The Last Month of School
The end of a school year is the same river seen from the other bank. Everything looks the same and also completely different.
June || Ending || Senior Year || Future
May and June arrived with the end-of-year quality that made everything feel slightly more significant than it normally was — the last of the routine things having the weight of lasts, the familiar hallways being seen with the particular attention that knowing you were leaving them produced. I was a junior, so this was not technically my last year at Jefferson — that was still ahead of me. But something was ending anyway. The year that had remade me. The year of the index cards and the management and the river and the coat. The year of Jamie and Priya and Abuela Elena and Tyler and Mrs. Callahan saying the ones who win state care the most. The year of telling the truest things and finding that the truest things did not collapse the room. I walked the Jefferson hallways in May and June with the full awareness of someone who was leaving a version of themselves behind in them, deliberately, as a thing that had been necessary and was now complete.
The debate room had the quality that classrooms had at the end of the year — lighter, somehow, even though nothing physical had changed. Mrs. Callahan gave a final class session in which she talked about what debate was for, which was not something she did usually — usually she talked about what debate required, what it produced technically, how to do it better. This was different. She sat on the edge of her desk, which she never did, and she took off the reading glasses and held them, which she also never did, and she said: “You spend a year arguing about whether things are true. What I hope you take away is not the arguments but the habit. The habit of asking whether what you believe is actually what you believe. The habit of looking for the seam between the position you’re arguing and the truth underneath it.” She looked at the class. She looked at me and Jamie specifically, for a moment. “The best debaters I’ve coached are the ones who argued their way toward something real,” she said. “Not a winning strategy. Themselves. They used the argument to find out who they were.” She put her glasses back on. “Now,” she said. “Let’s talk about next year.” She talked about next year. I wrote notes with one part of my mind and with the other thought about what she had said — about arguing your way toward yourself. About the resolution that had been a mirror all year, that had kept showing me my own face when I looked into it long enough. Authenticity requires courage. Yes, I thought. Yes it does. And the cost is real and the fear is real and the room on the other side of the courage is the warmest room there is. I had been in the cold hallway for three years. I had opened the door this year. I was not going back. Not ever. Not for any amount of safety or convenience or management. The river runs. Let it run.