A Hole in the Bubble
Student life in a sheltered, rich, and academically-driven school
I wrote this when I was a junior in a Bay Area public high school. My school is in an affluent area and has a culture of high academic achievement. The mascot of my high school was a bird, which is why in this piece I refer to the students as hatchlings. This piece remains one of the rawest expressions of what I felt during high school.
While this piece paints my school in a negative light, I was very fortunate to attend it and am endlessly grateful for the opportunities it gave me. At the same time, students and staff recognize the environment can become toxic.
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The money roared out of their pockets and ears, greenbacks and silver coins and multimillion checks snapping the hot air like fish, glimmering like fish. The wallets vomited their glistening guts into iron-clasped safety deposit boxes. Old and new money, hard-earned grimy money that yanked weeds, tilled earth, and planted concrete foundations for the little birds to sing upon. No Apple computer too new to replace. No gym too polished to polish. No wall too bare to repaint. No uniform too spotless to tailor.
Inside the air-conditioned incubators the chicks squawk, their raw throats tender and the veins sticking out of their foreheads. What’s the matter, darlings? The Developing Tragedy: test not graded and it’s been a week. Oh, the humanity, the innocence, and the salvation of mankind! Feathers fly, intellectual scuffle, sneakers skid on laminated floor. Pen almost runs out of ink. Grey matter greying and it’s only a Monday. Don’t worry, honey, the people will hold your hand — give you extra credit, give you back that half point, give you that pat on the back. Let the caregivers run Outside, bloody their hands tearing up the concrete, and return to the Bubble to drop juicy squirming worms down your gulping gizzards.
It’s one degree hotter than it should be in this tropical paradise; the chicks, their feathers, their feathers are wilting in this blasted heat. The iPads, sparkling new, won’t turn on, or, heaven forbid, don’t have Wi-Fi!
Seagulls, fat on In N’ Out and Chipotle, pose the greatest danger to the chicks. Remarque, Golding, and Hosseini drill all the life experience they can into the chicks’ skulls, but in the end most chicks can only pretend to know the raw edge of fear, fear that clips, contorts, cripples and delights in the taste of meat steaming on a winter day.
Numbers on a chart. Shiny, clean, cold. Free response, multiple choice, short answer. The greatest risk is guessing on a problem with four possible answers.
If the chick follows the mob into the guidance office and signs up for fifty AP classes, the money and parents and teachers and guidance crumble under the cinderblock of blame. If the chick takes fifty sports and joins fifty clubs, and enters fifty competitions and suffers through fifty hours of SAT practice; if one minute of one day of one hour isn’t spent with the neck bent, who is to blame? The chicks are to blame. No! Not the chicks, not the darlings. The caregivers run circles trying to keep their hatchlings from pulling out their own feathers or combusting in the pressure cooker. Hot, hot, the air is so hot and congested with boiling money.
If the chick suffers through an infinite succession of difficult classes, the chick will never admit to studying and will never, ever mention grades; the remodeled earth cannot suffer an earthquake. Who will be the first to stop pretending? Grades are taboo and must be covered like tattoos. Yet the chicks keep branding themselves and feel that the marks are permanent.
A chick will never throw the cinderblock off its shoulders because it cannot see more than one dirt path to a sunny future, because it is so paralyzed by narrow success that it cannot attempt possible failure, and because pretending to be cool is intoxicating.
Reality pauses at the Bubble of Bay Area. Its claws graze the glass dome which nestles seven million hatchlings in a dream. The Bubble can protect the Outside, but cannot shield what grows within; the chicks develop their own sharp claws. They walk with their feathers puffed, beaks polished, tails swishing, and myopic beady eyes darting left and right, only able to see the Outside through a glistening film that distorts reality.
One chick cried out, why is it burning? It burns around me, yes, but inside my growling stomach burns questions.
What was all this money and sacrifice for? Did it free us to follow our American Dreams, or enslave us on a Sisyphean quest for more everything? Am I hap-
The caregiver sprinted to the chick with a fat worm. The chick snatched the worm and began gulping it down to stamp out the fiery questions. Choking on the worm, the chick felt happy for another moment.