The Story of Us: High School, Part 2

[copied from dland]

The year goes by, and in 11th grade I find myself in a history class that turns out to be just a great class, great teacher, and of course, John is in it. We sat in a circle around the room in alphabetical order, so I sat directly across from him, where we never really had to speak. He was in my English class, too, but I didn’t even remember that until he told me years later.

Come spring, the teacher suggested that some in the class might want to go on a weekend trip with her, to a high school in south Jersey that was holding a Model Congress Convention. We would write bills, work in committees, argue before the assembly, and so on. Sounded good. I was one of about eight people who signed up, as did John. The funny thing was, the teacher wasn’t sure she could get the school van until the last minute, and so she asked for volunteer daddies to show up and drive us down there if needed, and the two who signed up were his and mine, although the van showed up and Jack (my daddy) got to go home.

So we head on down to wherever this was, and when we got there, we saw that other schools actually had political parties for school government elections, and they were all promoting them, all of them liberal and pretty much the same. Our school didn’t have that, but we knew that half the fun of this convention was going to be creating conflict and then trying to solve it, so on the spot we created a conservative political party and rallied around John as our leader. He wasn’t too crazy about all of us being insincere on the issues, but we went for it and it was great. Turns out I didn’t hate him after all. He really was bright and funny and cared a lot about all of his causes, horrible as I thought they were.

Senior year, and we are together again in a history seminar class taught by the same teacher. There are only about 12 kids in the class, and we find, to our amazement, that we can have normal conversations with each other. By this time, I have a boyfriend (since early Junior year, actually), and had no thoughts of anyone else, especially John. But we went to the Model Congress again, and it was great. And we also both went on a trip with the same teacher and a busful of kids to spend a week in Washington DC in March. By the time we got back, we were friends. We even played tennis together once a week or two later, not that I can do that. And then, just before graduation, the boyfriend and I called it quits.

One week after graduation, John called and asked if I wanted to go with him to see the Fourth of July fireworks. First date.

Sweet? Romantic? I’m not done yet.


ENTRY #27