Stand Tall My Sweet Dandelion Girl

by Jimenez, Javier

  I grabbed a pillow and pressed it against my head, wrapping it against my ears.

  “Sssss” echoed in my head now. Suddenly, in a very low-pitched voice, one grew loud enough from all the others and said, “Sam.”

  The whispers continued—they reached me. They reached me.

  They increased.

  More voices approached me, somewhere in the recesses of my mind.

  “Sam Azalea,”

  They began stretching my name, molding it, playing with it. I squirmed.

  “S-a-a-a-m.”

  They warped my name. I couldn’t recognize myself, they spoke my name, but it felt like it wasn’t mine.

  “Saaaaam” one voice said, it was so high-pitched and another one in a low-pitched voice added, “Azaleaaaa.”

  I gritted my teeth—it felt like my molars were about to break.

  I held my breath, and hugged the pillow even tighter.

  So tight I could almost crush my skull.

  “Sammm,” a voice said incoherently.

  I didn’t recognize any of them. I just felt my gritted teeth and pressed the pillow against my skull even harder as I continued to add immense pressure. My eyes were shut with such ferocity, like if I opened them, they would instantly burn. My heart was beating harder in my chest.

  “Sammm, look at you,” one voice said.

  “Look at you, look where you ended up,” another one continued.

  “You ended up as a failure,” they kept adding.

  “Failure. Look at you.”

  They spoke faster and faster.

  “You are in a stupid uniform.”

  They spoke, one right after the other. It was like a continuous, un-orderly collaboration of voices.

  “Failure. You are not successful.”

  “Look at you. Look at where you ended up.”

  I couldn’t keep up. I quickly lost track of my thoughts among all the voices.

  “Where are your friends? Where is your family?”

  “No one cares about you.”

  The voices were moving too fast. I lost myself.

  “You are unsuccessful. You are worthless. Everyone is successful, but you.”

  “This world doesn’t need you. You are disposable. All of your friends went on to be successful.”

  “Failure. Failure. Failure. Look at you.”

  I heard screaming. Screaming. I felt pressure in my head. I felt so much tension. My throat was hurting.

  It was my screaming. It was my voice.

  I was screaming into my bed with a rusty voice.

  “Failure, Sam Azalea.”

  Tears. Tears smudged the bedcover.

  They kept whispering and shouting.

  I didn’t want anyone to hear me cry. I held in my whimpering. “I have to keep strong. No one can know.” I kept crying into the bedcover, and muffled my rapid and short breathing with the pillow.

  My head started throbbing.

  I lay there. Powerless.

  They spoke.

  Chapter 10

  After twenty minutes, the voices subsided. The series of murmurs and whispers had been so agitating that it felt like time had slowed down. These voices were a perilous force that I could not control; they overwhelmed me and made me feel incapable of anything. But they had subsided now. The room returned to its normative quietness and soft white walls.

  I sat up, brushed my dark brown hair from my face and crossed my legs. My gaze was focused on the white bed sheets.

  I was terrified. I kept thinking to myself, What if this happened again, in front of someone? What if they saw me having an episode? What if they found out that I am going off my medications?

  I continued to sit there, looking down, deciding what I feared the most from all of this.

  I walked over to my drawer and pulled out one of several orange capsules from the top compartment.

  I took it to my bathroom where I filled up a small plastic cup with water. I uncapped the capsule and placed one pill onto my palm.

  I remained immobile for a few seconds.

  “Come on Sam,” I said.

  I stared at the mirror and looked at my own reflection. “Get it together, Sam. Get it together.” I told myself.

  I glared at the pill, then at my reflection, and finally, at the cup.

  I quietly murmured to myself, “I never win. Do I?”

  My nose was still runny so I blew into a tissue.

  I kept staring at the circular, pearl-colored pill in my palm.

  “Sam.”

  I kept staring at the pill.

  “Sam” I heard once more.

  I broke my focus from the pill and jolted in confusion. I was uneasy and was not fully sure from where the sound came, if it came from anywhere at all.

  “Sam, I’m over here.”

  I continued to scan my eyes from one corner of the room to the other, finding nothing.

  “Sam!”

  I finally looked at the mirror again and saw my reflection.

  “Hello?”

  It was speaking to me! It was my reflection!

  “What in the world-“

  “Sweetie, you okay?” She said to me. Her lips moved, but mine didn’t!

  “What the hell is going on?” I responded to her.

  “You know exactly what’s going on, Sam. You aren’t taking your medicine,” she explained to me.

  “Well? What’s the deal?” She asked me.

  “Well,” I paused shortly, and then half-heartedly proceeded, “I don’t want to take my medicine.”

  “Why not? You know you are supposed to take your medicine every day, Sam.” She said, and placed her forearms on the sink counter, leaning on them.

  My eyes popped in amazement. I was utterly shocked, speechless even. While I was standing straight, my own reflection was leaning forward on the counter. I felt extremely uneasy; it made me squirm from disturbance.

