In this essay I will situate my exigency during my sophomore year, at Michael J. Hayes Success Academy, which is a real shithole, if you would have me be honest, in a few rooms on the second floor of Rose Hill Mall, next to the discount quinceañera store, out by the airport.
“Home of the Lasers,” that’s my school. I got enrolled there because they sent my mom a flyer and the flyer said “interactive.” That meant they had computers. I’d take the bus, it wasn’t far, then my blitzed-out former military first period dude would sign off on my research. He was always like KIDS KIDS SHUT UP I HAVE A HEADACHE. Coach Cashed. So I’d just chill on Wikipedia, because I was The Rising Star of Michael J. Hayes Success Academy, and like this hot/professional chipmunk on my lock screen said I was reclaiming my time.
Things were okay I guess. I am thinking of my autobiography, in last fall. [Identify language arts genre]. My mom was an AirBnB maid, working up to her own business someday maybe, and that meant she brought home all the half-used condiments from where AirBnB people shop, dropping major cash for green fruity salsas and everybody buys a new bottle of Sriracha, I guess people who travel cannot live without Sriracha, but then they’d leave it behind. Mom was into holistic lifestyles, she said the cleaning stuff was less toxic than the cleaning stuff she’d cleaned with when she was pregnant with me, have you heard of Bon Ami, didn’t get the three-day headaches she used to, and also she had come into a pair of tight granny Hokas so could therefore stand. Her boyfriend I would yelp as only half an asshole (Kev), we were moving up, he worked at the vape store and sometimes I’d stay there after school while he pushed Tutti-Frutti on some maybe 16-year-old with a sus ID, or Mango Freak, because it takes one to know one. Then they’d talk about smooth vs. burn vs. mellow vs. you-get-the-idea, it’s like smoking a thumb drive, while I did my Khan Academy because I was going somewhere and it wasn’t there.
But I diverge. [Cut “but.”] Dear Committee, Please consider my application for admission under your new Charles Schwab Playing Field Initiative, which I believe I qualify for in double spades. There are nada college graduates in my bloodstream, though mom is working toward an Associates Degree. Regarding demographics Kev swears up and down that he is half full-blooded Cherokee but Kev is NOT my dad. I am Poor White, maybe half Hispanic would explain my hair and eyes but Mom says it was super dark in that car let the mystery be. Herewith I am going to relate my experience of the Sars-Cov-2 Pandemic, which was an [a??] historical event on par with The Bombing of Pearl Harbor, Paul Revere’s Midnight Ride, The Bubonic Plague, and also Abraham Lincoln, and therefore will shape a generation of which I am a member.
Pandemics have the ability to reverse the outcomes of people’s fortunes and tides. [Topic sentence]. My mom got laid off. The vape store closed—because breathing—and then it closed for good. Hydrate or diedrate is a wise saying I know, but Coach did it the wrong way. He told us liver disease, so I sent a sad face.
I got this new teacher for the shutdown, on Zoom. [Writing the main body]. Miss Crystal was like a Father Figure to me. She said she really liked LeVar Burton. I had to Google him. She was going to Reading Rainbow us over the Hard Times. That meant she read us books, and it was rad. I didn’t realize there were ones that had all the parts in them. A beginning, a middle, and an end. From our packets I had thought they were “the chunk,” and then “the takeaway.” These books that she read on Zoom were her own sometimes because Miss Crystal (light-skinned foxy Black Lady, really old, maybe 50), she owned books. I could see them, behind her, on a bookshelf, with a plant and a purple geode and who knows why some Star Wars bobbleheads.
I would wake up, Miss Crystal’s reading. Mute myself, turn my camera off, try to get my mom to move (this is the illness called Clinical Depression and this is the illness called Substance Abuse), Miss Crystal’s reading. She read us Harry Potter. She read us The Kite Runner. She read us that zestfest The House of the Spirits. She would go quiet, be loud. Sometimes she laughed with the books. When the spider died in Charlotte’s Web she fully cried. Then Mom couldn’t pay the WiFi. Then we couldn’t pay utilities. So I walked the long dumb distance to McDonald’s to use their hotspot at the parklet in the parking lot while listening to Miss Crystal read. Sometimes I turned in my daily Rose there. I was going to go to the library when this was all over, I wrote once, and get a library card, and instantly Miss Crystal’s typing. Kaylee, she DMs. You not having been to a library is a Thorn.
