Yearbook

by Allyson Braithwaite Condie

  “Thanks,” I said, surprised. She plopped a couple of cookies on my plate and dug into hers with relish. I watched her while I started to eat mine. I’d never seen an adult enjoy cookies so much.

  She caught me looking at her again and smiled. “I’ve been on a diet for the past few months,” she explained. “I haven’t had cookies in a while, especially not ones that tasted this good.”

  “A diet?” I asked, surprised. “But you’re already thin.”

  “It was a different kind of diet,” she said evasively. “Anyway, my apologies again about the interrogation. I think you’ll be a good peer tutor.”

  “Thanks,” I said, as the five-minute warning bell rang. “I haven’t done anything like this before, so who knows how I’ll do.” Admitting weakness to the school principal? What was coming over me?

  We both stood up to clear away the rest of our lunches. The unfinished salads went into the trash can next to our table. “It will be a learning experience,” she said, smiling at me. “Good for you for giving it a shot.” She waved good-bye as she walked off in the direction of a cluster of students known for needing a little extra supervision. “Okay, people, let’s get to class,” I heard her say.

  I picked up my backpack from the table and started walking to Mr. Newman’s room. The halls after lunch are impossible and impassable. I’m not above using a little elbowing here and there to get through. You have to look out for yourself, after all. It’s like the starting line of a big race, except the crowd never thins out until after the bell rings and by then it’s too late.

  I made it just in time. Mr. Newman peered at me over his glasses without much excitement, looking at me with scrutiny. “What qualifications do you have?” he asked.

  “I have a 4.0 GPA, I’ve taken calculus, advanced English—” I started. Here we go again. I didn’t think I’d have to prepare a resume to be a peer tutor!

  “That’s nice that you have good grades, but that’s not what I mean,” he interrupted. “Have you worked with youth or with peers before? Have you taken any workshops on peer tutoring, like the one we offered last summer?”

  “No,” I said. I felt the eyes of the students and tutors on me even though they were supposed to be working in their pairs. I looked over at David Sherman and he smiled at me before he looked away as one of the girls at his table asked him a question.

  Mr. Newman wasn’t going to let it go. “What made you think that you wanted to start doing this, after the semester already started and without any of the training we usually offer?” he asked. “I’m not asking this to discourage you, but I am curious.”

  “I haven’t done any community service and I need to start somewhere,” I said. It was the truth.

  “Well, we can put you to work,” he said, moving away from his desk. “I want to make sure you know what you’re getting into, though. You can’t just quit if you decide you don’t like it. If you’re on board now, I need you to stay through the rest of the school year. Continuity is very important in peer tutoring. Right now I have two students assigned to one tutor, so I’m going to give you one of those students. We’ll see how it goes. I may reassign if necessary, but this seems as good a fit as any.”

  He stopped by the desk where two girls were being tutored by David Sherman. “Amy,” Mr. Newman said to one of them, “this is Andrea Beckett. I’m going to reassign her to be your tutor. David, you’ve been doing a great job with two, but I think this will make it a little easier on everyone. Amy, why don’t you join Andrea at the table in the back of the room?”

  I could tell Amy wasn’t too happy about her new assignment, but she didn’t say anything. She picked up her books and walked to the back of the room.

  Mr. Newman pulled me aside. “Amy has several learning disabilities. She has a really hard time with reading comprehension—retaining the things she’s read. For today, why don’t you get to know her a little and do the best you can in helping her with her homework. I’d like you to stay after school today and I’ll give you some more specific information and resources.”

  I needed to get in my workout for track after school, but I nodded my head anyway. Now that I had an actual person to help and the word disabilities was being thrown out there, I realized that this was more serious than I had thought. Also, it wasn’t all about me. It wasn’t really about me at all, except that I was the vehicle being used to help this other person. I’d need all the help I could get because I’ve never had a learning disability and didn’t know how to help someone who did. School has always come easily to me.

