Joy in New Beginnings
If you would have told me my world was going to be flipped
upside down in aisle B9 of a
furniture store, I wouldn’t believe you, but I should.
Contrary to belief, picking out pillows for the new living
room can be interesting. Shelves upon
shelves of pillows were stacked on either side of the aisle
and as I run my fingers along all the
pillows, feeling the different texture of cotton, fur, and
silk, I think about the sweetest of dreams
I could have if I sank into the cart at the end of the aisle
labeled “clearance.” Standing next to the
cart, I pick up the smallest one hiding in the crevasse of
the bin, grip the side, and throw it down
the aisle, watching the pink and yellow tassels hanging from
the sides dance into the hands of my
best friend, Hannah, shouting “touch down!” so loud the old
lady looking at bathroom towels a
few feet away, glaring at us, the fifteen year olds, like we
were five.
With a quick sorry to the woman, we giggled as we put the
pillow back on a random shelf and
got back on task to finding the perfect summer pillow for
Hannah’s mother to add to her sofa. As
I reached for a cream colored, perfectly square cushion with
a bright yellow bumblebee
embroidered on the front to ask for Hannah’s opinion, her
phone started buzzing. “Which boy is
knocking on your door today?” I joked but soon realized her
face had gone pale and her eyes
were glued to the screen on her phone. Before I even had the
chance to ask what she was looking
at, she tilted her phone just enough for me to see and
that’s when my among all the dreamiest
pillows I had ever laid eyes on, my nightmare began.
It was a single post on a social media platform that changed
the entire outcome of my high
school career and ultimately, my direction in life. Little
did I know that as I stared motionless
into Hannah’s phone, illuminating a picture of my biggest
secret I had managed to keep from
everyone, was there for all to see. Not even a blink of an
eye could wake me from this nightmare.
If I could remember everything that happened between setting
foot on the cold concrete outside
the store as we rushed home in Hannah’s car and the first
day of calculus class surrounded by
unfamiliar faces, I would tell you. The painful drive back
to my house, collapsing into my
mother’s tired arms, repeating my story to countless
officers and searching for the truth became
an exhaustive memory not worth keeping anymore. As much as I
was able to flush out the
incident, it wouldn’t change that my peers remembered and
still had screenshots of what
happened deep inside their camera roles. The school wasn’t
willing to enforce consequences and
the police officers had nothing more to say than to gently
encourage I transfer to a different
school. So, that’s what I did. New school. New me.
In a high school with five distinct buildings, I had to pay extra attention on the tour I had just a
week before classes began so I could retrace my steps back
to my first period class. Peeking my
head into the classroom, I found nobody else but an older
gentleman who could be Albert
Einstein’s doppelgänger. I took a minute to admire his
thinning white hair with a matching
mustache before softly interrupting his focus of what looked
like a million emails he hadn’t
opened yet on his computer screen. “Is this the calculus
classroom?’ is all I could muster to
squeak out. His twinkling eyes switched their attention to
me as he youthfully jumped up from
his desk chair and introduced himself as Mr. Yoder. He
showed me to my assigned seat without
me even having to tell him my name - perks of being the new
girl. I took a seat and watched him
return to his computer as I pulled out my pencil case and
notebook, eagerly waiting for other
students to walk in and ease the awkwardness I felt. “Early
bird gets the worm,” I heard him say.
I cleared my throat before saying, “I’m sorry, what was
that?” He turned towards me and
chuckled, “Early bird gets the worm. You’re thirty minutes
early for class.” He must have seen
how bright my face got as he quickly reassured me that I
could stay and even added that he liked
the company. I must have been so distracted by the
complicated campus map and class schedule
on my tour that I had tuned out simple details, including
when school actually started. I shifted
my eyes to the clock that was hanging over the door I had
come in and got into a staring contest
with the minute hand. Unlike how I was able to make pillow
shopping interesting, watching a
clock simply is that boring.
My mind began to wander as I wiggled my toes inside the
straps of my leather sandals. I had no
idea how students at this school dressed, failing to mention
that it is a private school where kids
my age go because their academics are deemed superior or
their fathers wanted them to fulfill the
family name, not because their social media account was
hacked. I decided on a blush pink loose
blouse, medium wash bluejeans, and a pair of well-loved
sandals that probably should have been
tossed years ago. Before I could shuffle the things in my
backpack to grab my cellphone to tell
my grandfather to come pick me up so we could wait together
until the time of class was closer,
another student walked in with their head down, concentrated
on a text they were drafting. The
student was a boy my age wearing Converse high top sneakers,
khaki pants
with a hole in the knee cap with a black t-shirt with “Elton
John” written in all caps on the front.
Soon after him a girl walked in dressed with what looked to
be the school’s soccer team uniform.
I looked at my reflection in the blank white board to my
right. “Dressed to perfection,” I
whispered.
Arriving early to calculus class started as an accident and
transitioned to getting help for my
sinking grade and again shifting to the sole purpose of
spending more time in my favorite
classroom next to the teacher that taught me more than just
how to use the quadratic formula.
Transferring to a different school wan’t running from my
past, but rather providing myself with
the opportunity to redefine who I was. I knew that all along
but just needed someone like Mr.
Yoder to give me a little push. He never knew the whole story of what had happened to me, but
didn’t need to. He saw how lost and broken I felt on my
first day but could also see the light
shining from within me. I was beyond disappointed having to
switch schools but it gave me the
chance to step back and think about who I wanted to be and
what was important to me.
By the end of senior year, Mr. Yoder and I performed
together in chapel. He sat next to me
playing his old six string as I stood in front of the entire
school, looking into the pews now filled
of not unfamiliar faces, but friends and teachers who
quickly became my biggest supporters.
With sweaty palms I gripped the microphone and gave Mr.
Yoder a quick smile before singing an
aged folk song about new beginnings. The lyrics, “So you
should hold my hand while everything
blows away and we’ll run away to a brand new sun” still
echoes in my heart today. New
beginnings are something to rejoice in and that’s what Mr.
Yoder showed me
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