Endure

Katerina Sutton

Each day, she wakes up and brushes her teeth with an overused plastic toothbrush, applies the same bright red lipstick to her lips and cheeks. She dresses in her uniform with the distinct middle school logo, with the large symbol of a panther etched into the collar, rather than the high school ones, with sophisticated, italicized cursive of the school’s name printed on the side. She puts on her ratty purple backpack, with holes in the bottom, that she’ll use until it no longer holds her things.

She arrives to campus two hours before her first class, and sits in a corner of the courtyard. From here, she can see the entire campus – the bell tower that plays music before and after school, the three-storey building which harbors most middle school classes, the cafeteria which thousands of students pour in and out of each day. She is a fly on the wall, watching as employees arrive, then teachers, then students, all sluggish and weary.

By 7:20, most teachers have arrived, and she makes the rounds, greeting all of them. She’s used to their wary looks, wondering why she’s still coming here, why she’s not where she’s supposed to be. It’s been three weeks since school began.

__

As she watches these students, shuffling from the carline, she remembers waiting in single-file lines, slowly approaching the stage where her official title would change from “middle school” to “high school” student. She wants to race onto that stage, grab her diploma, and crush it under her high-heeled foot: a rejection of the idea of moving forward. Her favorite teacher, who teaches English, has been important to her this entire year; she shares her creative writing with him, and he helps her with her characters and plot. Standing before her now, he grins, wearing a silly hunter-green shirt and striped tie.

“Are you ready?” he asks, built-up excitement in his voice.

She smiles uneasily. She desperately wants to change into her comfortable uniform with the panther emblem, to skip to lunch with her friends, to talk and laugh freely. How could this have crept up on her so quickly? How was she expected to suddenly just leave the place she loved, and all that came with it, after what felt like no time at all?

Is she ready?

“No,” she says, meeting his gaze. Under his dry smile, she understands that his question is rhetorical; what do her feelings about it really matter, anyway? There is no choice to be made. He smiles. “You’re up next.”

Wait, she wants to shout back at him, as her body goes ahead of my heart, onto that stage, and walks across it, to the screeching vultures holding her diploma and wearing feigned smiles. No. I’m not ready.

__

I’m not ready. Still, she’s screaming from the foot of the stage, I’m not ready. She trudges through her morning classes, disoriented and distracted. The work is too hard, the teachers too unfamiliar, the setting too intense.

Lunch time comes around, and she does not sit with friends. She wanders back over to the middle school campus, where it is safe. She watches her underclassmen playing in the courtyard, walking to and from lunch, clustered together and gossiping on picnic benches. She remembers being in those same places myself, unaware of how quickly time was passing. Now, it is all she thinks about, how quickly the passing of each second adds together.

“Elara,” her friends often say, stretching the syllables of her name, “we all have the same lunch period. Where do you always go?”

“I just like to have a little time for myself during the day,” she replies, forcing a smile which she hopes paints a picture of normalcy. But she’s lying, of course; she is tortured by herself, by her thoughts. She wishes that all it took to remove myself from them was being with others.

She finds a place to sit down, her heart heavy with the weight of yearning. She notices her sixth-grade math teacher playing basketball with some students in the courtyard, limping slightly as he dribbles the ball across the pavement.

She wishes that she could find the students’ phone numbers, their social medias, to stay current on their lives. She wants to see them enjoying their days around the middle school campus, taking classes with the same teachers she once had. She wants to listen in on those lectures, to remember when she learned about Shakespeare and finding the slope of a line. She wants to see them fighting and embracing, laughing and crying, making memories as they go about their lives.

She wants to be there herself, but this is all she can have. She watches the students around her and cannot help but remember when she was one of them. I want to go back, she thinks desperately. I want to go back. I want to go backIwanttogobackIwanttogo-

“Elara,” a loud voice says. Her eyes meet a face a few feet in front of her: her old teacher, holding the basketball. Unfortunately, she’s been noticed.

The man is perhaps sixty-five, with thick brown hair, a tan face, and a warm smile. He’d always been so kind to her; now, he only looks with confusion, like she’s trespassing by being there. “What are you doing over here?”

“It’s my free period,” she says warmly, very aware of the implications of his words. “You’re in high school now!” he says, his voice loud, teasing. “Go back there and have fun!”

She gives him a small smile and turns inward again, focusing back on the campus around her. She couldn’t make him understand that she feels that she belongs where she is, that the daunting pillars and large cobblestone buildings awaiting her in high school are unfriendly, ruthless, cold. She belongs here, and it is devastating to be rejected from the place you feel you belong, by the people who used to accept you. Still, she understands that she must be a peculiar case to these teachers.

