Heaven in 1997

School's Out!

Finally!

The day has come! My junior year of high school is over! Yes!

It sucked so much! If it weren't for my best friend, Libby, I don't know what I would have done. She's my sister from another mister and I love her so much!

We're cleaning out our lockers, which are side by side, and we can't rub off the huge smiles on our faces.

"No more AP History!" She begins tearing up the papers from her binder from the class we took together, or rather, suffered through together. Ugh.

"What are you doing? You have some great stuff in there!" I watch her continue to rip pages and pages of highlighted and underlined notes into pieces and then tear those pieces into smaller ones and so on...

"I don't give a freak anymore!" She screams.

A few girls from our grade, the popular ones, with the perfect clothes and hair and skin, give us strange looks. They furrow their waxed brows and pout their highly glossed lips, flipping their hair over to one side for added effect.

I give them a sweet smile and then turn toward my open, empty locker. I roll my eyes at the vacant space in front of me.

"Oh my God, Libby! You need to chill out." I loved her, like a sister, yeah, but sometimes she could be over-the-top. Eh. That's why I love her, though, most of the time.

She sweeps her long straight dark brown hair up into a tight ponytail at the nape of her neck and slides a sparkly blue clip on top to keep her growing-out bangs out of her face.

"Sorry," she grins and looks in her purse for her cherry Chapstick. She swipes on the light pink waxy smooth stick on her lips and the smell makes me remember that I left my makeup bag in the counselor's office!

"Sh*t!" I slap my hand on my forehead. "I left my makeup bag in CoCo's office!"

"Oh no! You never gave me back my blue eyeshadow! You better run and get it right now! I hope he's still in his office. Gah, Elle, you lose everything, don't you?"

She didn't say that last part in a rude way, though, she said it with sympathy. I really do tend to lose things a lot. I just can't keep track of where I put everything. I've got a lot of stuff.

I book it down the hall and shout over my shoulder at Libby, "Meet me at the Quad?"

"Yeah!" She shouts back, returning to her binder on the floor and contentedly ripping up her history notes.

When I finally get to the counselor's office, which is like, at the other end of the school, I can barely breathe and there's a pain in my side. I grab my side and look up. Thank God, he's still in there! There is a God!

My favorite lipstick is in that bag and my favorite shade of Hard Candy nail polish and my favorite purple and pink roll-on glitter stick, too! Although, I really don't wear it that much anymore.

"Hey, kid," CoCo turns around to see me walk into his office. I am still breathing heavy and my hair is all tangly from my run. "You've seen better days, huh? Take a seat. Take a load off. Breathe in. Breathe out."

I could faintly hear oldies playing on the radio set on top of his desk.

He had a cardboard box behind him on top of his bookshelf and he lifted it up and placed it in front of me on his desk. He was packing up all his stuff for the summer. He was careful to gently lay the framed photograph of his daughter into the box.