Amy Dillon
ENG 484
Workshop Story
1/31/19
Boredom
I
The seats in speech class formed a circle, or an oval, so that it was a very peaceful, serene setting. To my left sat Willie, a short kid in the honors program that constantly recited quotes from The Simpsons, and to my right was Kevin, a short, red-haired kid that hit the mark of at least five jokes, per day, in the classes I saw him in. He was in Trigonometry sophomore year, and the day before the big speech, I saw him studying for a Trig test, his hands over his ears, his head hung low over his textbook. This was how I saw most of the smart kids’ study; they blocked everything out and tried to concentrate, even if there was a swarm of people and/or noise surrounding them. I used to study like that, in junior high, when I didn’t have anything else to worry about. At that point in my life, however, I had just been diagnosed with clinical depression and Bipolar disorder, so studying was something I didn’t think about, even though the fact that I could get kicked out was apparent.
Kevin took meds, too. Sometimes he would arrive late to class, coming from the nurse’s office. “Sorry, I had to take my medicine,” he would mention as he slipped into his chair and placed his North Face book bag on the floor. That was a big transition for me, going from junior high to high school: everything in style was much more expensive, and much more preppy. My mom bought me some Tommy Hilfiger shirts from Kohl’s, but that was about it. I had never even heard of Abercrombie and Fitch when I started at Loyola Academy, but, obviously, Kevin had. He was always decked out, head to toe, in Abercrombie and Fitch shirts, pants, jackets, etc.; with the exception of the rules of the dress code at Loyola: no patched pockets and only collared shirts. My first year I became assimilated to the preppy style of clothing, but in sophomore year, I started to look for something more to worry about, besides how to dress. I remained a quiet kid, listening to what was going on, taking in the energy and excitement; and with Kevin in the room, there was always energy and excitement. When I became more acquainted with my peers, I began to realize there was a whole other side of school besides rules and regulations about how to dress, how to conform. I found the boredom that lied in the partially lit hallways by the caf, by the library. I began to realize that we were all looking for something to follow.
II
The first memory I have of my childhood is me sitting alone in the back seat. I had a Barbie doll in my hand, and the seat to my left was empty. My parents were talking, and I was alone, with nothing to do but hold the doll and look at the passing cars and houses.
I have peaceful memories of traveling in my parents’ cars as a child. Sometimes we would cruise down the Kennedy, coming from the exit by Sayre Ave., and we would pass the house with a castle for a garage. The yellow lines lining the road whizzed by me as my arm hung low out the passenger’s side window, but I still felt safe, because my parents were there and they could make anything wrong better. I could only see the back of the house with the castle for a garage. I had never seen the front of the house, and I wondered if it was like the garage, but from what little I could see, it wasn’t like the garage. It was just a normal house. That meant, to me, that whoever built didn’t have intentions in mind as to whether people would see it, if you don’t count that backside view from the high way. This spectacle was just one of the many things that amazed me as a child. It fed that thing in me that needed to be challenged. A castle on the high way? Not possible! But it’s fun to look at. That was how I felt about the Scary Jesus Statue that was in front of a house on Foster, the closest busy street by my house. Scary Jesus was encased in a box that lit up at night. He held out his hands, as I to say (keep in mind I was still a child,) What are you looking at? Instead of, Follow me, I am your Savior.
The person I communicated with the most as a child was my sister, Courtney. She was four years younger than me, but we were pretty much on the same level about things. We had a way of communicating with each other, even without talking; just with a glance, a look. My most vivid memory of my sister and I was of her and I in my Dad’s car’s backseat, my Dad driving us through a McDonald’s drive through. The seats were sweaty, as the AC didn’t work, and my Dad had just shoved down the Jeep’s side windows down, so that we could stay cool with the gushing window that followed us. “Are orange sodas okay?” he asked, turning to face us, his arm around the front passenger seat. My sister and I looked at each other, and we both nodded, yes, even though we knew out favorite soft drink was Coca-Cola. We didn’t want to hurt his feelings, to deny the custom of driving through McDonalds and getting Happy Meals with orange sodas. It was a thing we did, it was our way of hanging out, of showing the person behind the register, the people behind us who saw the orange sodas being passed from the building into the car, that we had our own way of doing things. My sister and I giggled while we waited for the exchange to take place, while my Dad bopped his head to the song on the Classic Rock station. Did he notice us laughing? We noticed him singing.
The first best friend I had as a child was Elizabeth. We met in preschool. During play time we would pull out the red blue and yellow baskets that were filled with toy cars and Legos, sit down on the itchy grey carpet, and collaborate to make roads for the cars. When Elizabeth moved away, I made friends with Stefanie. My exact words to her were, “Now you could be my best friend.”
