After the End

I felt the warm summer breeze blow gently on my face as I drove home. School had been exhausting today. I had so much homework it was ridiculous. An essay, a math worksheet, finishing up a science lab; I could already tell I wasn’t going to get any free time tonight. My brother David was shooting hoops outside as I pulled into the driveway.

“Hey asshole don’t hit my car!” I yelled as the basketball escaped his grasp and bounced towards my Toyota.

“Yeah yeah whatever.” He responded cheekily. Normally I’d tackle him for being such an annoying teenager but I wasn’t in the mood. My brother is a very interesting case. His full name is David Judas Francis. And yes, he is named after Judas from the Bible. That wasn’t an accident. Judas was supposedly one of the 12 original followers of Jesus Christ and allegedly betrayed Jesus for 30 silver coins. I guess it was my parents rage against conventional society when they did that, but oh well. I love it, although sometimes it makes me think twice about trusting him.

All things considered though I guess he’s a good brother. He’s built like a thief, tall and lanky with skinny arms and legs. His sandy hair was always tousled about loosely on his head. He’s going to be a freshman in high school next year. I couldn’t believe it. My baby brother was growing up. ‘Soon I’ll be in college and I won’t be able to wrestle with him anymore’ I thought. Even though he’s really annoying, he’s still my brother. And we’re surprisingly close knit. But my whole family is like that.

As soon as I was out of my car I headed straight inside and plopped down on the couch with my crappy laptop. It was clunky, old and one of the hinges was broken so it made an awful cracking noise every time I opened it. Hopefully I was going to get a new one soon. My 17th birthday was in a little over a month. But first, I had to make it through finals week at school.

Finals are the American school systems way of forcing students to bring to the surface of their minds all of the useless information they never really learned in the first place. Essentially finals test how well you can cram for finals, not what you actually learned. I didn’t realize this until my third year in high school. This being said, let me tell you everything else I learned in my junior year.

All girls are bitches at some point or another. It’s just how we are.
When it comes to group projects, trust no one.
Despite what your teacher may say, you can write that English paper all in one night.
Lastly, teenage relationships are ridiculous and should be avoided at all costs.
I think even though those things aren’t necessarily academic, they’re still extremely important. Especially numbers 1 and 4. Those are absolutely vital knowledge. Of course some people would deny those cold hard facts, but I don’t have the time or patience enough to deal with those people.

The internet finally came up on my laptop and I began typing as quickly as I could, my fingers stumbling over keys as I tried to get that stupid essay done. I typed and typed for almost two hours straight, only taking breaks to pee and drink iced tea. My mom got home at a little after four o'clock but I was so immersed in the themes of Hamlet I barely even noticed.

Hamlet has this one character named Ophelia who I think is just absolutely fascinating. She falls in love with Hamlet, but he is so bent on getting revenge that he breaks her heart in order to prevent her from getting hurt once the shit hits the fan, so to speak. Later on Hamlet accidentally kills her father Polonius while he was spying on Hamlet.

In short Hamlet was shipped off to England to be killed. Meanwhile back in Denmark, Ophelia was devastated. She had lost her father and the man she loved so she began to do crazy things. There are two theories about her behavior in the play. The first is that she did in fact go crazy. But I like the second theory better. The second states that she was only pretending to be crazy. That she was waltzing around acting crazy and really thinking about what she was going to do next. I guess I like to think that that’s what I would do if I were her. I enjoy giving people the benefit of the doubt sometimes, but only sometimes.

When I was about halfway through pouring all these thoughts into my essay my parents called me into the dining room for dinner. My dad knew it was finals week and made grilled steak with baked potatoes for dinner. I gave him an extra hug for that. When my dad made any kind of food it was amazingly good. He had never had any sort of professional experience or education in the culinary arts yet he still managed to be an amazing cook. He could make anything: steak, stir fry, homemade mac and cheese, etc. It always used to make me laugh when I was little though. My dad was a big guy named John. He was independent, agnostic, and worked out four days a week at the gym. But man did he love to cook. Which is a really good thing considering how my mom tries to cook.

I started salivating when my dad brought the steaks inside. They were just how I liked them, pink in the middle with nice grill marks on top. He set them down on the counter and pulled the baked potatoes out of the oven. The skin was crispy and rolled in coarse sea salt. Yep, he definitely knew it was finals week. Although it could have been for my birthday, I wasn’t sure. Either way, I was in no position to complain.

I watched with mild amusement as my mom tore into her steak, making the juice run all over her plate. She’s a very delicate looking woman. Thin with a long neck and short hair. Her ankles were so small they looked as if they would break at the slightest pressure. Yet here she was, ripping into a juicy steak as if her life depended on it. She still kept her table manners of course, she’s not the type to eat with her mouth open.

