My sophomore year american lit teacher was two things: new to teaching and bad at thinking things through. We read The Scarlet Letter over the summer, had to turn it in 2 weeks before the semester started, and for some reason known only to herself and possibly god, she decided not only to make our seating assignment by the grade we got on it, but to actually say so to the class.
Naturally, from this moment forth, we hated her.
Under this seating assignment, which lasted all year due to block scheduling, I was grouped with the student council secretary, who had never done anything remotely sneaky in her entire life, and the aforementioned football player, who I had known since birth (his) and with whom I had spent most of august having an in-depth discussion of the summer reading (mine) due to disappointments about frankenstein the year before.
At the other end of the classroom was group B-, a pissed off cluster of orchestra students who were about to turn analyzing the american dream into a blood sport and take all of us with them. We’ll get back to them in a moment.
Somewhat importantly, the three of us sat where the teacher’s back was constantly to us - an inoffensive idea most of the time, except for the amount of resentment simmering in that classroom. Our first semester was short stories, and football season, which lead to Football Player suffering a torn rotator cuff. Somewhat by accident, we discovered that the teacher would not notice him sleeping off his painkillers if Student Council or I pinched his good arm when she finally turned around: He’d bolt upright and mutter something about it being symbolic of the american dream. It’s due to this that the class as a whole worked out that if he was still getting an A+ while on lots of codeine, and group B- had not seen significant increases in their grades, that there wasn’t any actual grading going on.
When our mid-semester project was announced to be an in-depth analysis of a specific character or theme for The Scarlet Letter, and that extra credit would be given for anyone who brought in an appropriately symbolic food, group B- decided to kill two birds with one stone.
They brought in cookies - snickerdoodles with shiny red sugar sprinkles - and explained how they were symbolic of something to do with Dimmesdale… then waited until we bit into them.
The sugar sprinkles were salt, dyed red with food coloring. The symbolism was about deception. They got extra credit, we yelled at them, the cookies were thrown out.
Enter the end of semester project, which was on the Great Gatsby, except people did an in depth creative analysis of a chapter, and my group got the one where Gatsby’s body is discovered, took one look at each other, and decided to go all out.
We met at Student Council Secretary’s house with half a plan, and spent a Saturday afternoon going bananas. We had a game board where each group would play a trivia game about the chapter using a car symbolic of the character they were playing as (several vintage hot wheels were donated to the cause: Football and I had very angry younger brothers, later.) We had an expressionist/Dadaist/give the football player scissors poster depicting the scene of Gatsby’s death, complete with “money growing on trees” because it was faster to chop up rectangles of green construction paper in the paper cutter than to put extra work into it. We had everything… except an appropriately symbolic food.
“We should make them toast to the american dream and the trivia game winner at the end,” said Student Council.
“With red koolaid,” said Football, who in addition to having slept through the first half of the semester has an unfortunate sense of humor, “To symbolize the characters’ gullibility as well as Gatsby’s blood.”
I’m not going to take credit or blame for what happened next, except to say that when you’ve known someone since birth, then been separated for the length of middle school due to districting, and then spent the last year and change rediscovering that you’re both fairly bright teenage idiots with no faith in authority while simultaneously making the worst puking noises you can manage when people mistakenly assume you’re dating, you fuel each other’s bad ideas until they become a california wildfire.
Student Council is relatively blameless, and in fact, tried to talk us out of it.
We waited. We presented. We played a trivia game and waxed rhapsodic about impressionism and did a lot of bullshitting about symbolism, and we passed out a stack of red solo cups half full of red koolaid, which NO ONE was to drink until the toast. Who won the race for the american dream? Doesn’t matter.
“A Toast!” declared Football, “To Achieving the American Dream!” and everyone drank but us.
There was an immediate storm of spitting and yelling from the class, who had drank the kool-aid responsibly, only to discover that it had been made with many, many cups of salt instead of sugar. Group B the second (formerly group B-) was particularly loud, but not louder than our teacher, who had drank her koolaid like a shot, and was gagging enthusiastically into the classroom trashcan. Student Council was ready to die of embarassment, but Football was nothing but thorough when he decided to piss people off.
“And that kool aid is symbolic of Jay Gatsby’s blood!” he shouted, as the bell rang and I shoved him out the door before the second hour honors american english class could commit a homicide.
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