt I wasn’t good enough, they would have the power to stop my life from advancing forward in its potential. If they felt I was good enough, I would be allowed to continue, yet I would be disconnected from the world I felt familiar with.
As nervous and as sick as I was starting to become, it was too late to turn back now. We pulled into the parking lot of a high school that stood atop a bluff within the urban landscape around. Previous times I’d driven by, the school didn’t look half bad to attend, but today, it looked bleak and cold, unwelcoming.
Upon entering the lot, we were wonderfully surprised that we would be waiting line behind several other cars to get a parking space. My Mom, after stopping, began to inch forward, closer and closer to the car in front of us. “What are you doing?” I asked her.
“What?” she obliviously waved her hand. Since she’d stopped her inching, I shut up about it and continued to day dream, only to be distracted by her pulling up to only be a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a millimeter away from hitting the bumper of the car in front of us.
“Mom!” I yelled.
“What?” she asked again.
The man from the car ahead stuck his fist out the window and pleasantly extended his middle finger above all the others to give us an unspoken message, which at that time, I began to doubt my mother would even understand, considering the unusually dopey way she’d been acting that morning.
“What’s that guys problem?” she exclaimed.
“You’ve been pulling up right on top of his bumper!” I told her, exasperated.
“Oh! Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I did!”
“No you didn’t! You just said ‘mom!’!”
“That’s telling you!”
“Jack, I’m an English major, graduated with honors – that is not telling me!”
“Yeah it is, you just didn’t understand it!”
“No, Jack!”
“What?”
“No!”
“No what?”
“No to that!”
“Mom!”
“What?!”
“Just . . . just . . .”
“What!!!?”
* * *
I sat in a desk, inside of a classroom that felt like a cell. I could almost envision bars where the doorway was placed, but that vision was whisked away like dust every time another kid entered the room.
After we’d parked, my Mom insisted on staying with me until they let us into the classrooms. So there I stood, within a sea of high school kids, only having something in common with the nerds hiding their four-eyed faces behind a Harry Potter book, who also had their parents waiting with them. Forty-five minutes after the classrooms were supposed to open, they did.
So now, there I was, waiting for my test booklet to be handed to me. I only wished that Rachel were there with me, holding my hand through all this – she always understood me, no matter what. I hadn’t previously realized how much I really needed . . . how much less I would see of her if I made it to college.
The simple, empty, question was in my head: why?
Then the test booklet was slapped on my desk, which probably sounded louder in my ears than in everyone else’s. And so, as the uninterested, mono-tone voice coming from the supervisor unnecessarily na the instructions like Ben Stein, I whipped out my #2 pencil, and began the first question, sweat beginning to drip from my forehead.
For the next 2 hours, I must have been in a trance, for afterwards, I barely remembered anything that happened. Couldn’t remember exactly which questions were which, what was and what wasn’t.
I didn’t know how to feel after that ordeal.
I was lost in too many mixed emotions.
I pulled out my cell phone and called my dad to be picked up.
And there I waited, staring out to look upon downtown and the bay water beyond. The fog seemed to clear then, and the sun shone more clearly, breathing new energy into me. I felt like hope had been signaled. And then my phone rang.
“Hello?” I answered.
“Jack, it’s Josh! We’re going to go to Chili’s tonight after church. Wanna come?”
“Sounds great.”
“Cool. See you tonight at 7 then.”
“I’ll be there.”
(More to come . . .)
12/9/2002 7:00:11 PM
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