“Is it an option to drop out of middle school?”
The date is August 31st 2012, the first day of eighth grade. “Here we go, piece of cake.” I smiled at my best friend of five years, Lylli. “Maybe for you B.” she replied, rolling her eyes so far back that I thought they’d get stuck and giving me her infamous look of exasperation. “Lyl, all you have to do is show up on time this year.” the small crack at her chronic tardiness had me giggling, the running joke between our friends was that Lylli would show up late to her own funeral. “Oh haha good one very funny!” she exclaimed in a voice sarcastic enough to make me cringe as we walked up the stairs to the team Presumpscot hallway, about to make a not so subtle attempt to find our english classroom. “Dang, it would be really nice if this place didn’t have so many stairs.” I panted to her, as we neared the top. Me, being the overweight child that I was, hated the stairs more than I hated the health teacher for the sixth graders, which was a lot. Lylli found the hallway a minute later, and the classroom about two minutes after that, and I remember that I was thankful that I had my fearless leader of a best friend on my team. We sat down and she groaned as she looked around the room at the faces of our english class for the next year. “B I can’t do this, there’s like 13 people that I can’t stand in here! Is it an option to drop out of middle school?” she whined. “Oh my gosh Lyl, don’t you think you’re being just a wee bit dramatic here?” I asked her while making a hand sign showing a small amount between my thumb and pointer finger. “No.” she replied flatly. If we’re being honest, she was definitely being a little dramatic, but both of us definitely wondered if dropping out of middle school was allowed in the months to come. This would be a piece of cake, I had said. It would turn out that I was wrong.
On our first day of Ms. Davis’ english class, we did the typical icebreaker activities even though we’d all known each other since starting at Massabesic Middle School in sixth grade, and even some from before that at our respective elementary schools. I figured this class would be a lame english class: learn a topic, do some homework, write a paper, repeat. Essentially that’s what it was sounding like to me until Ms. Davis introduced our year long research project that we’d be starting within a week or two, a new piece added into the curriculum to “prepare us for what we’d do in high school and in our future endeavors” (for the record, I haven’t done a project like that since). My heart sank beneath my heels instantaneously as Lylli shot me a knowing look. Even though I was a smart kid, “year long” and “research” were two very, very disconcerting words for me. This is it, I had thought, this is going to be the only class I ever fail. My cheeks flushed at the thought and I pushed it from the forefront of my mind almost as soon as it had surfaced. No no no I will not turn out like my brother.
At this point in the story, you may be wondering why this project is such an issue for me. The problem here, is that in eighth grade at this developing stage, no one has the attention span to stick with a project for a full year. My issue is having even less of an attention span than most. My lack of focus and drive wasn’t any sort of learning disability, it was just me. With the thought of this project weighing down on me, I thought more about my older brother, a junior in highschool at the time. Ben was smart, much smarter than I was, but lacked motivation worse than anyone I’d ever known. My brother, with his high IQ, partially eidetic memory, and advanced reading level, pulled grades in the low 70’s at best and failed every english class he’d taken in high school. His only issue had been the sheer boredom at school while he sat in a classroom relearning everything he’d seen two years ago. I remember crying to Lylli about how I’d end up exactly like Ben, about that being the exact path I was heading toward. Somehow Lylli always knew what to tell me to either distract me or make me change my mind completely, at least for a little while. She said to me “Hannah we both know that won’t happen to you because obviously you aren’t as smart as your brother so the same pattern doesn’t apply, duh.” Looking back, her logic makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, but I found it to be comforting at the time. The sense of comfort that Lyl brought me had given me a new sense of motivation almost. It seemed like it was worth it to put in the effort because I was going to break the mold.
After months of afternoons spent in the library and weekends sprawled out in my room with laptops, Lylli and I had finally put the finishing touches on our presentations. “Alright B get ready to hit send!” Lylli had her email pulled up on the screen, waiting for me to do the same. “Ready? One…two…THREE!” We slammed our fingers down on our laptops trackpads, sending our presentations, a culmination of months of hard work, to Ms. Davis. Our relief floods through the room but we aren’t out of the woods yet. It’s Friday afternoon, presentation week started on Monday. So close, yet so far. Surely enough, the weekend whipped by us before Lyl could say “Sorry I’m late…again…” and we found ourselves sitting in the back of Ms. Davis’ classroom with the giggles, a common occurrence when we had some nerves. The nerves had mostly come from the random fashion of the order of presentations. Basically, if your name was picked out of the hat, off you went to the front of the class next to the projector screen. The first name is called, not me, not Lyl either. This continues for the rest of class and I begin to realize that Lylli and I will not be presenting this time. We’re safe for now.
“Hannah come on up and present for us!” Ms. Davis picks out Hannah’s name and calls cheerily. I glance over at her and I know that she’s nervous, I can tell by the slight flush of her cheeks. “Hey, you’ve got this, love you B.” I whisper to her while she stands up. She gives me a slight smile and I know she’ll be fine, I can feel it. Her presentation starts, she looks at me the whole time, she doesn’t mess up once. As she ends her presentation, the class begins to applaud and I can’t help but be the proud mom of a friend that I am, so I find myself whooping and hollering in the back. “Lyl stop embarrassing me.” Hannah giggles a little when she sits back down next to me. She’s nailed it and I feel as though I’m ready to nail it too. My hand shoots up and I hear myself volunteering to go next, almost like I’m listening to someone else speaking.
A vivid memory of my crazy and fearless best friend Lylli volunteering to present her project sometimes flashes through my mind and I find myself thinking that I was extremely lucky to have had her by my side that year. No one but Lyl truly understands why a perfect score on the project meant so much to me but I know that she’s half of the reason I received it. Here I was terrified of ending up just like Ben, but with Lylli’s extra motivation, I left the beaten path and forged my own, learning so many new writing skills that I figured would be useless along the way. Many of them still stick with me now, just like my chronically late best friend of 10 years does, and for that, I’m forever grateful.
