Crum

Chapter 17

154 Chapter 17 There should have been something more special about this, but there wasn’t. There should have been more ceremony, more of something that makes good memories. But there wasn’t. I had looked forward to this day for such a long time, actually counting the months or the weeks or the days trying to hurry the whole thing so that I would wake up some morning and it would be over. The last day of school. The last day I would spend in Crum High School. It’s just that sometimes I thought it would never come and I thought that if it ever did come it would be something special, something to remember, something to really enjoy. But it wasn’t. There was something about it that was dull and ordinary, boring. It was like all the other days. For a long time, for years, I had thought about this particular last day of school. I was stuck in a school that was hardly a school and I knew that there must be something beyond that, but I didn’t know what it was. All I knew was that I had to go looking for it. I always thought that the last day would be the one that would taste good, the one that would make me feel liberated. I would spend the day running up and down the hallways, kicking doors and generally being a goddamn fool, delirious with my new freedom. But it was not that way at all. I felt something all right, but it wasn’t what I wanted. For one thing, kids didn’t seem to be acting any differently. They seemed a little too normal, a little too much like it was any other school day. It was almost as though they didn’t care one way or the other that school was in or school was out, it didn’t matter. Some of them even 155 seemed to be sad, as though they were sorry that it was over. Sorry— I couldn’t understand that. A couple of the kids who rode the bus came up and shook my hand. They lived far downriver and knew that they would not be seeing me during the summer, and also knew that this was my last year and if I had my way they wouldn’t ever see me again. Everybody sort of knew that I planned to get out, but there was never any real plan about that, no day that anybody could point to and say it was going to be the last day in Crum for me. The whole idea just sort of hung there. There were some ceremonies on that last day, teachers awarding kids certificates for best reader, or speller, or whatever. An award to the kid who had read the most books, another to the best math student. I didn’t win any. But it didn’t matter. Throughout the whole day, I felt apart from all those little prizes. Elly stopped me in the hallway and kissed me. She really hung one on me, her tongue working as she ground her hips into mine. She had never done anything like that right out in the open at school before. And she made sure that her timing was right—Ruby was standing right next to us when Elly let me have it. The truth is, though, once Ruby knew I was really going to leave, she pretty well forgot about me. She concentrated on Mule instead. I thought about Yvonne and how she should be here. She would have gotten some of those awards for sure—especially for the most books read. And she would have been dressed up in a dress that none of us would have seen before, and she would have been beautiful. All day long I kept waiting for something unexpected. I felt listless instead of excited. And then I figured it out. A lot of times the worst thing in your life can be the focus of your life, your whole ...