  As I made my way to the back of the room, I sized up Amy the best I could. I hadn’t seen her around or I hadn’t noticed her if I had. She was very unremarkable and unobtrusive: a chubby, plain girl with no glaring disabilities, but nothing very intriguing, either. Nothing that would make you stop and look at her to single her out for teasing or something, but also nothing that would catch your eye in a positive way, either. Her long brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail, her jeans were faded and a little too short to be in style, and her T-shirt left too much of her pale, pudgy arms exposed.

  She didn’t look up as I approached her table; she just sat there, laboriously copying down biology definitions from the book in a pink spiral-bound notebook with a smudgy pencil.

  I decided to take charge. “Hi, Amy,” I said. “First things first. Let me sharpen your pencil so you can write neatly.” I held out my hand for her pencil. She looked up, met my eyes, held out her pencil to me, and then turned away without saying anything.

  I marched briskly to the pencil sharpener on the wall, sharpened her pencil, and then marched back to sit down beside her. I could feel David Sherman’s eyes watching me. I handed Amy her pencil. She took it without looking at me.

  “It looks like you’re doing biology definitions,” I said. “How many do you have left to go?”

  Her pale blue eyes flickered at me. “Twenty.”

  “You’ll never get done by the time class ends,” I said. “Would it be easier if I read them to you a word at a time and you wrote them down? Then you won’t have to keep looking back and forth between the textbook and your notebook.”

  She nodded, and so that was what we did for the rest of the period: I swallowed back yawns as I read the definitions slowly, word by word, spelling the difficult ones, while she ground her pencil into the paper and wrote them down. We finished right before the bell rang.

  “Great!” I said. “Now your assignment is done. I’ll see you tomorrow, right?” Amy nodded, again not looking at me, put her books in her backpack, and left.

  “See you after school,” said Mr. Newman as I passed his desk. “I’ve set up some one-on-one tutoring instruction for you with one of our best tutors. It will only be for an hour or two today since it’s short notice, but it will help get you started.”

  After school, I hurried out to the track to tell Coach that I would be missing the workout. Since it’s not even the regular season yet, he was fine with me missing, especially when I told him I would make up the run later that day.

  “Does this have something to do with what David’s doing?” he asked. “I know David is missing practice today too.”

  “It might,” I said, surprised. I knew David was a peer tutor, but I didn’t know he’d be considered one of the best.

  It was David waiting for me back in Mr. Newman’s room. “Are you my tutor for tutoring?” I said in a lame attempt at humor as I sat in the chair across from him.

  “Did Andrea Beckett just make a joke?” David asked, smiling at me. “Yup. Mr. Newman asked me to hang around and give you some of the training that I’ve had. You know—he wants me to kind of give you a summary of some things that work. Plus I used to be Amy’s tutor, so I know a little bit about her too.”

  Mr. Newman was sitting at his desk grading papers. He chimed in, “And I need to give you this.” He stood up and came over, handing me a flier. “You’ll need to attend this workshop that the school district holds about
tutoring. It’s an all-day workshop and it will be three Saturdays from now. You’ll have to attend this if you want to stay in the class. Usually I make students complete the workshop before they can sign up.” He walked back to his desk and lifted a stack of papers into his arms. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll need to go to my office to finish grading these tests. I need to concentrate, and you don’t want to hear the profanity I’m going to be using based on how my classes are doing so far.”

  I waited until the door had closed behind him before I said, “This seems pretty intense. Is it really necessary to go to a workshop for this kind of thing? I mean, I’ve only been doing it for a day and it seems really easy.”

  To my shock, David’s response was, “Then you’re not doing it right. If it’s easy, then you’re probably feeding answers to them or doing most of it yourself. The whole point is that it’s not easy for these guys, so we have to find out ways to help them, and that’s not easy, either. It definitely takes more than one day.”

