The girl strides down the hall, her knapsack slung over one shoulder. It’s a full knapsack, and it drags her back down into an odd, Quasimodo-ish shape, but she doesn’t care: one-shouldered is the only way to do this. She strides. She knows where she’s going—locker to math wing to 3rd floor English class to basement weight room to locker to cafeteria to music room to locker to back field. She imagines one long tracking shot, capturing every step. She thinks, “None of this will be important, someday, but I want to remember every second of it.” She’s a romantic realist, and she plays the trombone, and she loves high school. Even the hunkering down outside the gym, waiting for the surge that will signify open doors and imminent exam. Even the tests, the essays—the things that make her sit cross-legged on her bed (to her mother’s chagrin), flipping textbook pages and writing line after line on three-ring binder paper. Especially the grade 9 Latin class in which she works on her novel (on three-ring binder paper) when she’s finished with Sextus (puer temerarius!) and Flavia and their dog Latrax (Latrax latrat!). Her Latin teacher walks up and down the rows; she sees the girl writing words that are, at best, Latin cognates, and she smiles. It’s OK. It’s good. The girl writes stories and novels and does homework and plays trombone and sits with her friends outside the music room doors; she reads Shakespeare and Golding and Sartre and masters, briefly, the arcane hieroglyphs of trigonometry, before she burns her math notes and pitches the remnants into a garbage can on the back field, having dropped this nemesis of a subject forever. She dissects no frogs or fetal pigs, having dropped science before this became necessary. She is happy in a way that she knows people (maybe even she) will roll their eyes at, in the not-too-far future. She longs for that tracking shot; for an image of her navigating, striding, going places.
*
I just got back from parent-teacher night at my daughter’s high school. And by “got back from,” I mean “hightailed it from said high school to a fabulous gastropub a few blocks north and west of there.”
Parents shouldn’t be disingenuous or precious or otherwise deny-y: evenings like this one really are as much about parents as they are about their children. It’s just another level of navigation—and I wish there were a tracking shot for this, too. Me, following my kid through the hallways she knows. The lockers. The cafeteria. My kid saying, “It’s so weird being here at night”; me remembering having had the very same thought (and wondering, now, what my parents were thinking, when they followed me). The things that were mine, the things that are hers, right this moment—some that match; others that don’t.
And that’s OK. It’s good.
Sextus, that puer temerarius, doesn’t realize he’s about to fall out of the tree AGAIN. (Picture taken from Ecce Romani, grade 9 Latin text.)
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