high school Archives -

The Battle of the Grasshopper

dead grasshopper by leticia chamorro via flickr

It’s November again and I am Nanowrimoing my little heart out, so I’ll be reposting a few things from way back when, and concentrating on the new novel climbing out of my head.

This time we’re going way, way, way back, because I was on the internet pretty young and kept an online journal, which you can still see in all it’s embarassingly neon-colored glory (although I didn’t get into animations or midi players, thankfully) on Angelfire. This is a from my freshman year of high school, and emotions were running hot in my family.

As promised, the story of the grasshopper and it’s effects on my life.

I spent the second week of May in New Mexico, which is an entirely different story. However, before I left, I notified all my teachers, except two — my Russian teacher, who would also be gone most of the same week and wouldn’t care anyways, and my biology teacher. Actually that’s not completely true. I had mentioned to my biology teacher that I would be gone, but on the day I told all my teachers that I would be absent and was there any work I’d be missing? I didn’t have biology and therefore never had an official type conversation with him about it.

Time passes and I returned, having missed a full week of biology. On my return to the class, I found I had missed three assignments, a chapter review, an arthropod drawing and the dissection of a grasshopper. I turned in the review, I drew the arthropod (thought it sure wasn’t pretty) and I contemplated the grasshopper dissection. At that time, I did have the chance to make up the dissection.

I decided, hey, what the heck, I won’t dissect the grasshopper. Doubtless, you’ll want to know the reasoning behind this decision. 1) I don’t care what chemicals they feed them, how big can a grasshopper get? It’s gonna be tiny and I won’t be able to tell what it’s insides are, even if I did care. 2) Somebody told me they squirted. 3) I’ve already dissected a worm, a crayfish and a starfish. How big a dent could a zero for a grasshopper make? 4) It’s a smelly, dead thing. I don’t like smelly, dead things.

So, I made my decision, I was conscious of it, I didn’t change my mind and I felt good and control of my life (if only a small portion of it).

Thursday came and 7th hour. Some guy who I know by name only came in to make up a grasshopper dissection. Sitting on my desk and coloring in my tesselation from math, I watched him out of the corner of my eye. The grasshopper was one ugly sucker, about 2 inches long. The biology teacher told me I could join him, if I wanted. “I don’t like smelly, dead things,” I replied, and continued my coloring.

Another day or two went by. The teacher was working on grades. “Bonnie,” he told me, “if you don’t do that grasshopper you can’t get an A.” Fine with me. My world won’t end with a B in Biology.

More time passed (though not a lot) and it was the end of the school year. I got my project reward slips and took them home. (Project reward is a program at my school where if you haven’t missed more that five days of school, or if you have an A or B grade or haven’t been in trouble you don’t have to take exams in whatever classes your parents will sign you off on.) I remembered to give the slips to my mother. “I’m only going to sign the ones for classes you have As in,” my mother said. Shit, said my brain, argued with itself for a while then directed my mouth to admit to having a B in biology. “Why’s that?” my mother asked, “because it’s biology?” (I have a history of hating, not caring about and generally not doing fantastic in science.) “Umm,” I said, and ended up telling her about the grasshopper.

Now, I may think it’s great when I make decisions and do things for myself but my parents don’t agree. In fact, this time, they disagreed with me quite emphatically.

Someday, my mother informed me, when you have a 3.98 gpa and you’re not the valedictorian, you’ll regret this.

If you want to go to a good school and get scholarships you need to work. (oh yes daddy, I’m such a slacker, of course) The people who get scholarships are the people who work and who don’t give up. (I’ll never let go dad, I’ll never let go…)

And it was decided by the Powers That Be that I was an evil child and would be taking the biology final. The Powers also decreed that for ever grade below an A I would be off the computer for an additional week. Addictional to off till the end of school, but although school ended of Thursday, these weeks will end on Saturdays, the Powers told me.

All arguments against the Powers are ignored. But if I’ll be majoring in English, why would one bio grade matter? What science scholarships would I be applying for anyway? Isn’t it my life? (Not till I’m 21, as I was informed by my male parental unit, several arguments ago. It might have been nicer to have been slapped.)

Two things remain on the tip of my mind. Should you have the right to ruin your own frickin’ life? and It’s a B! What’s so frickin bad about a B?

Looking back now, I can see it more from my parents’ point of view, but I also still feel a bit smug, because I was salutatorian in my graduating class and went to a perfectly nice liberal arts college with my 3.98 GPA. And I’m more interested in science these days, but I have no regrets about that grasshopper, and I don’t think that I’d jump at the chance to dissect one today.

Early Writings & Teenage Angst

The only way to illustrate this is with this adolescent photoshop effort.
Ashley and Coleman were our cats. Ashley Pitzman, by a certain formula, would be my pornstar name.

When I was in middle and high school, I was interested in writing and my parents were willing to encourage me, so I had a subscription to a few magazines. One of them was probably Fantasy & Science Fiction, and another was entirely written by teens. I noticed a certain formula in the teen-written magazine: pick something and exaggerate it. The example I recall was a short story about a boy who slept all the time. I decided to try my hand at the same thing, and recently rediscovered the result on a website from an era past, when I thought it was a good idea to post my teenage stories and poems online with my full name. Now I realize that a) publications don’t want things you’ve already published online and b) no publication would have published those pieces anyway. But I’m going to share this one anyway; I was quite proud of it at the time.