  “Okay,” I said shortly, “since you’re the master tutor, tell me what I should be doing.” I’ve never liked being told what to do, and especially not by the class clown! “If there’s one thing I know, it’s how to study,” I added, “but if you don’t think I’m doing it right, then by all means tell me what I’m doing wrong.”

  David leaned back in his chair, smiling his warm, easy smile. “Oh, no you don’t, Andrea Beckett,” he said. “You can’t get ticked off at me before I even get started or this is going to be the longest afternoon of both our lives.”

  It’s impossible to stay mad at someone who’s grinning like a madman at you. “Fine,” I said, unable to keep myself from smiling back a little. “Go ahead. I’m receptive and responsive.”

  “First of all, I listened to what you were doing with Amy today and even though that’s a great way to get through the assignment, it doesn’t help her retain any of the information. Also, you didn’t really even talk to Amy and that’s important. You have to build a relationship with her, even if it’s just a basic one.” David leaned in and spoke quietly. “Amy takes a long time to do things, but she’s not stupid. The way you were reading things slowly to her was embarrassing her. Didn’t you see how red her face was getting?”

  I felt my face getting red. This was supposed to be easy and now I was way out of my comfort zone. “No,” I admitted brusquely. “I thought the point was to help her get her homework done.”

  “Yeah, but it’s also to help her learn how to learn. You’ll learn more about comprehension strategies and stuff when you go to the workshop, but Mr. Newman wanted me to give you a few of them now so you weren’t floundering around. So let’s pretend that you are the person being tutored and I’ll help you with the same assignment Amy was doing.” He slid a biology book and the worksheet with the definitions toward me.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said, staring down at the definitions. I thought with longing of the track team out running along the streets through the cold rain. I like the chilly weather; it makes me run faster and faster. It sharpens me. I could feel my legs itching to get started instead of just sitting there, thinking about how to help someone I didn’t even know.

  “Okay, Amy,” said David in his deepest, most serious teacher voice. “Let’s get started on these definitions.” He marched to the chalkboard, lifted his skinny arm high over his head, and dramatically began to write on the board. “I’m writing down the first definition, and you should too,” he said over his shoulder. I played along, copying the definition out of the book and onto my paper. “Now, you read it back to me.” I did. “Now,” he said, “draw a picture on your paper of the definition.” He handed me some crayons.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said again. “I’m supposed to draw a picture of an amoeba? There’s a perfectly good one right here in the book with all the parts labeled and everything.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Drawing something yourself will help you retain the information. And you don’t have to make it super scientific or anything. Just what you think is important and what you think will help you remember it later.”

  I drew a blob and labeled a few parts. David came over to inspect my work. “Great,” he said. He walked me through a few more comprehension strategies like summarizing and retelling, and I could see how they might be helpful. After an hour and a half, Mr. Newman came back to lock up the room and kicked us out.

  We decided to run our late workout together, so we changed and met on the track. We started jogging to warm up. I like running with guys because they’re so much faster and it pushes me.

  “This tutoring is more involved than I thought,” I said as we ran. “I thought that all I’d have to do was sign up and I’d be in. Now I’m getting special tutoring myself and signing up for Saturday workshops.”

  David is gangly, but long legs make for a long stride. I could tell he was shortening it so that I could keep up. He looked over at me, the huge pom-pom on his ridiculous beanie bouncing chaotically as he ran. “But anything done right takes time and effort, right?” He grinned. “Why would tutoring be any different?”

  “I thought it would be easy because I’m good at school, I guess,” I said.

  “Oh no, my friend,” David said. “That’s where you’re wrong. Being bad at school actually helps more with tutoring because you understand how it feels to get things wrong and make mistakes. You can understand where the problems are coming from. That’s why I’m so good at it. That and the fact that my rugged good looks make the ladies line up to be tutored by me.”

  I laughed, and he feigned hurt. “You don’t think it’s the truth?”

