The Chris Sartinsky Memoirs: Chapter Fourteen: Senior Year

I got back to Connecticut a few weeks before school started again. I didn’t do much during those weeks. Just sat around the house, mostly. Enjoyed the fact that I didn’t have to do anything besides sit around the house. Part of me started getting all kinds of complicated plans to avoid going back to school at all, but I was never really serious about that. Another part of me was hopeful that I could go back without incident and it would all be better.

I skated through school without much incident, for months. I didn’t really get involved in all the sentiment or the nostalgia that seemed to be infesting the senior class. I had friends, but I was a little defensive about everything. I tried to keep my distance from the world for a while. I figured, these first seventeen years hadn’t done much for me. Just a few more months here and I get to start over in college. Senior year was just something I had to wait out.

I became one of a number of editors on the school paper. It was something I just kind of stumbled into one afternoon, because I had written an angry op-ed about yearbook superlatives in relation to cliques at school or something stupid like that. The editorial board was huge because the task of putting together our dinky little paper was still so difficult and unrewarding that editors got exhausted and cycled in and out on a weekly basis. When I joined, there were eleven or twelve other editors. I’m not even sure who some of them were; I only met three or four of them in the course of my own work.

At some point, I applied to colleges. My grades were inconsistent and mediocre, but I had done reasonably well on my standardized tests and I tried to write a knockout essay that would get me into some place. The first answers I got back were from my safety schools, and they were a wave of rejections. I was suddenly terrified that I wouldn’t be accepted anywhere and I stopped sleeping for more than an hour a night. At first, I just lay in bed all night with my eyes closed, pretending I was asleep, but as I got used to the idea of insomnia, I began to use the time constructively. I started painting with watercolors. I still have a folder of midnight watercolors from this period. They are all dark and smudged and mostly monocolored, though the color changes from painting to painting.

Somehow, though, I got into Boston University, which I thought was outside of my reach. I even got a generous scholarship from them, and an invitation into their honors program. I was a little stunned, though I came to better understand the school after spending a few years there. Basically, BU accepts everyone who applies. They’re big enough to accommodate a huge class, but they count on a very small number of applicants actually choosing to attend. They maintain their class size and their specific spot in the rankings by scaring the kids at the low end of the curve away with a huge, disproportionate price tag, watching the smart kids choose better schools and welcoming the mediocrest of the mediocre to Warren Towers every semester. It’s a nice little system, and it’s amazing how consistent it’s been. None of the students are happy, but the numbers of applicants, acceptances, GPAs and test scores are straight and steady, like a heart attack victim who’s flatlined.

Once I had been accepted to a real accredited university, I decided that I would phone in the last term of my high school life. As it happened, my grades were the best they’d been my entire life. I’m not sure how this happened. None of the classes I took were particularly interesting, or even any different from the kind of classes I had always taken. And I wasn’t just coasting by with lenient teachers. I started understanding material like I never had before. I wrote incredible papers for my English class, absolutely nailed calculus and completely demolished the curve in my American history class. I almost started to enjoy learning.

Meanwhile, prom was fast approaching, and I had no plans. It all seemed like an annoying waste of money to me. Everyone in the school got pretty nuts about it in the month leading up to the big night, which for me, only confirmed my suspicions that prom was a terrible thing that I should avoid at all costs. I decided that I would do something else on prom night. Something special, something alone. Everyone remembers their prom night, but everyone’s pretty much remembering the same thing. Sure, some people get lucky and others don’t, but it’s the same idea. Get dressed up, sit at a table, dance to bad music, take pictures, etc. I didn’t want the same memory as every other American teenager that had ever lived. I wanted to do something memorable, something I could tell people about without boring them stiff, like even the best story of prom night would. I thought maybe I’d drive to the beach with a cooler and get drunk all night.

But just when I’d started getting really attached to the idea, something came up. An acquaintance of mine informed me that a friend of hers—a girl named Donna—had something of a crush on me and was hoping that I would ask her to prom. I didn’t know how to respond to the girl who told me, so I just nodded like I already knew and laughed and said “yeah!” like she was in the middle of telling an amusing anecdote. Those two responses worked against each other, as you might imagine, and she walked away more confused than anything. I could tell she absolutely hated me, with all the power of her soul, for all the ways she was imagining I would hurt her friend.