Well okay. The next Zoom she says class class and the two of us left drop yes yes in the chat. There is still a big wide world and young scholars belong in it. We are going to start going to lectures 🙂 and safe outdoor events, and here’s the list. Don’t lecture me my mom said to Kev like the week before regarding whether or not her brother, my uncle, who had moved in and was stinking up the couch, should stop huffing the keyboard cleaner that he’d pilfered from his job at Office Depot, now closed. Howsit all that different from a vape? She screamed. Then Kev retorts, Uh it makes him claw off his face? And I heard glass items break. However, I think Miss Crystal meant a lecture was something good. I wrote it down from dictionary.com the next day outside McDonald’s and she was right, what a goat. Lecture, noun = “a speech read or delivered before an audience or class, especially for instruction or to set forth some subject.” [Demonstrate research skills.]
Then one day Kev got handsy with me by the microwave, or really arms and handsy haha not funny. Reaching for a Hot Pocket should not involve slow brushing my boobs, correct? So the next lecture, I went. It was almost like we had forgotten there were places? Or really, I had never known. No one had ever told me. It felt amazing. This lecture was on The Radical Inheritance of Decomposed Film in Two-Spirit Cinemas, I think? Or maybe it was Fanny Mendelssohn Writes Code: An Elegy. I didn’t get a chance to screenshot so can never know. I was googling non-stop to be Miss Crystal’s CEO (most of the rest of the classmates hadn’t turned their cameras on in weeks, and two by then were dead). I drove down Clinton, past the Family Dollar, past the waste-treatment plant and juvie jail, past the botánica where a nice old lady will put a hex on your ex if you pay her thirty dollars cash, away from my whole world, and then at the new Walmart I merged onto the highway. I am Charles Schwab Playing Field Material in that no one ever taught me how to merge/drive, tie my shoes, or boil an egg, for examples, in addition to my other factors, including that I have never eaten or seen irl someone eat a boiled egg, but Miss Crystal mentioned them once, she was going to make a spinach salad featuring boiled eggs, and I wrote that down. Thank the good queen Bey there was no traffic on said highway because I was terrified and also had on the parking break until I figured out that bad sound/burning smell, and pulled the right thing to release it, whoa.
Colleges are flagship institutions for the life of the mind and the community of learners. [Topic sentence]. Colleges that include first generation students enrich their student bodys’ diversity via the background of impoverishment which these students may harness for grit. [Development of main argument].
I guess I maybe knew there was a college in this conurbated city? [vocabulary] But truth be told: I did not. I turned my mom’s car off the highway. The streets got narrower as I drove. They had like long planted parks in the middle of them? There were sidewalks in this part of town that connected to other sidewalks and I saw nice people walking on them. Thin, for starters. All thin. Walking dogs that looked like they’d had haircuts? The dogs I mean. Then the sidewalks started to be lined with trees, continuous wide, tall trees. No trees by the vape store, no trees by Michael J. Hayes Success Academy, no trees at my apartment complex unless you count the big dead one where people take their dogs to shit. [Use of repetition]. I guess if you live here you get to live in shade? I swear the light was softer, the temperature cooler. The houses got taller, older. They were painted in colors that were different, like candy. I want to say they were painted in confident colors. Green and pink and yellow. And those brighter. [Squiggles at “and.” Cut “and.”]
Miss Crystal wasn’t lying. There was a college made of little castles twenty-five minutes away all this time who could have known. So I park my mom’s car. Mind you I don’t have my license yet nor does the car have insurance which is bothering me because I like to be in compliance, but I have illustrated the point about why I had to go and also Kev was drunk.
It is late April now and this is where the lecture is. It is in the castles. The first Covid year, which like Microsoft, changed the course of human history, was 2020. The whole city is brown. I mean except for the Amazon vans? They are blue. This place is green. Foreground, background, and vanished points: all green. There are green vines. I reverse image searched it and it is ivy. There is grass like I saw once on the news from a golf course. Grass like in the picture of Jesus they were giving away at the free mask tent, the one where he is mingling amidst the fluffy sheep.