In third grade we started to not be afraid of my upstairs, particularly my attic. Before my parents turned it into a bedroom for my sister and I, it was a big and empty space, with the exception of some toys that were kept there. I would build a fort with red cardboard blocks, but halfway there, I had felt a gust of wind from the drafty window facing my eastern most neighbor. I would stop what I was doing, freeze, and slowly turn around, with hopes of not finding the ghost that I had presumed floated around upstairs, facing me. After looking around and finding nothing, I went back to work at whatever fort or spaceship was in the midst of being built.
My parents spent a lot of money fixing up the biggest room upstairs to make it my sister and I’s bedroom. It had grey confetti carpet and two window boxes without places to sit. When I wanted to be alone, I would sit down in the window box space with a book or magazine, with my neon-yellow boom box on full blast, on B96 or Kiss FM, and I would just relax. When it was nice out, at night, I stuck my head out the window of the window box, to be one with the silence of the side street. Almost directly across from me was a mansion that did not belong on the block. It had Spanish tiles on the roof, a messy front garden that was covered with weeds, and a patio on the side. An old lady lived there, who paid me to shovel for her in the winter, and to take care of her cat occasionally while she visited her granddaughter in Dallas. The mansion was always silent. I could tell it was silent just by looking at it, even when I had my radio on.
Before the upstairs bedroom was remodeled for my sister and myself, me, her, and my childhood best friend Stefanie would spend a lot of time in the older part of the attic. There were rolls of fiber glass in the corner, and a ladder with two steps that went up to a place that no one had ever seen before; not even my parents. It probably led up to more storage space, but my sister, Stefanie and I always imagined that it led up to some other hidden room. We never got the courage to climb up it, and it was left, unexperienced, when my family and I moved in 2004. While we didn’t have the courage to climb the ladder, we did have the courage to try to enter other worlds, ghostly worlds, like how Michael Keaton did in the movie Beetlejuice. Stefanie took a piece of rock from the alley that substituted as chalk, and drew a door over the wooden boards of floor. “After we draw it, we need to knock three times,” she said. And so, we did. Nothing ever happened, of course, but the thrill of the hunt (of ghosts) flowed through my blood like unleashed tigers; or ghosts, for that matter.
III. Lisa
Lisa was the friend I had who lived a block from my house. Before the time of cellphones, we dabbled with walkie-talkies, but after a few days of static, we decided that phones served better purpose. Lisa’s house was comfortable. We started to be friends in grammar school, after I had attended the after-school program with her, her Mom being a supervisor. As soon as we realized we lived a block away from each other, we clicked. I would go to her house after school, and also during the summer, when we had nothing to do. After school we would spread out all of our books and notebooks and workbooks over the gray carpet in Lisa’s front room, in front of the television. I usually didn’t get anything done until later at night, when I was alone in my bedroom upstairs. Still, when I was at Lisa’s house, I was at home. I didn’t have to worry about what other people thought of me, because Lisa and her friends and family took me for who I am.
“What are we going to do today?” Courtney asked as we walked in the door into Lisa’s front room. The new reclining chairs her parents had just bought sat in the two corners, while a desk and a family portrait that was taken a few years ago hung in the other corner. An arched entryway led to the wooden worn dining table, and to the right was the kitchen, where we had spent many days baking and cleaning, out of boredom as well as the need for purpose in our adolescent lives.
“Can we do the thing where we stand on our heads?” I asked. The new thing that we did because we didn’t have anything else to do was to stand on our heads as long as we could, until the blood rushed to our faces and we couldn’t take it anymore.
“Ok,” Lisa said, “Last time I won- thirty seconds.”
“Courtney never wins,” I said, a hint of mockery protruding from my voice.
Courtney went through a prolonged awkward phase, from when she was about three to thirteen. She always lagged behind me, but I still stood up for her when people (friends, and people who weren’t friends) were mean to her because they knew that she couldn’t stick up for herself.
Lisa’s dog was named Hacker, because he occasionally made a hacking, coughing sound. Lisa’s family wasn’t the type of family that had a dog, so when I saw him for the first time, I was surprised. Hacker was the type of dog that had almost a lot of energy, kind of like Felix, the dog of the people we used to babysit for. Felix and Hacker had too much energy. Hacker was always exerting energy, and Felix was an Airedale that had the same amount of energy, that is, until the Dad of Calvin and Kendall would tell him to go into the crate in the basement.
Sometimes Lisa would babysit for Calvin and Kendall, and sometimes I would, and oftentimes we would visit while the other was babysitting. Kendall’s room was pink and girly, with a bed in the corner that had a table next to it where she always placed a cup of water at night. Their Mom kept good snacks in the set of three baskets that hung over their microwave. The green and blue microwavable plates with flowers painted on them sat under the microwave. Their freezer always had Oberweis milk and tortillas and blocks of cheese for quesadilla making. Brenda showed me how to make quesadillas for the kids: just boil some water on a pan, place the rack and then the tortilla over it, let it soften, and the roll the cheese in it. The first time I tried to make it I burnt the pan so that all the water evaporated too quickly and the pan started to char. Calvin had more of an idea of what he was doing. Also, he was the one who took Felix on the leash out to the yard when it was cold, so that we wouldn’t have to chase him back into the house.
