GROWING UP

Linda Hibbard

              It is the autumn of my 7th grade at school.  The first year at Frick Junior High.

            The school is large and dirty and very impersonal.  Perhaps it is the first year of my life that feelings seem to have any importance.  I think I am lost, lost in a large world of uncaring people. It is as if I turned around and found myself in something I couldn’t understand and most of all didn’t want to understand.

            I wonder what am I doing here and why?  Why am I sentenced to this setting.  Last year I didn’t seem to feel much of anything.  I was a child that was taken care of and I want to go back, but I know I can’t.  Now I’m something that is not a child, but what am I?

We’re told to go to period 1, that is P.E., so I go.  The teacher always looks so strange. Her legs are thick and bulky and she wears short socks and heavy white shoes.  Her face is like stone, no emotion, she acts like something of a man and woman combined.  I am scared.  We dress in a cold room, it is always cold in that room.  We dress in queer looking blue shorts with elastic in the legs and snaps on the side.  The shirt is blue all blue with snaps in the front.  Everybody looks alike, we are now going to play tetherball, and we do.  Then the loud whistle brows, it blows in my ear and I can hear the ringing for the next ten minutes.  The game is finally over, nobody seems to know who won or lost and nobody cares.

Next we shower in dirty stalls and hear laughing, giggling and yelling.  My hair is a mess and the day has just began.  I wonder will I get through Period 2.