College Me Purple

[kitsjay]

My family has always been on the outskirts of normality and teetered preciously on the edge of poor. We lived briefly in a subdivision, moved to Canada, and moved back to Texas to reside in a trailer from the ‘70s, complete with brown shag carpeting, yellow linoleum, and indescribable colored sinks and tubs that bordered on avacado. The carpet sagged where gaping holes had opened in the floor, despite my eldest brothers’ persistent fixing, and at night you wrapped yourself as tightly as possible in a blanket so that you would not feel the thousand skittering touches of cockroaches’ legs over your skin as you slept. I shared a room with Chris, a year older than I was, and Mike and Sean had the other at the end of the hall, separated in between by a narrow bathroom.

All three of my brothers, due to unfortunate timing, were teenagers at once, and as soon as food was bought it disappeared again. We learned to love Spam, frying it and slapping it between two pieces of bread as a sandwich, and referred to devilled ham as “the good stuff”, reserved for Mom. Afternoon snacks were not neatly baked cookies or prepackaged Fruit Roll-Ups, but my mother would tell us to go out in the woods and find something. Mostly it served to distract us from annoying her, but we would pick honeysuckle and fill the front of our t-shirts with dewberries that we would carry home to mix with milk and sugar.

During the summer, my father employed us to clean jobsites for a paltry paycheck. From early in the morning until it was too dark to see, we would hoist two-by-fours to a burn pile and sweep and clean until we were sweaty and tough, then all of us would go to Cici’s and fill up on the buffet. Mike, the eldest, found a job with a plumbing company when he was fifteen, and every day he would come home and get sick with the combination of physical exhaustion and the heat. None of this seemed terribly unusual to me, as we lived away from subdivisions and civilization in the modern sense, and I had nothing to compare our lives with. Mom was terribly ashamed of our trailer, though we did our best to clean it up, and friends were not allowed over at all. My siblings and I grew up as close as possible, and though we had friends at school, we were as thick as thieves at home. We also caused about as much trouble.

Middle school rolled around and we moved into a house, right next to where the trailer had been. My dad’s company flourished and we finally were able to afford nice things. Everyone had their own room, spacious and with carpet that did not seem to plead for a mowing, and sinks that did not spurt our rusty water. It was heaven. To make up for lost time, we reveled in inviting our friends over all the time; people were encouraged to drop in unannounced and make themselves at home. Despite this, our new house was every bit as isolated as the trailer. Besides my grandparents, there were no neighbors to borrow sugar from or sidewalks to jog on in the early mornings, and I secretly envied my friends who lived in neighborhoods with fences and mailboxes. Sometimes I felt a great jealousy, wishing that I had that closeness to society, and then I would swing back the other way and thank the stars that I lived away from such things. Freshmen year of high school proved to be the first time that I began to notice that we had a strange childhood.

My father drilled in us responsibility and working hard for a living, and it was implied that the best time to get a job was when you were fifteen; Mike stood as a sterling example of what we should be like. If I complained about school, I was told to buckle down. If teachers were unfair, I was either to talk to them myself or ignore them. My parents settled nothing until it became noticeable that there was a problem, at which time we would get a lecture that would drag on for an interminable amount of time, then we were released. Dad constantly hinted that I should find a job while I struggled with algebra and science, barely keeping my head above water. One of my friends mentioned off-handedly once that her parents forbade her to get a job, since she was stressed enough by school. Indignation welled up in me. I have long made my peace with the fact that my parents refused to pay for college or a car, but granting leeway for academic pursuits would have been helpful.

At fifteen, my parents moved to San Antonio and I lived in the same house with Mike, his new wife Mary Ann, and Chris. I was given an ultimatum: graduate a year early or start my senior year in a new high school in the middle of Somerset, Texas. I signed up for night classes at the college and worked my way steadily through school, taking three AP classes and fighting my way through mental fatigue to graduate top 15% of my class and score a 1360 on my PSAT. I was sixteen when I graduated. It was no great accomplishment within my family, however; Mike had graduated well at the top of his class and scored in the 1400s on his PSAT; Sean was a National Merit Scholar, scoring a 1590 and was head of JROTC; Chris was a mathematical genius, taking his second year of Calculus as easily as breathing, and followed Sean as head of JROTC. I became as unremarkable as everybody else in the midst of such achievement.

I moved to San Antonio with my parents, who refused to let me begin college at sixteen. I watched as Mike and Sean finished their schooling at A&M and Chris began his, while I stayed at home and buried myself in dull community college classes and toiled at my father’s business. Indecision swamped me soon after and I watched the next year as my friends did what was expected of them and entered universities straight away, AP credit tucked neatly under their belts and parents’ money in their wallets. Again, I was struck by envy.

This year, I hope to begin my college career for real and make up for lost time. This year, I hope to catch up to my friends and, though they do not care or judge me, I will prove that I am every bit as good as them. Mike once said that he would not have changed a moment of our childhood because it made him who he is today. I am less romantic. If my fairy godmother had shown up and granted me a wish, I would have asked to trade with any of my friends’ perfect subdivision lives and not regretted it. The hard times and hard lessons may have made me who I am, but I do not treasure them or delude myself into believing they were any less hard for the person I eventually became. No fairy godmother ever came though, and so I will make do with what I have and show that who I am now is more than enough.

Comments, thoughts, editing, rallying war cries for the patrician ruling class to step down and create a communist utopia?