When I was sixteen, I made the decision to switch schools. I
was weary of the small-town vibe of Hopedale Jr./Sr. High School: a building
that hosted just a few hundred students and what I considered to be a woefully
inadequate Drama Club. In my bid for the big time, I looked to the next town
over and chose Milford High School. MHS boasted many impressive features. It had about
as many students in my grade level as Hopedale had in the whole school; a gym
that was actually attached to the building (no more having to trudge down town
in all kinds of weather for Phys. Ed.); a genuine honest-to-goodness football
team (I had previously begun to suspect that high school football teams were
something that only existed in movies) and, most importantly, a good Drama
program.
So impressed was I by my new school that I lived in constant
fear that my MHS classmates would see me for the stupid, small-town rube that I thought
I was. The most substantial and absurd manifestation of this fear still haunts
me to this day: I was afraid to ask where my locker was.
To be fair, I was indeed given a locker assignment. My locker
number was neatly printed on a small slip of paper that was handed to me on my
first day of eleventh grade. But, after spending the previous four years
attending a school that consisted of little more than two short hallways
stacked on top of each other, Milford High School’s expansive layout (it was
divided into wings—wings for God’s
sake!) seemed an impenetrable mystery to me.
And so, unable to decode the correlation between the numbers
on that slip of paper and the location of my locker, and too shy to ask anyone,
I endured the final two years of my high school career lockerless. Each day of
school, every item that I might need—every notebook, every school project, every lunch, every massive
hardcover textbook—went into my backpack. I spent my schooldays stooped and shuffling
through the hallways, my overstuffed backpack strapped precariously to my
then-willow-thin frame. After a while, the backpack seemed to become a part of
my overburdened back, and I began to look like a teenage,
female Quasimodo as I staggered painfully from class to class.
I’ve long since tackled my fear of looking stupid in front
of strangers. Indeed, embarrassing myself in front of others is a phenomenon as
frequent and inevitable as the rising of the sun, so why not embrace it? I do
wish sometimes, though, that I had learned this lesson earlier; it would have
saved me years of resultant back pain after daily laboring under a load that
would make a pack animal wince.
So kids, my advice to you is this: Just ask someone where
your goddamn locker is.
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| 16 years old: Afraid to ask where my locker was, NOT afraid to wear shiny animal prints. |
