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After bottoming out at school, could I somehow end up with a
moment of 'success'?
With using the school's computers out as an option for Luke and me to
play computer games once a week, he had taken up driving me to my
place after school once a week to play the games there and have an
impromptu dinner. Given no time constraints, these late afternoons
soon turned into evenings before Luke would head back home, twenty
miles away, at eight o'clock.
On one of these evenings we picked up a roasted chicken from the
grocery store across the hayfield and sliced it in half down the
spine and had a fun 'Medieval' time eating it with our bare hands.
We decided to go to the arcade that night rather than using my
computer to play video games and I noticed a funny thing: I was
losing the left side of my field of vision. Not that I was
losing vision in my left eye, but that I was losing the left side of
my vision in both eyes, half with my left eye, about a third with my
right eye. This area was replaced with a greyish fog. Something
like this had happened to me the previous month, but it had soon gone
away and so other than discussing it with Luke as an oddity, I saw
little point in worrying about it. When playing games at the arcade
I just turned my head a little to the left so the game screen was
centered in the portion of my remaining vision. By the time Luke
headed home I was beginning to get my full vision back. An odd
occurrence, since it went away on its own, and mother hadn't wanted
me to see a doctor since my thirteenth birthday, I just ignored
it.
I had gotten into the routine of coming to school late and leaving
early as I'd left my first and last periods of the day empty.
Technically this was skipping school as I was under eighteen years
old, but no one seemed to notice. Then, on one of the days I was
driving my father's car, one of the Principal's twin daughters called
to me after I snuck out the front door. Stunned, I stood by the car
wide-eyed. Was this going to be an intervention? Had her father
roped her into sussing me out after the incident with the computer
tape? As she walked up to me she asked if she could ride along
with me.
I nervously agreed. As she was eighteen, she could
come and go to the school whatever times she liked. Perhaps she
just wanted a ride somewhere? But when I asked she was vague and
just wanted to go a little ways. Still worried about her being sent
to have a 'chat' with me, I missed while moving the manual stick
shift to the next gear. I looked down to see where I had gone wrong
and she suddenly grabbed the top of the wheel and pushed it to the
left; it turned out that as I looked down to the stick shift, I
had let the car drift to the right and she intervened before I went
off the side of the road. Now looking like a complete fool who
couldn't drive as well as needing a good talking to, she had me stop
a little further down the road and thanked me for the ride. She got
out mentioning that she needed to practice her running and left me
completely clueless. My only guess was she wanted a reason to run
back to the school before the buses came...?
As the last month of school came and they were getting ready to take
pictures for the year book, a funny thing happened. Students
would come up to Luke or me to ask us a favor. Toward these last few
weeks of our Senior year, our classmates began to realize the
importance of being involved in 'extracurricular activities'. Could
they join us for the Computer Club picture? I hadn't even known
there was going to be a club picture for the year book, but since we
had officially registered the club that meant there would be a
picture for it. As more and more students asked to join, we agreed
and when the time came I brought in my own computer to place next to
the office's Trash-80 Model III on the table in the conference room.
The photographer didn't feel there was enough room for all of us to
be in the room and get a good picture, so we brought the table out
into the more open front office area, set the computers up and, as
the club sponsor, the wood shop teacher was called to join us.
He had attended the first couple of club gatherings at the start of
the school year but soon lost interest, so he seemed truly surprised
when he showed up and there was just shy of ten students gathered for
the photo. As the founders, I sat down by my computer at one end of
the table and Luke took the end with the Model III, the rest lined up
behind the table with the wood shop teacher in the middle and the
picture was taken. Looking through the resulting year book at our
photo and the impressive Computer Club group we seemed to have that
year, it left me wondering just how many of the other extracurricular
activity photos had 'additional people' in them as well?
These books were handed out with still a full week left to go and we
made notes in each others' pages. It turned out there was a surprise
for me in the year book. Not only did it have a good picture of me
giving my variety show speech at the end of Junior year, but in the
'Notables' section I was listed as 'The Sneakiest'. This stunned me,
first that anyone would think I was notable, but then not
knowing exactly what I had been the sneakiest at? Was it from making
my own computer room key? Was it for my stunt bringing in the bottle
of nonalcoholic grape juice to celebrate the new Principal? What
was it? I asked my friends as they seemed to all know
with the smirks on their faces, but they wouldn't tell me.
This would remain a mystery for me over the next two years.
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