My mom was an interesting person to say the least. She was a feminist first of all. Not the crazy, all men must die feminists. The equality for everyone feminists. So I guess actually she’d be an equalist. She never discriminated against anybody. She didn’t care about skin color, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or anything like that. And I thought that was amazing. Luckily, she taught me and David to be that way too.

After devouring my dinner I finished my essay on Hamlet. In total it was a little over 2,000 words. That's pretty impressive for me. I love to read, but I can't write for crap. Sure I know a lot of big words like "egregious" and "acquiesce" and how to use them, but forming sentences with them is really difficult for me. Reading is really my strong point.

I love reading. It's a beautiful, mutually beneficial relationship. When I read books, it takes me to another world. They allow me to escape the dull, everyday bores that plague high schools. I can become friends with a magician, or an angel. I can fall in love with a charming prince or a mysterious thief. In return for all of these services, I provide the books with a caretaker. Someone who understands and appreciates their value and will share it with other people. It's a beautiful, priceless relationship that not many people seem to fully understand.

So now you may see where my problems lie. I love reading, so I have a rather large vocabulary. But I can't seem to put the thoughts together into smooth, coherent sentences. I have plenty of thoughts, I just struggle to write them on paper. As a result of this, essays take a long time to complete. And even longer if I want them to be good. But somehow I still manage to get by in school. Although it often turns out to be exhausting

I was shaken from these thoughts as my dad called out to me from the kitchen "Daisy honey it's 10:30, are you almost done with your homework?"

"Yeah dad I'm just finishing up. I'll be in bed in a minute."

“Okay, don’t forget to brush your teeth and stuff. Goodnight.” and with that he went to bed. My mom had probably already passed out. She’s an elementary school teacher so her days are exhausting, or at least that’s what she tells us.

I finished up my lab report for biology and closed my laptop at around 11:00. Walking up the stairs my dog came out of his bed and joined me. Our dog is adorable. We have a Shiba Inu. His name is Loki and he has fluffy golden fur with a really poofy tail that’s curled upwards all the time. I let him run up the stairs in front of me and watched as he turned back to look at me as if to say “Would you hurry up?”

The lights in the bathroom nearly blinded me after getting used to the subtle glow of my laptop screen. I looked at myself in the mirror and studied my appearance. My hair was frizzy from the humid summer air. It washed over my shoulders in golden brown waves and hung plainly around my face. I really didn’t like my hair, I had always wanted to change it but found that I was too afraid of the unknown. But that wasn’t normal for me. I usually think the unknown is fascinating. For example, I love to travel. I’ve never been outside of the US but I loved going to California. It was warm, sunny, and the beaches were amazing. Everyone there seemed to have an air of elegance about them. They looked good no matter what they were wearing or doing. I wished I could have that. Who knows though, maybe someday when I’m older I will.

I want to be a teacher when I get older. Not an elementary school teacher though, a high school teacher definitely. I’ve been told that I have an amazing sense of intuition. My friends say that I can read people as well as I read books sometimes. I can look at a person and know by their body language what they’re feeling, how much they’re feeling it, and I can try to help. That’s why I want to be a high school teacher. Little kids are incredibly simple minded most of the time. Especially the kindergarteners that my mom works with. Their only problems are that Suzy took their doll or that Timmy hit them. So they run up to the teacher whining “Teacher! Suzy took my doll!” and the teacher scolds little Suzy and puts her in a timeout. The teacher would be forced to do the same thing day after day, year after year for their whole career.

Teenagers on the other hand are fascinating. There’s something new happening every day. My intuition might help me better understand students. In high school, you try to discover more about who you are. You date people, make friends, lose friends, and put up with incessant drama in order to better understand who you are. You tell yourself (and others) that you don’t care what anybody thinks of you when in reality, you really worry about it sometimes.

It is this in particular that makes me think that teenagers are often walking contradictions. We claim to not care what people think, and in a perfect world we shouldn’t have to. But this world isn’t perfect. In reality, much of your life depends on what people think of you. Applying for college, applying for jobs, interviewing for jobs; it all depends on what people think of you. So you walk around and pretend not to care what people think of you and at the same time try to impress everybody. It’s an awful contradiction to be stuck in. I’m still struggling to accept this sad truth. As I looked into my own eyes in the mirror, I could see all of the judgement I was going to face in my future. It was scary, but I was ready.

I spat out my foamy toothpaste and went into my room. Loki hopped up on my bed and laid down, waiting for me. Of course he had to lay right in the middle of the bed, he always does. I changed into my baggy nightgown and made him move so I could lay down. It was summer so I definitely didn’t need any blankets. So I just snuggled up with my dog and pet him until he fell asleep. I drifted off slowly after him.