Staying In Town.

Turns out, I'm well-versed in the art of making it work.

The year Kelly and I met, ten lifetimes ago. Today, we are slumber party tarot queens in our forties.

1998

Ive written before about the time the road to my high school fell into the river. It was January of my freshman year and a massive flood hit Yosemite and knocked out a bunch of infrastructure, roads, bridges, and buildings. From then on, Highway 140, which leads from Yosemite Valley to Mariposa, California, the home of my high school, was only open for thirty minutes in the morning, thirty minutes in the afternoon. Luckily, these windows coincided with when the bus traveled to and from high school. But if I wanted to do anything after school I’d have to drive around (a three hour journey through Oakhurst each way) or stay the night in town.

After school activities weren’t a huge priority for me freshman year. That year, my main goal every afternoon was getting as far away from my high school and Mariposa as I could. It worked out, because I didn’t play sports so I didn’t have to stay in town after school for practice. I think at one point in time there was a “late bus” that brought student athletes home after practice was over but if my memory serves me that later bus was canceled after the flood because the road was closed anyway.

I was a late bloomer academically. I didn’t really care about school until halfway through sophomore year when I realized I was way behind all of my friends academically. I’d been placed in a few honors classes and noticed not only was I behind in language (I hadn’t even started Spanish yet) I was also way behind everyone else in math. I’ve never been good at math, so me being placed in a remedial math class wasn’t surprising. But I wasn’t sure how to catch up because our school had notoriously tough math teachers. Not tough as in “I’m going to hold you to a high standard.” Tough as in “Only two people in this whole 45 student class will be getting A’s.”

Two of my friends, also teachers’ kids, were also struggling with math. They’d taken math with the hardcore math teacher, gotten bad grades, and wanted to balance the lower grades out with higher grades from community college math classes. This was a hack a few kids at my school did. Rather than take Algebra, Algebra II, and Trigonometry from our school’s dreaded math teacher, we just took classes at Merced College, a junior college about an hour away from Mariposa.

Each week, I’d drive with Sylvie and Genevieve, the two friends I took my junior college math classes with, to Merced College to sit in a dark room learning math with literal grown ups. The classes themselves were mind-numbingly boring. I wish I didn’t, but I find math really annoying. My brain tends to add ten steps to every equation, making it ten times harder than it needs to be. So my memory of those nighttime math classes was mostly just zoning out and making up stories about the other strangers in the room that I’d share with Syvlie and Genevieve after class.

Sylvie and Genevieve felt the same way I did about class. We all thought it was boring. But all three of us have only positive memories of those nights driving down to the junior college. Nothing brought us more joy than sauntering around the Merced Mall making fun of everything. Hot Topic? Hilarious. Panda Express? Even funnier. Trying to figure out how to pronounce “Gottschalks”? Nothing has ever been harder or more entertaining.

I was a vegan at the time. And nothing was vegan then. So we’d go to the grocery store and get bread and hummus and eat it on the way home. Normally, I stayed at Sylvie’s house. She had a pull out bed and I knew her parents because her dad was my teacher. We’d stay up late, wearing our retainers, making up stories about hot guys from our school.