  “Sam.” She tried to catch my attention again.

  I felt slightly terrified, but tried to focus my attention on her question once more.

  “Why aren’t you taking your medicine?” She asked me again.

  I gulped down the uneasiness in my throat and tried to overcome the horror. I looked at her and responded with, “I don’t know.”

  “Sam. You and me—we change. You can’t be the Sam that you were. You just can’t. You want to go back to when things were simple? When your mom was still with you when you were little? Or what about when you were rushing around everywhere on campus—getting your work done? The girl who spent long days studying late at night for exams, reading textbooks, doing homework? You can’t go back. This is your life now,” she said to me.

  I clenched the pill as my hand formed into a fist. I gritted my teeth.

  “You really can’t go back,” she continued. “When you don’t take your medication, you see and hear things that aren’t there. You can’t even focus on anything long enough to be productive. Why do you think you’re in here in the first place? It’s not because you are some great prodigy or have your life together. It’s because you couldn’t keep everything together.”

  “You’re wrong!” I shouted. “I can still amount to things with my life!”

  “Well, face reality. When you take them, you don’t have to deal with things that aren’t there, Sam.” She took a slight pause and stared at me, and finally added, “Either you choose to live in reality or you choose to go back to the puzzled world where the pieces are always changing.”

  I unclenched my hand, looked at the white pill again, and finally looked back up. My reflection was back to normal—the tense young adult with a slim body. Well, I was not usually this tense, but everything else was back to normal.

  I rubbed my eyes with one hand, pressing on them heavily. On the other hand, the pill continued to sit there in my palm. It was so still.

  I thought about what she said. And for a moment, I couldn’t decide what I was more afraid of sometimes, reality or loss of reality.


  I threw the pill in my mouth, sipped from the cup, and swallowed it.

  Chapter 11

  I was now lying on the bed. I felt slightly lethargic from running in the hallways and screaming into a pillow.

  The sun was still radiating into the room and birds could be heard chirping outside. I lay immobile, inhaling, exhaling and occasionally closing my eyes and opening them again to stare at the sunbeams that stroke across the room.

  You know. That thing that they always say on T.V., when some parent calls their kid a “straight A student.” That’s all a bunch of garbage. Most of the time, those kids aren’t straight A students. They are just kids who tend to get good grades and their parents exaggerate their academic status. If their kids were straight A students, implying that they got straight A’s their entire high school career, than we would all be valedictorians, wouldn’t we? Those “straight A students” are generally students who get mostly A’s and one or two B’s every semester. Their parents just love to blow their accomplishments out of proportion. Make their child’s successes larger than they actually are.

  When a student’s parents says that their son or daughter is a “straight A student,” what they mean is that they are students who generally get A’s and a few B’s. It’s always the parent, or someone else for that matter, who calls students “straight A students.” Students themselves will never call themselves “straight A students,” because they know that they got two B’s this semester or one C that one time in their high school career. Parents and the media love to throw that title around for every student who has nearly straight A’s, but not straight A’s.

  Stuff like that gets me upset.

  I turned and lay on my side, facing the cool and white wall. I brushed the back of my hand slowly against the wall and left it leaning on it. I inhaled and exhaled. The birds were still chirping outside.

  I thought about my mom again. “How did the rest of high school go?” echoed in my mind.

  I remember towards the end of my junior year. I was sitting in my counselor’s office and we were discussing the classes I could take. I was staring at a list of courses she had given us a week before and wrote down the ones that I was interested in taking.

  She printed out my transcript and saw that I had gotten four A’s, and two B’s during that final semester.

  “These are very good grades Sam. Your weighted GPA is above a 4.0 again, that’s really good,” she said to me as her eyes moved up and down my transcript.

  I sat silently across from her. I didn’t say much, because I wanted to have done better that semester.

  She pulled some papers from some crate under her desk, stapled them to the back of my transcript, and set them down on the desk.

  “So.” She began, but stopped speaking as she continued to shuffle through some other papers. I assumed they must have been papers from some other juniors or even another grade.

  Her eyes shifted left to right as she looked at other peoples’ papers, setting them down in one spot and picking up others. I remained quiet.

  She must have gone through over fifty students already, and had maybe fifty more to get through. I saw how busy she was. I was scared of breaking her train of thought, so I sat there without saying a word and stared at the ground. The silence in the room perpetuated further and further, with only the sound of papers being pulled, dropped, or turned.

  “What classes were you thinking of taking?” she finally asked me. She shifted her body halfway towards me while staring intently at a paper. She finally set it down, and turned herself completely in my direction.

  “Well,” I said without confidence. “I’m not sure how many AP classes I should take this year.”

  She held up my transcript and marked the AP’s that I had taken so far with a highlighter. “Well, you have taken three so far,” She stated and stared intently at the ones that I had taken so far.

  “Typically.” She said with a slight pause. She wiggled her highlighter back and forth, and added, “You would be expected to take three AP’s again, or more. It usually looks bad when you go from challenging courses to easier ones. Colleges like it when you challenge yourself and succeed.”

