Chapter 63: Ending the Semester Well

Monday, December 12, 1983

Today I had English, followed by PE. Hard, then very easy.

English wasn’t really that bad, though Ms. Epstein was clearly taking her best shot at making our hands cramp. A three-hour all essay final? This was as bad as some of my college finals had been.

Spring finals would be much shorter, or at least I hoped they’d do the same thing this year that they had last year.

In one of those instances of bad timing which can’t be helped, today was the Student Council meeting. We kept it short and sweet.

Grade points? Wait for the School Board. Clothing? Wait for January. Merchandise? Doing great! Dances? Done until Valentine’s Day. And so on, and so forth.

It was the fastest meeting I’d been involved with. Everyone had somewhere else to be, so no one dawdled in the least.

Tuesday, December 13, 1983

This was, in most ways, my toughest day of finals. In the morning I had Tom Myerson’s class, which was heavy on both essays and real thought. Three years of Extemp practice is a great tool for doing well in Tom’s class, though. My guess was that our entire class would do well, but that was just a guess.

Up next, after lunch, was Calculus. This should have been easy for me, and I think it really was easy, but I spent a fair bit of time second-guessing things.

It was no surprise to me (or Paige or Jas, I suspected) that Angie blew right through it. I suspected it might have been a surprise to everyone else in the room, even the Study Group kids and particularly Ms. Emory.

If there was ever going to be a real accusation of cheating, it would probably be right here, right now. I knew what Angie was capable of, and so did her closest friends, but she’d stayed quiet for the most part in class. On the other hand, should Ms. Emory even raise the question, I had the feeling Angie would answer with a whole lot of math that she shouldn’t have known yet.

I don’t mean to overstate. Angie would, right now, probably blow through a full year of college calculus and not break a sweat. Calculus III might give her some fits (or it might not), and I suspected she’d struggle in Differential Equations.

Of course, everyone else in this room (probably including Ms. Emory, and definitely including me) would flounder badly in DiffEq. I’d gotten a B on it in my first go-round, but it would take me a lot of studying to get back to that level.

Everyone studied in Study Group. Imagine that!

Yes, I was (for all intents and purposes) done. Some of the others had substantive finals left, though (including both Angie and Jas) and we wanted to do everything we could (within the rules) to help them.

As for me, I had Computer Math and Drama tomorrow, then Debate Thursday. We’d have a pep rally Thursday afternoon, and that’d be it for the fall semester.

Well ... almost it. Friday we had to show up, get counted, and pretend to do something productive for a bit. It wasn’t a normal school day, though, and it was clear we could get away with leaving not long after our noses were counted.

The same held for next week. Anyone with vacation scheduled was excused, provided that a parent sent a note with information about the trip and provided the student did ‘extra credit’ (a trip report) about the trip.

We all planned on being there, at least for a few hours. You could pick which class to hang out in. I figured we’d mostly go two-for-one in Steffie’s and Meg’s classes.

This was the last Study Group meeting of 1983 that Cal and Andy would attend, so Cal brought Andy a cake for his birthday, upcoming on the 19th.

Wednesday, December 14, 1983

Steffie had made a new and interesting plan for auditions. I suspected that it owed a lot to Jasmine’s SAT retake, but Steffie shouldn’t even have known about that. It could have been simply all of the other distractions we’d had over the past few weeks.

In any case, our Drama final was auditioning for ‘Bye Bye Birdie’. We all stuck with the characters we’d picked before.

It was little surprise to me that we had four Conrads. Besides me, Bob, Danny, and Ben all took a shot at it. In my totally biased opinion, I was the best, but Danny was damned good.

Similarly, we had six Kims. Jess, of course, but also Lexi, Carole, Penny, Sierra, and Sam. Completely surprising me, Sam might have been the best. She was at least tied with Lexi, and Jess was either holding back, needed more voice lessons, or just wasn’t going to be that good. She could sing, but not the way she would need to for a true singing part.

Everyone knew we’d get shuffled around, so people were taking characters that let them show off rather than characters they thought they’d actually play. That seemed just fine to me. Steffie would put us where we needed to be, and we’d do our best to knock it out of the park for her.

We went straight home after school. Before packing, I checked the messages and found one from Kyle wanting to set a meeting.

Since next week was bonus school, I could take off on any day. I decided on Tuesday the 20th at noon. When I called Kyle’s office, I got his secretary. She took the message for me. They’d call back if there was any problem with that time.

Ang and I packed for Dallas when we got home. For me, it was fairly easy. I’d gotten used to traveling and had duplicates of most things now. I just needed to pick out some clothes, make sure everything was folded fairly neatly, and I was ready to go.

Angie was nearly as efficient as I was, really. She didn’t need a lot of stuff, and she wasn’t all that picky about clothes for this sort of trip. I wished I could give her the new bag, but it’d be more fun for her to have its first outing be New Orleans.

Thursday, December 15, 1983

Our crazy week at school ended (but for our appearance tomorrow) with the pep rally to end all pep rallies. We had no time constraints, and it felt like everyone wanted to speak. Getting to the State Championship game in any Texas high school football division was a big deal! If they won, there’d likely be a banner up somewhere in the school when my kids’ kids went here (assuming they did, of course). Even if they lost, for most of the team this would be their ‘Glory Days’ moment. Most of the team would tell stories about this game for the rest of their lives — even the ones who went on to have college and pro careers.

On a more personal level, this had been Andy’s dream, and Cal’s dream, ever since they were playing Pop Warner football as little kids. I’m certain that it had been the dream of virtually every kid who’d be on that field on Saturday, of course, but they were my close friends, and that mattered to me. It meant to them even more than winning CX at State meant to me. Heck, it might mean to them what winning Nationals would mean to me!

Similarly, this was a dream come true for Jess and her entire cohort of cheerleaders. There’s no bigger stage in the state for a high school cheerleader than the State Championship game. Jess would hardly ‘coast’ after this, but this was the apex of her high school cheerleading career. After this, it was all downhill, and she (and the whole squad) knew it. Some of them might be college cheerleaders. If so, there were bigger stages to be had. But for most of them, as with the team, this was their pinnacle.

We cheered our hearts out, of course. What else could we do?

Where there had been twenty buses before, there were thirty this time. With the game a late afternoon game in Texas Stadium, almost four hours away, they’d arranged to make this an official, chaperoned school trip for those who wanted that. The boys would stay in one motel, while the girls would stay about a mile away. Ten of the buses would come back for those whose parents were unwilling to let them spend the night away.

Between that and what I imagined would be a fleet of cars, Memorial was going to be well represented at the game. With our opponents coming from Midland (much farther from Dallas than we were), we might well outnumber them.

It was going to be a blast.