They think they're so smart...
There’s a girl on the front cover of my test preparation book, a cute redhead with ocean blue eyes and perfect teeth, smiling confidently from the glossy cover. She seems to be saying, “Hey, this thing is easy. Why did I ever worry myself over it?” I appreciate her vigor. She makes me feel as though I could succeed, with enough hard work.
She’s sitting with a group of three others, a girl and two boys. The boys are looking off into the distance, also smiling. Their smiles are satisfied, content with their lot in life. Perhaps they are looking toward the future, realizing how promising it will be for them. “We did well on the test, for it was simple and we are intelligent fellows,” they bellow together. “Onward to victory, friends! The future is ours!”
The other girl is not nearly as attractive as the redhead, and definitely not as positive. She has brown hair and wide, dark eyes. Hers is not the warm inviting smile of her friend. It’s a subtle twist of the lips that suggests she’s better than the people around her. Or, at the very least, better than me. One elegant eyebrow is raised ever slightly higher than the other. She is saying, “Yes, I agree with my comrades, the test was not difficult in the slightest.”
She looks me in the eye. “You’re having troubles with it? Are you some kind of slack-jawed moron?”
“It’s just the math section,” I assure her. “The verbal and writing sections have been relatively simple.”
“You’re having trouble with the math section?” she laughs. “That was perhaps the easiest part!”
I shrug. “I guess I’m not very good at math.”
“How arrogant,” she chides. “You can’t possibly expect to score well on the test. And yet you want to go to graduate school? Hah! Not to mention the fact that you’re a subpar student with a laughable grade point average. No graduate school will accept you! You really think you can compete with people like us?”
She gestures to her friends. They begin to chuckle.
“I think I stand a decent chance,” I reply sheepishly.
“I bet you don’t have any letters of recommendation!” says one of the boys, fashionable glasses pressed high onto the bridge of his nose. His ears are bright pink, barely concealed by a mass of dirty blonde curls swirling around his head.
“I do so! I have three!”
“Academic letters of recommendation?”
“Well… no… but I graduated over two years ago! I’ve been in the work force since then.”
“Did you even bother to ask any of your old professors?” asks the tall, lanky boy with mussed chestnut hair falling into his eyes.
I look down at my shoes.
“That’s right,” says Brunette. “She was too scared! She knew they wouldn’t write her letters because she was such a piss poor student!”
“That’s not true!” I cry. “I did well in my literature classes!”
“It’s not just the literature classes they look at,” Lanky says with a shake of his head, knocking his bangs into his green eyes. “They look at your overall performance as a student. And you were less than model.”
“I burned out, all right?” I shout at the group, inciting them to laugh like hyenas. “After 16 years of solid, full-time schoolwork, I was sick of it! I needed a break! There’s nothing wrong with that!”
“Yes, you burned out,” Redhead. Her cheerful smile has turned sour, transformed into a menacing grin to match Brunette’s.
I look at her, betrayal clearly written on my face. Not you too, I think. I thought you were better than this.
“And now you want to go back, to better yourself. You want to be more than just an assistant teacher.” She chuckles low in her throat. “But who’s to say you won’t burn out again? How do you know you won’t just drop out after a year?”
My shoes grab my full attention once again. “I won’t,” I whisper, sniffling and trying to hold back the tears welling up in my eyes. “I’ll see it through to the end.”
“All right, let’s say you do manage to see it through to the end and you get your master’s degree. Then what?”
“I’ll work on my Ph.D.”
“Do you really think you have the attention span for it?” she asks. Her friends laugh. “You didn’t even have the attention span for four years of college!”
“I wore myself to thin then,” I reply defensively. “I won’t make the same mistakes again.”
“You’re not really the type to learn from past mistakes,” Glasses replies.
“I’m not perfect.”
“No,” Brunette spits the word out as though it were dirty and vile. “You’re not. And yet, you want a Ph.D. Arrogant.”
“High level degrees are for the worthy,” explains Lanky. “For those of us who worked hard all of our lives and never buckled under the pressure. You ran away as soon as you could.”
“So it took me longer to get here than you. That doesn’t mean I don’t stand a chance?”
“Doesn’t it?” Brunette grins, and the four burst into laughter.
I grab my notebook, pink sweets with cherry blossom hats smiling up at me. They are the keepers of my trials, of pages upon pages of notes, of helpful phrases and scribbled diagrams, all in an effort to better grasp the concepts I will face on the test. Vain attempts to improve skills I never possessed.
I slam the notebook down upon the test preparation book, obscuring the faces of my demons. Their laughter is cut off, and my room is once again brimming with silence and the sounds of cars hurrying along the street.
“Assholes,” I snort. I wipe away errant tears trickling down my cheeks.
I get up from my seat and forage in the kitchen for something to nosh. It’s as good a time as any for a study break.
~Mai