And while it hurts her heart to sit there for hours and watch her peers, she must. She cannot forget. Just the thought of it terrifies her, weighs on her mind. She can already feel it; at first it was little things, things so small she hadn’t noticed she’d forgotten them, like the sound of the warning bell. And then it became bigger and bigger things, and she fears that by the time she realizes all that she’s lost, it’ll be too late.

In three years, what memories will she have of the happiest days of her life? Will she be able to remember anything? Will she remember the classes she took, the friendships she had, the moments where she felt lucky to simply be alive? Will a mere shell of this past year remain, to remind her that it even happened?

She will do everything in her power to prolong this. Every waking day, she dabs oily lipstick on her cheeks, though she knows it clogs her pores. She had terrible acne back then, reddish splotches spanning from her cheeks to her forehead; spreading Tretinoin and Clindamycin creams on her face, the slight chemical smell of it, brings her back. She wears her middle school uniform, with the panther emblem instead of the sophisticated cursive, and she

does not care about potential dress-code conflicts. She wears the same backpack she used that past year, though it can barely hold itself together. Doing these things, sitting here, is the only comfort she can find in such trying times.

No one had told her that losing something isn’t losing it once; it’s losing all the little things, over again and again and again. She’s not sure how many more little losses she can take.

The days go on, but she wishes that they would not. Each day is further away from the life she loved, closer to a life she desperately does not want to accept.

She visits her old English teacher whenever she can, the same teacher who sent her off to graduate, to ask questions about her writing. He is the only person who does not ask her why she is still there, still wanting to be around him; he does not tell her he has other students to help, and that talking to her is above his paygrade. This, at least, is something she has not lost yet.

“You know, I’ve seen you sitting outside the courtyard during sixth,” he says to her one morning.

“Yes,” she replies, smiling. “I like to go out there sometimes.”

“The high school is much larger than the middle school,” he says. “Though I’m sure you know that.”

“It is,” she agrees.

He sighs. She understands what he is trying to say, but she will not entertain it. She does not want him, out of all people, to try and force her into assimilating into her new life. “Do you miss eighth grade?” he asks.

“I do,” she says. “It was the best year of my life.”

He laughs softly, and it feels condescending, as if he wants to say that she hasn’t had many years, and there will be plenty of better ones.

“It sounds like you’re grieving your time in middle school,” he says.

“Well, no one I know has died,” she tells him dryly. “I wouldn’t say I’m grieving.” He pauses. “You always ask for my advice. Don’t you?”

“I do,” she answers. He introduced her to Kurt Vonnegut and Tom Perrotta, to Billy Joel and Simon & Garfunkel. He recommends that she read, watch, or write something, and she quickly does; to her, his knowledge is endless.

“I’ll give you something to do,” he starts, meeting her gaze. “Sometime in the near future, sit down and write everything you can remember about your eighth-grade year. Little and big things, sensations or moments you remember.”

She doesn’t quite understand the point of this, but listens.

“And then?” she asks.

“You keep it with you, and you add things whenever you remember them. And, when you feel you’re forgetting your eighth-grade year, you look at it, and you read a few things from the list.”

She sits down at her computer that evening, unsure, and she begins to write. She writes about everything that comes to her; the one song she listened to for months on end, the day they raced handmade wooden cars in physics class and hers was the fastest, how she and her friends would grab all the cafeteria’s oranges and squeeze fresh juice from them at lunchtime. She writes about the time her teacher wanted the class to guess a word that started with “n” and meant “subtle changes”, and she said “nuance” first, about bopping along to the classic rock her proctor played in study hall. She even writes about the sound her history teacher’s leather shoes made as he walked across the floor, about the homely carpet smell in my math classroom. Two hours later, she looks up from her document, cheeks wet with tears, and yet it feels like something has shifted.

The next day, she wakes up an hour before the start of school; she will arrive right before the start of classes. She changes out her old toothbrush, many bristles missing from overuse, for a new one. She applies blush to her cheeks, rather than lipstick, dons herself in a never-worn uniform shirt with the sophisticated cursive, and changes her backpack out for a new one.

She is determined to never forget this past year, to hold it close to her heart, and while she does not want to leave the comfortable middle school campus, with every day she spends there, unwanted, she feels like more of an outsider. She wants to go back, yet the only way is ahead, toward the daunting pillars and the unfamiliar classrooms with the overwhelming workloads. She will suffer, and she will endure.