Lisa lived a block away from Calvin and Kendall, and I lived a block away from her. Calvin and Kendall, lived on the other side of Foster. Foster was the divider of the neighborhoods of my peers that went to Saint Monica. I was one of the few in my grade that was on the side opposite of St. Monica’s. Almost everyone else in my grade lived on the other side of Foster. Foster was a busy street, but when there wasn’t that much traffic, it could almost pass for a side street. When I wanted to see Lisa, I would call her on the phone, and either I would start walking to her house to go there, or she would start walking to my house to visit me, or we would agree to leave at that exact moment so that we would meet each other halfway. Lisa was one of my best friends until I started high school. She was in the grade below me, and I went to a different high school than her. Once high school started, we stopped seeing each other as much.
IV. Kathy
Loyola Academy was too big for me. The first day of class I couldn’t find my rooms on time. I wore khakis, a collared shirt and a pair of white and blue Adidas, the kind that were fashionable in 1998. My first bus ride to school my mom walked with me to the bus stop. I picked gooseberries off of the bush that stood next to the corner, and I thought to myself to not get my expectations up to high, as I was the only girl from my class to go to Loyola.
I saw Kathy for the first time the first day of Faith class, when everything and everyone was fresh and new. Kathy walked in with Andrea, while everyone had already taken their seats. They both walked through the space in the middle to sit behind me, and everyone was watching them.
“Take your seats, ladies,” Mr. Smith said when they walked in late.
“Sorry,” Andrea said in a tone that I recognized as rude yet intimidated.
The first time we had a group assignment I talked to Kathy first. Tom sat next to us, and I noticed his lips were exceedingly chapped. He took out a tub of lip balm and smeared it all over his lips.
After class that day Kathy asked me if I wanted to have lunch with her.
“I really don’t have anyone else to sit with,” she said, “I usually just walk around, anyway.” We turned the corner around the cafeteria to Kathy’s locker. She pulled her hair behind her ear before opening the purple metal door of it open and taking out an Algebra One and a Latin I book. We turned three more corners, walking silently until we got up to the space in the basement by the elevators. We sat down behind the grey pillar.
“I can get us some cookies,” I asked, not knowing what to say about the fact that there was so much awkwardness that we had forgot about food. “Do you like snickerdoodles?”
Kathy and I made other friends, Lindsey being one of the ones we spent the most time with. When summer came around, however, Lindsey and Kathy stopped talking. I was still friends with both of them, but we didn’t spend time together anymore. Lindsey’s house was huge. She lived upstairs in a big room with a window that showed the outside of a neighborhood that was close to my home yet I had never seen before. That summer the boredom hit us hard, but we knew how to handle it. We made a list of things to do.
One, of which, was to throw a party. One of Lindsey’s friends had invited her friends from another school. I walked there, and on my way I saw three kids from my school walking down the circular street, towards me. I told them to come by the party, but the girl in the middle just waved at me, and they walked by, like a passing storm. When I got there, all of the girls from another school were sitting on the wooden benches of Lindsey’s back porch.
After it had gotten dark out, I went inside. Brett and Lindsey were the only ones by the front door. Brett was sitting on the stairs going upstairs. I started to cry because I felt left out of the party, partly, but also was sad that nothing exciting was happening. You could call it boredom, but I think of it as aggravation. I used to cry a lot when I was younger, and that moment was the last time I cried because of a lack of present emotion. The party was just too dry for me, so I stirred some drama by telling Lindsey I needed to use the phone. I called my friend Maddie who lived far away from Lindsey’s house, to ask if I could sleep over. When I called, no one picked up. After I hung up the phone, Lindsey and I walked out the front door, alone, and I lied and told her I had gotten in a fight with my Dad. The tears came streaming down my cheeks, and she gave me a hug. I brushed my face and we walked back in, where no one knew what had happened.
My sophomore year at Loyola Academy was boring because I only hung out with Kathy. We would stay after school and wait until or parents picked us up, waiting in the hallways for someone to come our way and talk to us.
“What kind do you want?” I asked, getting up from the floor at the hallway intersection by Kathy’s locker.
“Skittles,” she said, placing her North Face jacket by her side, and then opening up a notebook.
I walked the hallway until I met the corner with the staircase going upstairs in front of the cafeteria. I dug two dollars in quarters out of my pockets and shoved the coins in the vending machine, pressed the buttons until a bag of Skittles and Twizzlers fell into the bottom of the machine. Turning around, the bulletin board and all of the flyers attached caught my eye; there were flyers for the poetry club, track, the chemistry club, art club, Poms try-outs, and other obscure papers with dates scrawled across the front.