  We were picking up speed, but he wasn’t breathing hard at all. I was starting to have to work to keep my words from coming out choppily, but I didn’t want him to know. It’s so unfair that guys are naturally faster than girls.

  We ran our intervals hard. We did ten 400-meter intervals, which was a pretty hard workout. We ran a lap of the track as hard and as fast as we could, then jogged a lap in between, then ran another 400-meter lap. It’s a grueling combination of speed and endurance and, when done right, is a workout that can make you ache physically and mentally by the end.

  David finished ahead of me on all the intervals, then waited to jog with me in the intermediate lap. We didn’t talk much because we were both running hard in the intervals and trying to recover in the jogging laps, but it was nice to just have someone there and not be running alone.

  After the last interval, I was beat; David was too. I’d just run one of the hardest workouts of the year on a stomach full of milk and cookies. Not exactly the food of champions. We finished our cool-down mile and sat on the bleachers for a minute to stretch. We still hadn’t said much, but the silence was pleasant. It wasn’t a cold or embarrassed silence, just companionable.

  I pulled out the elastic holding my ponytail and shook out my hair, then raked it all back from my face. I caught David looking at me with admiration in his eyes. It made me feel good, which surprised me. I didn’t know I cared much about what he thought. I’d thought he was immune to how I looked, but I guess he noticed after all.

  “What?” I asked, more sharply than I meant.

  “Nothing,” he said. Then he got a mischievous glint in his eye, pulled off his beanie, and shook out his sweaty, disheveled hair. He started preening, making fun of me in a good-natured way. “How do I look?” he asked, trying to pull his hair into a ponytail.

  I glared back at him, trying not to laugh. “I’m too tired to joke around with you,” I said, stretching my arms out in front of me. “That was a hard workout.”

  “Yeah, it was,” he agreed, but his irrepressible energy was already back. “Thanks for running with me,” he said. “That would have been even worse if I’d been alone.”

  “Yeah, thanks to you too,” I said. “And thanks for the tutoring pointers. I’ll have to give them a try tomorrow.”

  “Good luck,” he said.
“I’ll be watching. You’ll do fine.” He popped his hat back onto his head, clapped me firmly on the back, and said, “See you tomorrow.” He broke into a run towards the boys’ locker room.

  I was still pretty exhausted—I’d run each 400-meter lap somewhere between 1:05 and 1:10, which was good for this early in the season. I walked back to the school slowly to pick up my calculus book from my locker.

  I was surprised to see Amy standing near my locker, pulling things out of her locker. She looked up as I walked by.

  “Hi, Amy,” I said. “What are you doing here this late?” I asked, stopping near her and trying to seem friendly. It came out sounding kind of fake.

  She didn’t look at me, just mumbled something about retaking a test and closed the locker door, turning to leave.

  This was going to be harder than I thought, I realized for the fiftieth time that day. “See you tomorrow,” I called. She nodded and walked away, plodding down the hall.

  Suddenly a line from a poem that was published in the school paper last fall flashed through my head. I’d kept the poem stapled to a page in my notebook all year because I’d liked it so much. Something about it had shocked me with recognition. I felt that same way as I watched Amy slouch down the hall.

  I went to my locker, got my notebook, opened it up, and turned to the page where I’d stapled in the poem. I found the lines that reminded me of Amy (and of myself):

  It’s easier to let yourself drown.

  Why struggle and slip and swim and choke?

  I read the rest of the poem out loud to myself quietly, finishing with the last stanza, which was my favorite part:

  But something in me still wants to rise up out of the dark water.

  Wants to feel the sun on my wet, cold skin.

  NI>Something inside of me wants to put my feet on hot, grainy sand

  And run along the beach.

  NI>Even though there is glass that might cut me buried beneath.

  I could picture exactly what the author was talking about. That poem was published a month or two after the Homecoming debacle. I could understand how much easier it would feel to quit coming to school and running hard and trying to be perfect all the time. It would be so much easier to slip beneath the surface and give up.