Dear Committee, I see that I am over the five paragraphs and concluding nutshell that make an essay, but Miss Crystal says sometimes when you are brainstorming, resist the urge to judge yourself, and on redraft you can mine for gems and cut the fat. The lecture was supposed to be in Finch-Hatton Hall. I found a map on poles. I was at the red dot nearest Bouldering. Finch-Hatton Hall was north, and then west. You will see I am a Path to Success Learner, in that I have never googled and/or received instruction on north, south, east, or west, but I figured out the way. I passed a hot Asian girl in a mask, we were both wearing ours correctly, unlike nostrils Kev. The girl was skateboarding on these beautiful benches that were made out of some shiny stone in front of a building that had twelve arches for just its front porch and did I mention she could ollie? Then ollie she did.
Architecture and design effects citizen’s’ [??] understanding of the world and also potentially effects their moods and therefore physiques while they develop their potential by traversing in it. [Topic sentence]. Maybe a windowless high school in a mall needs windows. [Development of main argument]. There were no other people at the college, likewise shutdown, except for a Mexican guy mowing, and a Mexican guy weeding. There were about a million ducks I thought, but turns out they were geese.
Consequently, regarding what is to follow a) my mother’s car was low on gas, and I was tragic on cash, and b) the door to that hall was propped open right then, by some janitor’s cart. I thought I would find Miss Crystal. I thought she would maybe get me lunch, I was at that point stomach growling from skipping Hot Pockets and the night before we were out of Ramen, but I climbed the three broad main marble I think floors of Finch-Hatton Hall to find that there was no one there. I saw the big beautiful room with dark wooden bookshelves like from Beauty and the Beast [textual evidence] and the doors to it, which were four, huge, with glass windows, and locked. So I did go to the lecture, but from the other side of those doors.
The teacher, white white, possibly part elf, he had a camera pointed at him but was otherwise pretending like he was talking to people in the chairs. He took off his mask. He had a beard that he kind of combed with his hand. He did some stuff with his computer then he tapped the mic. I could hear him pretty good. I was writing down the new words so fast. Discourse, the first. Had no time to vocab that. Himpathy, and that was maybe an animal from the context clues? He kept talking about his lenses I guess he meant contacts because he had no glasses on. He never saw me, looking in. He made eye contact with the camera to say, “Capitalism rewards wealth not work,” and I got that whole sentence down, and I wasn’t 100% on what he meant, but it sounded correct, and then finally he was done, and he packed up all his stuff, put his mask on, turned off the lights, and left. I wasn’t sure what Miss Crystal would have me do. Have him checkmark my copious notes? I saw his back in a business coat going away from me down the hall, and I did nothing at all.
That wide hall had bulletin boards with posters that were very aesthetic, and water fountains with slots for filling bottles, and shiny wooden boxes full of dinosaur-related rocks. Hanging above the doors were signs, like it was an amusement park for dorks. GEOLOGY, POLITICAL SCIENCE, HISTORY, COMPARATIVE LITERATURE, GENDER STUDIES, FILM THEATER TV. Each sign had a door that opened to a living room and the living rooms had food.
Mom and I had been getting into fresh food, working up to eating rainbows, and this was not that, but still there was a lot. Granola bars, tea/coffee/cider/cocoa, cookies, candy, big bins of pretzels, varieties of bubble water, dried apricots and dried mangos and coconut chips, M&Ms, pistachios and roasted almonds, blue corn tortilla chips and, as fate would have it, more green fruity salsa. [To Venn Diagram: College People AirBnB?] Gender Studies had the best food, and a full-size fridge too, with everything that had been left before shutdown still in it, apparently oats give milk sksk?!, and lots of it was good.
Supposing you were walking a mile in my shoes, what would you do? [Appeal to pathos]. You would lie or lay down on that leather couch with the Call the Midwife buttons, a real one that had a Costco blanket casual on its arm. You would eat some freaking animal crackers and plug in the teapot and do the cider powder. Siesta is a rest time invented by Spain. [Connect to current events.] [Multicultural inputs].