That was the last time I stayed after school with Kathy. It was the last time I walked the halls lined with purple lockers, where the ceilings hung low and the smell of outside wind filtrated homeroom classrooms weekday mornings. My mom and I were supposed to give Kathy a ride home a few weeks later, but I didn’t make it to school that day, as I was checked into the psych ward at Lutheran General for clinical depression.
V. Productive Solitude
After Loyola I went to three schools: Resurrection, Luther North, and Taft. Resurrection was a bad experience, and since it was a private school and I got bad grades and slept through class, they kicked me out. The summer going into junior year my Mom called my Uncle Bernie about obtaining money from my trust fund so that I could attend Luther North.
“Yeah, it seems like a good choice,” my Mom spoke into the receiver to my Uncle. We sat at the kitchen table as the sunlight flooded over the wooden floors, and a flurry of dust particles danced in the light. I noticed this happening when I was younger, when my Grandmother would sit at the table with me and we would talk.
“One might consider them angels,” my Grandmother said, referring to the pieces of dust.
My Mom looked at me encouragingly as she listened to my Uncle for ten or fifteen minutes. A few days later, I was registered at the small school with less than three-hundred students in all four classes.
Homeroom was a unique experience. The Kid’s News Program was on television, and I would occasionally watch as the news anchors who were my age took over the television for a good twenty minutes of the morning. Since there were so few classmates (as compared to the other school I had attended), I could match a name to a face pretty easily after a couple of weeks. Two girls that seemed nice were Merle and Anna. Merle was in one corner of homeroom while Anna was in the opposite. One morning Merle shouted across the room something about borrowing her boots, another day a question about an invitation to go to a Dave Matthews Band concert. I was in Honors English my first year there, as was Merle. She wrote a twenty-five page paper on the Dave Matthews Band. I watched in envy as she placed the packet into Ms. McKenzie’s hand, claiming she had been up all night writing it. I had decided to do my paper on the Black Plague. I followed through with the first few steps of the assignment. I wrote a thesis statement and brought some references to class, and brought them up to Ms. McKenzie’s desk. She leafed through it, looked up at me, and said,
“Wow, I am impressed.”
Her compliment felt fake, like I was special compared to the other students. But I took it.
The boy I was in love with who went there was named Jackson. While this should be a good thing, everything that led to the fact that he wasn’t interested and taken led to me being alone. He was tall with a buzz cut and freckles over his cheeks. His girlfriend’s name was Cara. I was in love with the soft look in his eyes; the way he talked to girls; and the way he was nice to me while being a complete jerk at the same time. My counselor told me that he had caused problems before, so I was warry of him and the fact that everything mean thing he did and said broke my heart. I thought I loved him but at the same time I hated him. I hated the way he walked into a room like he owned it. I hated how he thought he was exempt from the rules. One day in history class he walked in with his pants rolled up, and the teacher called him out and gave him a detention. He looked around the room in disbelief and said, “Just for having my pants rolled up?” Mr. Johnson was the type of teacher who craved authority. Jackson was the type to challenge everything.
Lunch period was boring. Until I came out of my shell a bit junior year, I used to sit in the bathroom stalls on toilets and eat chocolate chip cookies from the cafeteria that fell apart in my hands. Free period was even worse. I sat in the hall on the green tile ground with my books spread out in front of me, not having the stamina to do work, as I sat heartbroken at the fact that I was missing out on a normal adolescence because of my clinical depression and shyness.
Taft was different, because I wasn’t as intimidated with my peers. I stopped dreading public speeches and sitting in the front row of class. After school I would have nothing to do, so I sat in the after-school computer lab and played Cubis. When I got home I vegged out in front of the television and watched Total Request Live on MTV.
Graduation day it seemed like there weren’t that many students graduating. This probably was because a good number of students didn’t pass. I still had not made friends, but I felt a sense of pride and achievement that I could share with my fellow students. Gabriella, the girl next to me, blew up a beach ball while we waited for the ceremony to start, and it went from corner to corner, over the graduates’ hands, who were sitting on the seats on the floor of the auditorium; in a manner of seconds. My parents sat in the bleachers, watching me as I watched them, my mom smiling, my Dad’s eyes an even brighter blue than usual. After the ceremony, we went to Russell’s, a restaurant we used to go to when I was younger. I ordered fried shrimp and French fries and an orange soda. My parents and I sat at a booth, talking about my plans for the summer, and for next fall. I was going to volunteer at the Anti-Cruelty Society that summer, and I wanted to register in a few weeks for classes at Wilber Wright Community College.
“What are you going to do this weekend?” my Mom asked me, taking a sip of her Diet Coke.
“I don’t know, mom,” I said. “What is there to do?”