  She looked back at the highlighted courses again. She began listing them along with the grade I received, “AP US History—A,” “AP English Language—B,” “AP Art History—A,” “Physics Honors—A,” “Math Analysis Honors—B,” “Spanish II—A.”

  “Well,” she said, pulling a paper from her side, which contained a list of courses. “Since you took AP US History, I recommend that you take AP Government. And the same goes for English—you should take AP English Literature. How does that sound so far? Besides, colleges love seeing those two classes paired together.”

  “That sounds understandable so far,” I said, nodding.

  She continued to wiggle her highlighter, and finally said “Math Analysis.” She paused staring at the letter grade intently, and continued, “since a fourth year of math is recommended. I would advise you to take an AP course, either AP Calculus AB or AP Statistics, unless you know you can’t handle either of those.”

  “I thought about it a bit, and I don’t think I can handle AP Calculus, so I think I am going to simply take AP statistics.”

  “Okay then, that’s your third AP class. What about science?” She asked me.

  “I’m not sure, the only classes that are left are either human anatomy or an AP science.” I said hesitantly.

  “If you take human anatomy, you may be downplaying yourself. But you have to keep in mind that you would be taking your fourth AP class now.”

  I had definitely given some thought as to which AP science class to take, if I were to take any to begin with. Earlier, I had asked several students about AP science classes, and many told me that AP Environmental Science was generally easier than the other AP science courses.

  I looked at my list and the classes that I had marked before meeting with my counselor. My gaze from the list rose back to my counselor, and I finally said, “I want to take AP Environmental.”

  “Okay,” she said, and proceeded to mark her paper. She grabbed my list of courses as well as this cover sheet that went along with it and filled in the courses. In the last two lines, I had previously labeled in Spanish III and Sociology, knowing that I wanted to take those two courses for sure.

  She placed my papers on top of the already stapled transcript, and then organized them neatly.

  “Sam,” she said, as she thumped the papers on her desk, making sure they were even. “I believe you can do it. I believe you can get excellent grades. You shouldn’t second guess yourself,” she said to me. If for any reason you feel you can’t handle four AP classes, come talk to me within the first two weeks of school.” She stapled both my papers and hers together and placed it on her desk. “Sam, you are an exceptional student, and I know you can do this,” she stated and flipped back to my transcript. “You have a weighted GPA of 4.3, an SAT score of 1700, and you are ranked 35 out of your class of 550 students. I wouldn’t be letting you sign up for four AP classes if I didn’t think you would be able to do it.”

  “I will do my best,” I said to her.

  “I know you will succeed. You just have to try. I want to see you getting above a 4.0 again next semester, okay Sam?” She said.

  Most counselors always seemed to encourage us to take the more challenging courses whenever we did well in our current ones.

  “Well, you have your senior schedule ready, Sam. Have you thought about what you want to study in college?” She asked.

  “I am not sure. I am undecided right now,” I responded.

  She finally put the finished packet in a crate, and said, “Well, give it some thought, Sam. If you need to talk to me for anything, please come see me,”

  I half-heartedly smiled, knowing that I wouldn’t fully know what these classes were all about until senior year started.

  I finally thanked her, and walked back to class.

  Chapter
12

  Fortunately, I took a combination of the more lenient AP courses at my school. Within the last two weeks of school, all students who were taking AP courses had to report to a teacher who was to teach their respective AP course.

  During one of my lunches, all students who were taking AP English Literature had to attend a mandatory meeting where we went over the expectations of the class as well as discussing our summer homework. The summer homework consisted of reading five books as well as several assignments that went along with the reading.

  For my AP Statistics class, we had to meet after school where we went over general information about the class as well as what we had to know for the first day of class. We had to complete three packets before we returned, read one book from a list of statistics/probability related works, type an essay explaining the concepts, and meet once over the summer.

  For my AP Government class, we had to begin reading from our textbook and take Cornell notes from our first unit, fill out a four-page chart, and define over fifty terms from a list of vocabulary that we needed for an upcoming test that we were to take in the first week of school.

  Lastly, for my AP Environmental class, we had to read the first few chapters from the textbook. On the first day of class, we were expected to have completed Cornell notes pertaining to the reading along with several diagrams filled out with explanations.

  All of this is easier said than done. My summer was not really a time for fun and games. I was doing volunteer work for the first half of summer and for the second, I had to sit down and focus my entire time and efforts on book work, reading, typing, turning things in online, meeting over the break, and a handful of other tasks to ensure that I didn’t fall behind before the school year even started.

  I spent four weeks working on several assignments for these classes, and some how I had to read six different books, two different units from textbooks containing multiple chapters, and five different packets, with a handful of Cornell notes as well.

  I am not going to lie—the five books consisting of novels and plays for my AP English Literature class was more than I could handle. I had to be reading about forty pages every day for four weeks to be able to finish all of the books within the month, and on top of that, manage to complete the assignments that went along with the readings.