The Ride of Life

High-School students are sheep guided by passionate and unmotivated shepherds. There is this common misconception that sheep are all alike. Most people (for most of us do not encounter sheep often) base our knowledge on sheep hearsay. We have been told that they have no uniqueness or personality so we believe it. If someone took the time to look closely, they would find that each sheep does have its own individual self. And so too, do those teens called high-schoolers. But just as most do not bother to notice the difference in sheep, most do not see the intricate makeup of a high-school student. I really though that would be different in college, it is not.

I think that is what really got to her. Leah, my best friend. We met at a water park, age nine. I was eating a hot dog and mustard had fallen on the green table I was hunched over. She was just walking by, holding her mom’s hand and talking a mile a minute. She noticed the mustard, though, and left her mom to grab a napkin from the disarrayed pile on the concession stand checkout counter. I was watching her, but I didn’t understand that the napkin was for me until she was holding it in front of my face and smiling into my eyes. I still do that now, watch people without remembering that they can see me.

We spent the next five hours running around that water park like animals, best friends by closing. I don’t remember a single word we said, but the sound of her laugh was ingrained in my mind forever after.

That day happened long before either of us had a cell phone, and since it didn’t occur to either of us that we should introduce our mothers, I assumed I’d never see Leah again. Two months later she was the new girl walking into my fourth grade homeroom.

We were ecstatic, of course, and continued our friendship at once. I did not have many other friends, but I didn’t begrudge Leah when she began fitting into the popular crowd. What she didn’t know, and what I could not articulate at the time, was that every new girl was popular for a while. The core of the popular kids had all been friends since kindergarten. Fourth grade was still young, and those girls were only just learning to show their fangs. Even so, they had a system set in perfect working order. A new person comes to school, they are evaluated and allowed to be a part of “the group” for a few weeks, months if they behave correctly, and then spit back into the multitudes. No letting them down gently, from besties to acquaintances in a weekend. It had happened to me when I was new the year prior. Looking back, I can’t even believe I ever went to one of their birthday parties. It didn’t hurt me when they dropped me, my concern for school related events was borderline nonexistent even then. Leah saw it differently. She hated them the first moment they ignored her and she hated them the day we were handed our high school diplomas.

I then began to understand how Leah worked. Her life was a series of ups and downs, a constant roller coaster of emotions that she either could not control or didn’t want to. It was odd to me at first, since I had always felt just about the same, no matter the circumstances. I stepped into my life seeing into one way and I still held that perspective at the age of nine.

Our lives then growing parallel to one another, we sped through the years together. By seventeen our friendship was unbreakable. We as individuals had not changed too much either, at least in my opinion. The only real difference with Leah was that she had been riding a kiddie carnival roller coaster in fourth grade, and by the end of our high school career she was buckled onto something with 300 foot drops and was no doubt named after hell. I never knew who I would get each day, the overly happy and confident Leah, or the borderline hostile and dejected Leah. Not just for emotions, everything for her was do or die immediately. She had to be perfect or she wouldn’t do it at all, whatever it was. No matter what she felt on a given day, we were as close as sisters.

I felt and acted in the same way every day, and every week, and every year. If Leah had a roller coaster, then I was on one of those moving sidewalks at the airport, an escalator that never goes up or down. It is not that I didn’t feel anything. I cried, and I laughed, and underwent most emotions. But it didn’t affect my life so much, my identity. I felt something and when it passed away I moved on.

The biggest difference between us, I think, was our plan for the future. When I was seven I spent the entire summer break going to the local library and reading. At school that fall my Social Studies teacher made the class write what we wanted to be when we grew up on little sticky notes and paste them to the wall. I wrote “Librarian.” Ten years later that was still the plan. Not a dream, a plan. After high school I would be going to the local community college for two years and then down the road to the slightly larger college for two more years. Degree obtained, I would stay in my hometown and work. A hometown that Leah was sick of.

Leah dreamed. At it was so beautiful to sit in the passenger seat of her car and listen. She never knew what she wanted to do for any longer than five minutes at a time, not even a general category. She must have discussed every option during those middle of the night snack runs we did. What she did know, at least, was that she was destined for Harvard. It didn’t matter why she went, just that she did. Not for a reputation or to get the best job possible. Leah wanted it because it was the best, and it would make her the best version of herself that she could possibly reach. Pure ambition is what that dream was for.

What stood in her way was scholarship. The solution, the ACT. Our whole grade had to take the ACT in our junior year, we could retake it senior year to improve our scores. This one test exactly defined the difference between her and I. She studied for months. She went to late night practice classes for the entire fall semester of our junior year. She studied and practiced again and again and again. I didn’t, my little community school would give me a scholarship no matter my ACT score, and I knew it. The day I sat in the auditorium and unfolded the blue booklet was the first time I ever knew what an ACT looked like. But I wasn’t lazy, and I did my best. We got our scores back a few weeks later. She got a 29, I got a 29. I turned to her instantly, a big smile on my face. I did not understand the rage burning in her eyes as she looked at my results. Now I do, it was my first time being the reason that Leah’s emotional coaster had plummeted. She gave everything to that test, I took it because the school required me to, and we came out the same. But she obviously hadn’t meant for me to see into her heart so far, so I pretended we were okay. She retook the ACT the next year and got a 35. I didn’t bother.

Honestly, I put that moment out of my mind for a long time. Once you start thinking about graduating, it runs faster and faster towards you until you’re laying in bed two weeks before the most anticipated yet shortest day in your life and you aren’t even sure if you really did spend years wasting away in public school. There wasn’t time to evaluate whether my best friend resented me or not. I soon had plenty of time. My plans changed.

It was then, two weeks before the end of school, when I learned that my grandmother was sick. She lived three hundred miles across the country, and there was a university (a nice one, not a cute little community college) ten minutes from her house. By June, I was enrolled and living with her.

Leah had applied to Harvard and been rejected. Doing her due diligence, she sent applications to ample universities across the country. But that one rejection pulled her down further than she had ever been before. She stayed at the community college, which for me would have been wonderful and for her was torture.

She only called me on good days, or she was faking the joyful tones whenever we talked. I have heard that when people are friends for ten years, they will be friends for life. I guess that isn’t true, because we haven’t spoken in three hundred sixty five days. I always thought I was part of the soaring moments, when she was flying upwards and could see the whole horizon. All I can think of now is that I became a reason for steel valleys, for falling. She always rises again, though, and I know she’s already climbing. It’s just that, she left me on the ground.