I didn’t know what to do about this, exactly. I was not interested in Donna. There was something about her I found rather repugnant, even if this wasn’t entirely fair. Even though we had been going to the same schools since kindergarten, I couldn’t remember a single conversation we had ever had. Apparently, this had been enough to convince her that I was the perfect person to bring her to prom. She must have been attracted to my mystique. I decided the best thing to do would be to ignore her, which was easy, since we had never had any kind of interaction before.

But one day at lunch, she came up to my table and asked to talk to me in the hallway. I didn’t really want to follow her, but my policy of pretending that I had no idea what was going on didn’t allow it. She pushed me up against a locker and I was afraid she was going to start kissing me for a second, and then what would I do, but she seemed surprised by her own force, and looked a little embarrassed and took a step back. I tapped my fingers on the lockers, just out of habit, because I was nervous. The tapping was very loud.

“So,” she said, and she trailed off. I could tell she was dying, but I didn’t help her. It would have been the courteous thing to do, but I wasn’t feeling capable of courtesy at that moment. I was a little annoyed, and a little put off, but in my defense, I also didn’t really know what to do.

Finally, she picked up where she left off and asked me to prom. I said yes. I tried to be noncommittal about it, even though I knew I was stuck. She smiled and stepped back again, which must have looked to someone in the hallway like she had cornered me against my will and was finally letting me go after robbing me or something.

I walked back into the cafeteria and found my friends. They asked me what that was all about and made fun of me a little bit, but stopped abruptly. I turned around and saw that Donna had followed me in. She took the chair next to me and started eating her lunch. She wasn’t looking at me and she wasn’t talking to anyone. Who knows why she wanted to sit at that table with all of us—maybe she thought she had to—but it made the rest of lunch incredibly awkward for everyone, me in particular. I made no effort to engage her and she made no effort to engage anyone.

She sat with my friends and I again the next day, and the day after that. Each time it was the same thing. She chewed on her sandwiches, smiled at jokes, rarely glanced in my direction and never said a word. We felt like we were eating with a ghost. In the halls, my friends and I whispered to one another, worried that she would appear out of nowhere and make normal conversation impossible. If the intention was to make sure we never talked about her, then it was successful, but I think it was more innocent and naïve than that. She was just trying to do what she thought people did when they asked someone to the prom. It was awful.

One day at lunch, Donna and I sat down at almost exactly the same time. One of my friends, who was eating a pretzel, promptly began choking with laughter.

“Oh man!” he finally shouted after his throat had cleared. “They look exactly the same!” Immediately, everyone else at the table (besides Donna and I, of course) started laughing uncontrollably.

While this was going on—and it lasted a long time—Donna and I looked at each other. We each had shaggy, boyish hair; long, thin faces; green eyes; broad, bony shoulders; gray shirts with blue and red stripes. We realized that if she took off her glasses, we would be identical. One of my more quick-witted friends snuck up behind Donna and took off her glasses. He put them on me, then back on her, then back on me again, and so on. “Which is which?” he asked over the desperate laughter of our friends. “Which is which?”

Donna ran for the hills, but with a lot of composure, which I admired. I just sat there, because they were my friends and all. They kept up the jeering for a while, stuff like “which is which,” and “if he got anywhere with her, would it just be masturbating.” They all got a kick out of it.

I sat there and smiled as, inwardly, I panicked and tried to think of a suitable comeback that would shut everyone up and restore my honor and maybe, incidentally, Donna’s as well. Nothing, so I decided to go along with them. When everyone started to quiet down, waiting for the next jab, I spoke up, and asked “where did Chris run off to?” It was a stupid joke, no doubt about that, and it wasn’t very creative. But it was at someone else’s expense, and that was the important thing.

One of the louder roars I've ever heard swelled up and down the table. Someone slapped me on the back, like the last triumphant scene in some cheesy coming-of-age movie. I felt like I had figured something out that day.