Parker
By: Britny Rodriguez
Tags: Anxiety, High School, Coming Of Age, Short Story, Public Speaking

My sophomore year of high school is something that I work very hard to forget. As it was happening, I did my best to not create any outstanding events that might help me remember what a miserable year it was. Every day was the same. This made it easy to conflate all 365 days into one blurb that I might place in a footnote of my life.

New city, new school. If I tried hard enough, I might be able to remember how scared I was walking to the cafeteria on my first day. Or maybe how it felt the moment I failed my first test and realized I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was. But there is one event that stands out from that sophomore year. One that I will let slither through the barriers I’ve built.

The hardest class I took that year was AP World History. It loomed over me the second I stepped into the classroom. When I was signing up for classes in the summer, the counselor warned me that it was a difficult course, the most difficult of all the AP courses and it might benefit me to take the normal world history class so as not to overwhelm me. I had just come off being near the top of my class in my previous school and was actually insulted by the suggestion. I took it to spite her.

I got my ass kicked by that class. The reading was insurmountable, the tests were cumulative, and the teacher was a no nonsense baseball coach who nabbed Assistant Principal the following year.

I skated by all year long doing just enough to pass the class. This teacher was one of those that could spot the cream of the crop from the bumbling twats who were foolish enough to think they could manage the class. I was the latter. He knew I was struggling and would write notes in the margin of my tests that read, “Do the reading.” That was discouraging enough, but imagine if he knew that I was, in fact, doing the reading.

At the end of the year, much to my anguish, the students were to partner up and create a Power Point presentation on one of the final historical events we were studying and present it to the class. This created two problems for me. One: I had not said one word to another student all year long. I had several classes with almost all of them. Saw them every day, all day. I doubt they ever noticed me. Finding a partner was like asking me to fly a plane. I simply did not have the capability. Two: My biggest fear is public speaking. I have made it my life’s objective to fade into the background of every situation I am placed in. Inverting that and placing me at the center of everyone’s attention and eloquently expressing thoughts and opinions was like asking to fly a plane into outer space. Indisputably cruel.

By the grace of god, there was another student in that class who was also an outsider. Because no one else wanted to partner with us, it left her and I, which felt fitting.

Anytime I’ve had to do a group project since then, the same feeling always washes over me. It’s like I learn to be a teenager again or someone who can communicate with their peers. I only talk to adults…mostly my parents. So when I interact with other students and people my age, adrenaline pumps through my veins as I try to “act normal.” My partner ( I forget her name, but it started with a B, so we’ll call her Bee”) surprised me. Most of the other students came from money, were exceptionally smart, or were in a clique that they had no interest in expanding. I could tell she was like me. Forced to slip under the radar and just make it through, one day at a time. After my period of adjustment, it was nice to have someone who saw me.

For this reason, I found myself excited at the possibility that I might now have a partner in future classes Bee and I were in together. There would be this unspoken agreement that in a sea of unfamiliarity, maybe we would gravitate toward each other and make things a little easier for the other.

During one of the few class times when we were working on the project, Bee made a comment that I completely misunderstood. Bee said that she would finish the power point on her own because she was going to be gone and would not be able to help later on. Now, I can’t remember her exact words, but I tried to regurgitate them in such a way that would create enough ambiguity to convey my confusion.

I never saw Bee again after that day. I worked on the Power Point in the next class and wondered where she might be, thinking it awful odd to be missing days so close to the end of term. Near the end of class, the teacher came over to have a chat and said that Bee was not coming back to school and that I would have to give the presentation alone.

I emailed Bee that night to express my anger and frustration at her failure to prepare me for the gladiator arena but it probably ended up going something like this:

Me: Bee! I didn’t know that when you said you weren’t going to be here to help, you meant you were never going to be here again.

Bee: Sorry! I moved so that’s why I wanted to do as much of the power point as possible so that all you had to do was present. Okay bye!

The final day of class was my day to present. I was consumed by my anxiety and couldn’t even breathe when I got to school that day. Everything around me was spiraling into a black hole with me at the center. It had to be a sick joke. Why me? The more I thought about standing alone in front of 20 kids who probably thought less of me than their book bag, the more unfathomable it seemed. I convinced myself that it was more likely that Bee would burst through the door and save me from this nightmare than it was for me to give the presentation alone and live to tell the tale. Delusion was my savior from reality.

The teacher called up the partners two at a time and they presented effortlessly, the way a model probably takes a drivers license photo.

And then he called me.

Maybe I looked like I was on the verge of unconsciousness or maybe I looked so pathetic and perhaps this was the first time people were seeing me at all and that’s why it happened. Nervous, woeful, and alone. The teacher did his best to communicate that I did have a partner at one point and wasn’t isolated on a remote island, partnerless, apart from the class and the other students.

This was supposed to make me feel better, I think. But it only compounded my isolation; drew attention to it. I pulled up the Power Point, took a shaky breath, and started to take my place near the front of the room when a boy in the class stood up and made his way across from me on the other side of the projector screen. He said nothing to me. He looked at his classmates and motioned his arms around the screen like a magician would at his grand finale, somehow knowing that all I wanted was not to be alone, for people’s eyes to be drawn away from me. He stood there during my entire presentation, beginning to end, nodding his head and gesturing as if he were my partner all along. I made it through.

I don’t know if that boy, Parker, knew how much that small act of kindness did for me. But I will remember him for the rest of my life.