Things Which I Had Almost Forgotten About - 3/24/2007 in 2005 - 2007: High School

Mr. Thomas is at a conference. Therefore, we had a substitute for music theory Friday.

He said we could do whatever we wanted. So five guitarists and Jack decided to jam, and Bonnie and I went into the hallway and didn't talk much and pretended to do our homework. After we had been doing this for a while, she said, "Hey, we should go to Odyssey."

"...Can we do that?"

"Sure, why not?"

We did. The class was in the middle of the rather chaotic abstract expressionism lecture. They had just brainstormed things to paint and now Mr. Sampson was showing examples. The class stopped a little when we came in. Molly and Dave greeted us, and the previously unmentioned female Odyssey teacher greeted us, and the rest of the class sort of looked over. I sat on an unoccupied table at the back and Bonnie sat on the floor in the corner.

The first examples were from a long time ago - the best-of-the-best ones that they keep permanently on the wall of the classroom. Then Mr. Sampson took out a pile of them. They were from our class. He had people guess what they represented, and usually they came pretty close.

He took out the third or fourth one and said, "This one was done by... Bonnie Jones."

People looked at it for a while.

"Peace," someone guessed.

"Emptiness," said someone else.

"...Loneliness," said Mr. Sampson.

There was a small silence.

"She's here, you know," said Molly, perkily.

"Where?"

"In the corner."

Most people looked surprised to see Bonnie in the corner. Apparantly when we came in, people had only been greeting me. It was as if Bonnie were invisible. Then some people realized the significance of this in relation to her painting, and some of them went "aww."

It was a weird moment. I never realized before that that's what Bonnie had painted. I never realized that that's what Bonnie... feels. The realization hit me across the face. And I felt terrible, I felt mortified and violated along with her because this most secret, most repressed, least expected of her emotions was being revealed to fifty people, in front of her. Bonnie gets lonely. Even though she seems perfectly happy being who she is, maybe somewhere, sometimes, she is not.

That's when I thought, Fuck.

Panic overwhelmed me. I tried to figure out what to do. Should I get down on the floor and tell Bonnie that we had to leave, quickly, before I witnessed Julian finding out what my painting was? Maybe if Mr. Sampson held it up, I could just try to get his attention, shake my head at him from the back of the room to let him know to move on. But I didn't come up with anything. I sat there and let my heart race and my muscles tense up and just waited for it to happen.

But it didn't.

The class dissolved into waiting-for-the-bell-to-ring chaos. I had an awkward conversation with Mr. Sampson, partially caused by the remnants of the fight or flight response, which made me question whether there was ever really a significant amount of respect between us. Then the female Odyssey teacher came up to me and said, "April tenth!"

"What? Oh, yeah." I told her about my jazz band, and whenever I see her she swears that she and Mr. Sampson will come see me on jazz night, which is April tenth.

"Whatever happened to your painting Aidan? Did you take it home?"

"I... don't think so... No..."

"Oh, we must have lost it then. I felt really bad - we had all of them hanging up above the board - you taped them up there, remember? But then they just fell down. We lost track of some of them. What was it that you did again?"

"Infatuation."

"I think I remember liking it."

"Oh. Thank you."