The High School Transcript my Guidance Counselor Never Saw
Ninth grade was innocence dressed up in a uniform that didn’t quite fit. It was over enthusiastic eye shadow and laughter at jokes scribbled on notes passed during class. It was learning that goodness doesn’t last and sometimes the boy doesn’t like you back and there is nothing you can do about it.
Tenth grade was studying how to lie and snatched moments in the bathroom to clean the gullies of makeup that forced their way down your face. Cleaning it off always gave you pause because the canyons were a sacred monument to everyone who told you that you weren’t good enough.
Eleventh grade was learning how to drive and realizing that your friends can be counted on an internet website. It was going a whole day without initiating conversations with anybody and wondering who would actually talk to you. No one did.
Twelfth grade was people copying off your tests and you not caring. Maybe if they copied off your tests they’d like you enough to want to be your friend. They didn’t. It was wasted study halls and poetry scribbled during class and it was you realizing that they could make you cry but they couldn’t take away what really mattered.
When you graduated, you didn’t know what mattered, but you knew that by someday, you could figure it out. One horse towns have a way of teaching you how to tie your own noose and how to choose the right tree to hang it on. They don’t show you that there is a whole wide world at your command and that you are good enough and that no one determines your happiness but you.