A Matter of Silent Observation

“I wish I knew why she won’t talk any more,” said her mother.
“Don’t we all,” replied the shrink.

Laurel watched them from her seat on the windowsill. She knew why she didn’t talk. She didn’t want to. She’d decided several months ago that it was a waste of time. No one seemed to understand her. Why waste time trying to explain when she could be pondering more interesting things?

She liked that word, “pondering”, it sounded (or in her case didn’t sound) big and important. It was pompous, which was another good word.

So she pondered the raindrops which fell from the sullen gray sky outside, following them down the window where they trickled off the outside sill and splatted onto the scraggly lawn below. It wasn’t very far below, only about two feet down. This was a shrink room, they couldn’t risk people jumping out.

Laurel considered what would happen if she jumped out this window. Not that she was suicidal – the thought came up with the notion of people jumping out. She would get a lot of little cuts from the glass and maybe some big ones and about the same with bruises.

The shrink interrupted her with a tap on the shoulder. She knew he had a name but she preferred to think of him as “the shrink”. She didn’t let him see that he’d interrupted her, she ignored him instead. Actually she didn’t really ignore him, just pretended to. It was easy, she was very good at pretending to ignore people. She thought of it as a game. How long could she ignore this new shrink before he gave up and left her alone?

She watched him out of the corner of her eye. His sandy brown hair kept falling in his face and he nervously brushed it away. She knew he was nervous because she made everyone nervous, even the shrinks who were over-confident. None of them stayed that way. Because no matter what they said or did, she didn’t talk.

She turned and faced him, staring because she knew it would make him uncomfortable. Her eyes were an unusual green-gray with yellowish rings around the pupils. Having unusual eyes helped when you wanted to make someone nervous. Sandy Hair the Shrink broke eye contact and reached for a paper on his desk. Laurel laughed silently to herself. This was one of the weaker ones. She could deal with him easily.

She watched him as he turned around again. “Laurel, do you see this picture?”

What a dumb question, did he think she was blind? She glanced at the picture. It showed a happy family rowing across a lake. She knew what this was about: she was supposed to write a story about the picture. They would analyze it and believe they had picked her mind. Which, of course, they wouldn’t have.
“What story does this picture suggest to you?”
I knew you would say that, she thought.

“I want you to think about the story you think goes with this picture. Then I would like you to write it down. Next time you come I would like to see the story.”

I knew you would say that too. I will write that it began to rain and Mr. and Mrs. Jonathan Meyers bundled Andrea and Michael into the rain ponchos that were tucked under the seat of the boat. Then they rowed back to the lodge, where they dried off with fuzzy…purple I think I’ll have…fuzzy purple towels. And they drank hot cocoa and, since there is a sunset in the background, watched a movie and then went to bed. The End.

She blinked twice at him – that was how she was telling people yes now, just to see of they picked it up, and held out her hand for the picture.

She wondered briefly why everyone was so worked up about her not talking. She had never talked much anyway. Now she just talked less.

There were many interesting things to do, if the world would be quiet and stop bothering you. You could learn a lot with silence, as Laurel knew. Girls in the locker room never stopped talking when she came in.

“No, it’s just Laurel, she won’t tell anyone,” and Laurel would blink at them and they would smile back and continue their conversations. It certainly didn’t bother her peers much, that she’d stopped talking.

The teachers had taken a bit more time to adjust, she’d been taken to the principal several times and failed an oral book report before the teachers stopped trying. Laurel had become quite adept at blank-eyed stares when adults tried to talk her into talking. It was a waste of time, to talk a mute out of being so. The teachers, shrinks and her parents couldn’t attack the logic behind her silence, because they didn’t know what it was.
Her parents hadn’t even noticed until the second day, when a teacher called to complain and make arrangements for a drug test. They were absolutely horrified, but then, parents usually are, Laurel thought. When the tests came back, Laurel was found to not be under the influence of any substances, illegal or otherwise. By this time she’d learned enough to know who was under the influence of such things, and she smiled to herself.
A succession of doctors confirmed that her body was fine, and would be able to vocalize, if the mind controlling it so chose. Laurel’s parents moved on to testing her mental health. Enter the therapists, psychologists and shrinks, stage right. Refuse to exit.

The first suggestion was regression. The regression therapist attempted to explain to Laurel how at the root of this difficult period in her life lay only one problem, which was causing all of the others in her life. She had been stuck, briefly, in the fallopian tube as an ovum. What she need was to relive this memory and work through it and accept it. Laurel walked out in the middle of the session, wondering just who it was that needed therapy.

The next candidate was a man inspired by Freud, who gave long, searching, passionate and woefully inaccurate monologues on her relationship with her father.

Now, four months, several therapists and a great deal of money later, Sandy Hair wanted her to write a story.

She had written several stories besides those about pictures for shrinks.

When she had read them over for proofing though, she had realized that they were rewrites of books she’d read, different but the same.
People were like that, she mused, all different but the same. Except for her.
She was different, because she was silent.