The Ellipses and...

Entry 1: The End of the Beginning

Graduation day was yesterday. I graduated. Good-bye high school. There was a ceremony, of course.

Everyone was joking, laughing, except for maybe the valedictorian who was busy rehearsing her speech. Parents came up to hug their children. Oh, how proud those parents were! Plans were made for restaurant reservations, and graduation gifts, and distant aunts and uncles to fly in from halfway around the world to celebrate the glorious day. No one seemed the slightest bit sad.

Well, that's not entirely true.

There was a filming club that went around asking people poll-like questions. "Who was your favorite teacher?" "What was your favorite subject?" "How do you think McEntire High School has prepared you for what will come?" (A personal favorite of mine, merely because of all the blank faces and "um..."s that come in response). And, of course, the ever famous "What will you miss most about this high school?" Well, many people said that they'd miss their friends, their teachers, EVERYTHING, but there weren't any real answers, except for one.

There was this girl, Christina Morel. I'd always thought she was a little pretentious. Well, pretentious and a pain in the neck. She had this voice, this really nasal voice, that just pierced through all other voices and jabbed itself into your ear. I hated her voice.

So, the filming club asked her, "What will you miss most about McEntire High School?"

"I love McEntire High School," she said, "So, I'm sure I'll miss alotta—" she said it as if "a lot of" was one word—"things. I'll miss my friends, and my teachers, and my boyfriend, most definitely, but I'm not sure what else I'll miss. I guess I'll find out once I'm gone. You can't know what you'll miss until you're missing it. But I loved high school, so I'm sure I'll miss just about everything. Am I done now? My cousin is here. I have to say 'Hi.'" End scene.

God, she drove me insane. But it wasn't her voice, or just her voice, that made me remember what she said. It made sense, what she said, if you took away the superficial stuff. You were left with a bare statement, a pretentious statement, yes, but it was true and it made sense, especially since pretentiousness is one of my key attributes. I hated her for saying something that made sense. It ruined my memory of her. Now she wasn't Miss Pretentious Snob With a Nasal Voice. She was Miss Pretentious Snob With a Nasal Voice Who Once Said Something I Couldn't Ignore. I didn't even know her all that well, anyway, so it was much easier to judge her before I heard what she said. I needed to know if she meant it pretentiously (when you state a true statement with a possibly deeper meaning for the purpose of sounding wise or whatnot) or if it just slipped out because it was bouncing around in her head. I hoped the former. At least that way I could reinstate her as Miss Pretentious Snob With a Nasal Voice.

I had to find her in the crowd of purple gowns. Again, I didn't know her all that well, so no way could I recognize her from the back.

I snuck around a little more, glancing at people's faces and listening in on their conversations for a hint of that awful voice. I started feeling a little bit like a spy, so I hummed the Pink Panther theme song. People really started giving me weird looks then. Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum-ba-dum-ba-dum-ba-dum, ba-duuuuuuuum, ba-da-da-dum.

I finally saw her, over by the water fountain, lip-locked with a brown-haired unidentifiable male—I was really getting into the spy thing. I stood for a while, watching and waiting for them to finish so I could intrude. It was a little creepy, to be honest. Watching them. It was very creepy, not to mention downright stalker-like behavior. (I never feel comfortable watching couples be intimate. It's not that I feel disgust by the display, it's that I feel as if I'm invading on a private moment. But, I'm pretty sure if I was part of a couple, I'd be glad to escape into our bubble, and making people uncomfortable would just be a bonus.)