It’s
June, which usually marks the beginning of summer and the end of
school. This June, though, for me and millions of others around the
globe, means the graduating seniors bid us farewell and pass us the
laurel crown of stress and upcoming university applications.
There’s
a heightened sense of anxiety about our future as we see our
predecessors post on Instagram about prom and grad. We constantly
tell each other that we are ‘cooked’ for university
applications and that ‘it’s so over’ for us.
Certainly, there’s a definite self-deprecating element to it,
but from what we’ve learnt from the past years, the standards
to get into university— even the ones once considered easy to
get into— are rising fast.
Whispers
circulate among the students that even with a 93 average your chances
are still a bit uncertain. There’s talk of adjustment factors
and grade inflation and rumour has it that someone with a 1590 SAT
got rejected from a mid-tier university in the early rounds. Going
down to the States has always been tricky for internationals, but us
starry-eyed juniors watching the seniors apply all thought he was a
shoo-in.
I
bid farewell to my friends as we part ways for the summer. One friend
is going east, all the way to Ontario. Another is spending a few
weeks travelling through Spain, France and Italy. Some are staying in
our city and volunteering, while others are heading back to their
home countries. Whatever we do, this summer we prepare to move one
step up the pecking order. The next time we step into the school,
we’ll be freshly minted seniors, and it’s kind of
terrifying to think about.
*****
At
our school’s year-end barbecue, my graduating choir-mate handed
me her yearbook and asked me to sign it. “Did you buy a
yearbook?” She inquired while I wrote her well-wishes in
glittery purple.
I
told her no, I haven’t, but I was planning on doing so next
year, and she sighed gustily. “Too bad. Well, if I had to write
something for you, I’d tell you to not stress about grade 12.
Continue singing in choir. You got this.”
“I’ll
try to make you proud,” I told her.
She
smiled fondly. “Oh, you already do.”
We
made small talk— how many exams do we have, how was the Biology
final for her, how she feels about all her friends moving away, and
somehow we ended up talking about the school choir.
She
and I are both altos. I think we tend to get overlooked a lot of the
time— too many exasperated glances have been traded between us
when we have one single note to sing while the sopranos run up and
down the scale. Yet, we are just as important as the other parts of
the choir, because we help. We balance out the tone
and
provide a strong support for the others to build on. She’s the
most ‘alto’ alto in our meagre group: she provides the
base for us altos, and without her leadership, I’m afraid our
section might collapse, and I voiced such concerns to her. “The
choir will feel your absence.”
She
just pursed her lips. “It happens all the time. People leave,
yes, but new people come every year and we adapt to fill in the empty
spots.” She patted me on the back. “You’ll do
great.”
*****
My
last final fell on the last day of school— classes were
finished, most students were already gone to tropical places,
teachers were flying through marking finals— but thirty or so
unfortunate Pre-calculus students huddled around the classroom door
at half past eight in the morning, wishing they were anywhere but
there.
It
was not a particularly taxing exam, as far as finals go, and I was up
and gone with half an hour to spare. I swept one last glance over my
desk— pencil case, check, calculator, check— and I
carefully slipped out of the classroom. As soon as I stepped through
the door, I felt as if a huge weight had been lifted off me. In a
way, it was. I had finished grade 11 and would be relatively free for
the next two months, until when September rolled around.
I
moved through the school in a haze. It was eerily empty, the hallway
lights turned off and the only noise being mysterious, muffled disco
music coming from somewhere. I bumped into an open locker door and it
banged against the wall. An annoyed-looking teacher poked her head
out into the hallway, and I scuttled away in shame.
As
I approached the foyer, I heard snatches of chatter. I rounded the
corner to see a cluster of international seniors signing each other’s
yearbooks and Canadian flags. A few of them were even taking pictures
of the school as digital keepsakes.
One
of them waved me over, and I recognized her as a Japanese girl I
tutored before. “Can I get your signature?” She held out
a pen and her yearbook eagerly.
I
carefully wrote my name in the yearbook. “How was the IELTS?”
She had reached out to me for some help on the speaking part of the
English exam.
She
smiled. “I did really well, actually !”
“Good
job! How do I say ‘Well done’ in Japanese?” I
asked. She told me how, and I slowly stumbled through it: yo-ku
de-ik-ma-shi-ta.
“Yes!”
She clapped delightedly when I got it.
We
chatted a bit more, but she got called away by a friend so I bade her
goodbye and good luck. I bumped into another familiar face; the
valedictorian. He, too, asked me to sign his yearbook and I obliged
happily. While I wrote, he talked about the clubs he ran and
organized while staying on top of his studies.
“How
do you do all that?” I was in awe.
He
smiled ruefully. “I don’t sleep much. Sleep is for the
weak.”
As
I was walking home, I had a realization.
We’ve
seen the good, successful side of our predecessors. What we haven’t
seen, or seen little of, are the late nights studying, hopes
shattered and swept under the rug. It’s a rat race, and we’re
not even eighteen. Fame-chasers, we are, small kids with big dreams
and the odds stacked against us. We think we’re close to the
end, that all our effort spent during high school will pay off and
college will be a breeze. In reality, we will still face hurdles in
college and beyond. That is life.
I
hope that next year around this time, all the stress will be lifted
from my shoulders. I will have committed to a college; my next four
years, set. Maybe I’ll be proud and grateful, maybe I’ll
feel stinging regret. Nonetheless, I hope I can look back on this
with fondness, the thoughts of a naive girl reaching for the stars
with ambition in her heart.
Ningxi
(Nancy) Liu is a high school student in British Columbia, Canada. She
enjoys drawing, writing and birdwatching (like, a lot). When she's
not at home, she's out on the beach searching for shorebirds.