I had not known how deep was my deficit for a fiesta of sleep. Maybe because my bedroom door had no lock and I was worried that Kev was headed Full Molester and my chair barricade wouldn’t work? The HVAC was on point. The couch was so comfortable, and so clean. The blanket was so soft, and so warm. This had to do with my sleep which went on like Sleeping Beauty, v v long. When I woke up, I felt like a new person. I also drank water.
I was thinking about how joy cometh in the morning, to quote Macklemore. Then again that mom might need her car. I left the Gender Studies, walked down the stairs at the end of the hallway, and out toward the daylight.
Mom’s car is an old-timey Honda Civic. I have first-hand experience about tapes, and therefore the 1900s, because it has a hole for them. I see it where I left it, but there is a black metal situation on the front wheel. I walk closer and see the boot’s locking bar, locked. On the window are two notices, printed in color, with matching folders, I have never once received an educational handout so crisp and bright, and they are parking tickets. One is for parking in Faculty Parking without registration. The fee is $75. That is the exact amount of money my mom gets paid to clean an AirBnB, which takes her 6 to 14 hours, depending on laundry, and whether or not the guests were a-holes. The ticket price will go up every three days if not paid. Above it is another ticket. It is $225 for Illegal Overnight Parking, which is the reason for the season of why my uncle moved in.
I did not have $300 dollars. Not asking pasty, not a Cherokee Kev for zilch. Ditto the gassy uncle about which the less said the better, and my mom, this was her car, oh she would be so pissed.
I noticed a golf cart coming at me. Then I saw that it said SECURITY. Then I saw that there was another college kid, dressed a lot like the hot Asian girl, but this one was a white boy, and he was balancing on a strap suspended between trees. I walked away from my mom’s car, and away from the cart, toward the boy.
The cart cop put another ticket on Mom’s car. Maybe he saw the expired tags? Maybe he needed more to do? He was looking at me. I could feel it. I was near the same age as the boy with his arms out, and the skateboarding girl, but I realized our car looked wrong, somehow, and all of a sudden that I looked very wrong. I was wearing a sweatshirt my mom got me last Christmas that said Freedom Isn’t Free in reversible sequins that were nice to smooth up, then down, like I was my own fidget. My jeggings were distressed Time and Tru. My boots were snakeskin print with chunky heels, which I had really liked but now I saw them, and they were bad. Even my mask, I realized, which was the paper kind, when theirs’ were cloth.
I left the tickets. I took off my shoes. There were straps between three trees that made a triangle. I did not want to go to prison, like Grandma Christy had. I stepped up onto one, put my arms out like the boy, found my balance, took a step forward without falling, and that’s when the cart drove away.
Herewith you want to know what it was like at Grandma Christy’s prison? It was loud and it was ugly and they never turned the lights off and a bunch of those bitches were snakes she said [use of direct quotation], and when I tried to get a Snicker’s bar out of the vending machine with my own $5 of stocking money the machine ate the bill and the bar got stuck.
So I wasn’t going there. I was now on the lamb.
[Cut, like, all of this? Dear Committee is not here for the plot].I followed the hot girl and the boring boy around. Of interest I am noting that on the phone she was speaking Chinese (I know that from our neighbor in 7B) and he was speaking who knows what something throaty with a lot of zs. The only students left at the college during April of the Historic Sars-Cov-2 Pandemic spoke other languages AND English. To google: why?
I tried to keep it casual, doing what they were doing. But mostly the college was empty of all college people, and full of geese. I did not see another white guy teacher with a beard ever. I did see multiple janitors. The smells of their carts reminded me of my mom. They cleaned everything I saw, which was crazy, because no one was using anything, so I guess I could have for example cooked a quesadilla on a toilet seat if the toilet seat were sizzling [paint a picture]. It was that clean.
Most of the castles had keypads by their doors, with a little red light. I saw the hot girl swipe a card, the light turned green, and that’s how she got into any castle she wanted. I did not have a card. But when the bells rang I saw another janitor walk out of the biggest castle of all, one with towers, and a roof made of stone, so I walked in.
