Back in high school, I was a pretty good baseball player, not great, but pretty good. Mostly short stop, but sometimes catcher just to help warm up pitchers. I was clean cut, did well academically and was popular enough to date pretty cheerleaders and pompom girls. I was eighteen that September of my senior year and secretly had aspirations of going to art school. At least at my high school, the typical art student was not in the same class, no pun intended, clique or league if you prefer, as my fellow teammates and cheerleaders.
Oh, and I played soccer too, but wasn't very good.
It was one of my secrets because the aspiring art students were sort of grungy, greasy, goth types with arms sleeved in tats and piercings and blue hair or green or pink and their leader... their mentor was the art teacher, Mrs. Janice Rolnick. She represented all those qualities quite well except for the goth part. She was more like a Woodstock hippee. She dressed sort of dumpy and frumpy most of the time in baggy jeans and clogs and baggy sweaters which seemed perfect to show off her shoulder length greasy, scraggly straight hair which hung in thick greasy, brown clumps.
I wondered what her greasy locks felt like... what they smelled like... what they tasted like.
I wondered a lot about her, in fact.
More of my secrets I suppose.
She had her favorites... her little pets... and I was not one of them, though I was at least as good as any of them in terms of artistic abilities. And I was always well behaved in her class. Unlike my jock buddies, my so-called buddies.
I approached her one day after school early in autumn; she was at her desk and completely focused on a somewhat disturbing, but definitely intriguing drawing.
"Mrs. Rolnick?"
She didn't look up from her desk; she definitely was ignoring me. I guess that she had her suspicions... a lot of my friends had given a lot of her pets grief and acted like complete assholes in her class.
"Excuse me... Mrs. Rolnick?" said I again, as polite as I could possibly be.
Success!
She acknowledged me, though cautiously. "Yes?"
"Mrs. Rolnick, I'm sorry to bother you... but but but, I was wondering if you could give me s-s-s-some advice about applying for art school..."
I began to stutter.
I did that when I was nervous.
It seemed as if she were studying me to determine if I was serious or if I was playing some sort of joke on her. And to be honest, I couldn't blame her.
My so-called friends had done things, mean things, in the past, though I never took part in these pranks. Just earlier this past week, two of my baseball buddies sneaked into her classroom when she had lunch duty and had drawn crude penises on all the sketches done by her favorites.
She was so upset. She sat at her desk with her hands covering her face for the entire double period. She didn't say a word. She didn't look up even once.
I didn't have any idea that they were seriously going to pull this stunt. I mean, I knew about it, but it wasn't my fault that they did it. Still, I supposed that I was considered guilty by association with the impetus on me to prove otherwise.
And then there were all the times that my baseball buddies bullied her little pets in the locker room.
I never bullied them.
The thing is, that despite appearances, we were not really friends at all. That is, we did have sports in common and I did dress like they did and hung out with them sometimes after games or practice, but the truth of the matter was I wasn't really one of them.
We never hung out on weekends.
I was more of a loner.
I lived by myself in a boarding house, helped out by the state. Just a one room with a tiny bathroom on the third floor of an old house owned by the state.
"You want to apply to art school?"
"Yes, Mrs. Rolnick, I... I... I can show you some of my drawings that I've been working on." I quickly spread out a few of them on the desk for her to review lest she lose even the slight interest that she was showing me.
I could tell from her tone and facial expression that she at least knew that I was serious. And now that she knew, she was much more at ease and it seemed to me, that she knew she was in the driver's seat now.
There was a slight smile on her face that hadn't been there before.
And though I had worked for hours and hours on these drawings that I thought would make a good portfolio for an art school application, she glanced at them for a total of eight seconds... total.
"Applying for art school will require many, many hours of hard work."
"Yes, I know that..."
"What about sports?" She was fully aware that I was one of them.
"Baseball doesn't start till spring and I'm not playing fall soccer this year."
"What hours are you prepared to put in?"