This was now my headquarters. I had decided [appeal to my ethos] to claim a building because every single one was nice. The main part of this church or churchlike castle with the bells echoed. It had a giant balcony and stainglass. The inside was extremely Disney princess and it went on and on. There was a little restaurant, and a library of books. There were offices and a dance or yoga studio with mirrors and mats. There was a greenhouse next to one whole wall where actual salad mix was growing, and the greenhouse had a yard, with real chickens walking around. It had rooms with couches and pillows and fairy lights. Happy Holidays it had a fully stocked kitchen with rows of canned goodness, and frozen drumsticks in the freezer, a stack of pizzas, and a big bag of edamame ie gucci peas.
An important thing happened to me in that chapel. There was a white girl there. She looked unclean. She was in the kitchen, making coffee, singing Doja Cat. Then she was rattling a doorknob. I have not mentioned that there are phones in every castle, wall phones with cords. She lifts one up, pushes the top three buttons in reverse order. She says her name, that she’s from SCAMP, and she needs the pantry opened in Holley for a distribution. Holley, I gather is where we are. SCAMP is not, like, a tramp, but is, like, a secret society I think? Me? I am behind a big couch, against the wall, where I ducked when I heard her, fully hidden.
It was maybe two quick minutes later when this guy with badges and tools but no gun arrives and he takes a big key chain, asks no questions, and opens the door for Doja Cat, she barely confirmed humanity from her coffee/phone. So though I am descending from criminals, and though I do not ever want to be a criminal, I now know one way to do the doors. What I still needed was a keycard.
[PERSONAL ESSAY IS OFF THE RAILS. Ask Miss Crystal???????]Herewith gonna try to cut the fat before I make the fat.
I read Siddhartha. Read The Tao Te Ching.
Slept on the couch.
#1. #2. It was like a palace.
Shopped the salad. Scared of chickens.
Logged some QT with the cans, crackers, Nutella, gucci peas.
What to wear? Decide: new day, new me. The castle with bells, it has two enormous Lost and Found bins. I took out things I’d seen the students wearing. Mom jeans, chunky white sneakers, water bottle that could double as a weapon, Malcolm X glasses [Black History Month input], ear buds, beanie, sweater.
Thorn: couldn’t find a charger that fit my dead phone. Thorn: had no access to their computers which were IDed. Related thorn: typing in mom’s email address makes me seem like I’m looking for porn?
Rose: got a swiper card out of the Lost and Found bin from the pocket of a Lululemon cross-body bag. I apologized to Fidelia, the owner of the card, for taking from her drip, promised I would get it back.
So I set out on a hero’s journey, with an entire box of CLIF bars, what else was there to do?
What was twenty-five minutes by Mom’s car took me two days by no car and no bus and then three semi-juiced lime green scooters for a little ways in the shady nice part where scooters live and one 4chan creeper in a truck with truck nutz who offered to help, it’s my fault I should’ve known better, he took me the wrong way, so when he pulled up to a KFC drive-thru and was duly distracted by his combo meal which he ate like a leaf blower plus here go his theories I threw a Coke on his wish it were quarantined face and ran fast and then mostly my feet.
Thankfully I was in a college person’s shoes, which were highly more comfortable for walking than my former shoes.
I was back in the land of no sidewalks and no shade, among the saddest dudes who wander those stupid pockmarked streets talking to invisibles, but now I had a mission.
Because I was on a hero’s journey [writing the great themes] I expected to receive a hero’s welcome.
Hahaha never. Kev was doing the devil’s own work on my Michael J. Hayes Success Academy Chromebook and though he failed to mute that cw/tw he did manage to turn the screen away. He brushes some crumbs together [use of symbols, his life] and greets me with glad tidings. “I figured out to steal WiFi from the rich Chinese guy in 7B!”
He’s not rich, I say. I know things now.
Kev closes the Chromebook.
Where’s uncle? I say.
Oh you no no? He says. He thinks that’s funny because he’s racist even against himself. Since our star-crossed [making allusions] meeting by the microwave not, I have read some books. I have read some brochures. I have seen a shit-ton of high-end vinyl stickers that preach.
They put tubes in him. Nose and wiener. Your mom is pissed she had to Uber there. Bitch, now he looks at me. Where is her car?
I will not be answering to bitch today, I say. I have the om of Siddhartha. I take my Chromebook, Kev’s looking kind of stunned, so for further mastery I take his good remote too. I walk nonchalant to my bedroom, which continues to have no window. I take my twenty-three dollars, my God’s eye from Grandma Christy, and my tumbled agate necklace from Mom, all the sweetness I have ever been given, including Miss Crystal’s inscribed to me for reals book. I put it in my old backpack, which is exactly not like the college kid’s’ mountain expedition climate-change fighting B-Corp backpacks, of heirloom quality, with fair labor, but this backpack of pretty stinky see-through plastic for the metal detectors and to make sure we left our bongs at home, well, it is mine, and right when’s Kev’s going to punch me directly to the head, this is not hyperbole, I have seen him do this, therefore to knock me out, I lock that shitty hollow door and disappear. [Was that a run-on? Ask Miss C.]
I disappeared by climbing to the roof for a siesta’s worth. Therewith I found another reason why my mom should never live in Vanguard Housing again. Big sink hole. Looked like some dude just iced it with tar to stop the sinking? But I saw it, and it was going down.
By the time I figured out which hospital, again, hoofing it, man should I be getting P.E. points from surveying the endless aging asphalt of where I’m from, my uncle’s already dead, but the tubes are still there. At least he got this out of his problematic life. He is historic. It was Sars-Cov-2.
Mom is a mess. Mom slaps me. I forgive Mom. Mom hands me the bill. How the hell did they already get her a bill when his lunch tray is warm? Well it’s on her phone. That’s how. She has opened the portal. Mom, Mom, I say. Why did you open the portal?
I was trying to do the right thing, she says.
For my uncle to die will cost us $42,937.
But he’s already dead.
“Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles and the water is clear?” I ask her, and also, truth be told, me?
We have a cafeteria voucher. We go together. This is his wake and funeral. They went ziplining once over a canyon, she says. We cry. Laugh snort. Eat some of everything.
One thing I learned from doing daily Rose and Thorn work with Miss Crystal, not by her words but by her eyes and something else, was when life gives you the worst, you just push it down, put it away, get a good box, lock it up, punt it over the fence to the juvie jail yard, sayonara that toxic plume, and hush, you know?
So mom and me, we are in college now.
I forgot to mention that she was 15 when she had me, and somehow Benjamin Buttoned since then. I dressed us both from Lost and Found in those warm and comfortable clothes. We moved right back into Holley. We rotate between there and a third floor in Finch-Hatton Hall that goes to nowhere, for no one, but is just like, storage for the endless cool and real wood furniture that the college people forgot about. Our blankets are from Outdoor Ed. Our pillows are from the art museum. My whiteness is a privilege, as it turns out. Now that I’m skinny from their aggressively fibrous food, I just look like a white girl that everyone thinks they maybe know but do not anyway. Though if they get close, they can smell it: my childhood, the waste-treatment plant. So we keep to ourselves. Masks on and a lot of slack lining, me and mom. When someone begins to have an inquiring thought, mom blinds them with her cleavage, the only female-identified student in the school who seems to wear a bra let alone the sort that does that kind of magic.
We are what you call auditors. Mom says keep it on the DL moonpie and so I do. I am skipping the whole Charles Schwab thing, because I hacked it myself.
Mom is majoring in Geology. Who knew, I guess she really likes rocks?
I am majoring in Music, because on the three days it took us to get here, we both sang a lot, and that helped.
I am sorry to Fidelia. I ended up stealing more than her card. (She is okay. I saw her yacht life reel and her sticker about offsets slay). When I went back to my old Academy for our virtual graduation, I learned that Miss Crystal had succumbed. I cried for everything when I learned that, including my third through fifth grade secret (still have told no one), and then I cried some more.
I will return to work at the mall maybe. Siddhartha seeks liberation from suffering. There will be books. There will be windows. Rainbows by children will be eaten. But me? I am going to live by the trees.
***
Rumpus original artwork by Ian MacAllen
