mean that you’d deliberately sabotaged your high school career. Too obviously “holding back” was sometimes dangerous. After graduation you might wind up at a community college hoping to better yourself by taking courses and trying to transfer to a state school, but the fact was, once you entered the workforce in a low-level category, like Roddy at MDB, you were there forever.
Nothing is ever forgotten, no one is going anywhere they aren’t already at. This was a saying no one was supposed to say aloud.
So, Dad was stuck forever as an ME2—medical technician, second rank—at the district medical clinic where staff physicians routinely consulted him on medical matters, especially pediatric oncology—physicians whose salaries were five times Dad’s salary.
Dad’s health benefits, like Mom’s, were so poor Dad couldn’t even get treatment at the clinic he worked in. We didn’t want to think what it would mean if and when they needed serious medical treatment.
I hadn’t been nearly as cautious in school as Roddy. I enjoyed school where I had (girl) friends close as sisters. I liked quizzes and tests—they were like games which, if you studied hard, and memorized what your teachers told you, you could do well.
But then, sometimes I tried harder than I needed to try.
Maybe it was risky. Some little spark of defiance provoked me.
But maybe also (some of us thought) school wasn’t so risky for girls. There had been only a few DASTADs—Disciplinary Actions Securing Threats Against Democracy—taken against Pennsboro students in recent years, and these students had all been boys in category ST3 or below.
(The highest ST—SkinTone—category was 1: “Caucasian.” Most residents of Pennsboro were ST1 or ST2 with a scattering of ST3’s. There were ST4’s in a neighboring district and of course dark-complected ST workers in all the districts. We knew they existed but most of us had never seen an actual ST10.)
It seems like the most pathetic vanity now, and foolishly naïve, but at our school I was one of those students who’d displayed some talent for writing, and for art; I was a “fast study” (my teachers said, not entirely approvingly), and could memorize passages of prose easily. I did not believe that I was the “outstanding” student in my class. That could not be possible! I had to work hard to understand math and science, I had to read and reread my homework assignments, and to rehearse quizzes and tests, while to certain of my classmates these subjects came naturally. (ST2’s and 3’s were likely to be Asians, a minority in our district, and these girls and boys were very smart, yet not aggressive in putting themselves forward, that’s to say at risk.) Yet somehow it happened that Adriane Strohl wound up with the highest grade-point average in the Class of ’23—4.3 out of 5.
My close friend Paige Connor had been warned by her parents to hold back—so Paige’s average was only 4.1, well inside the safe range. And one of the obviously smartest boys, whose father was MI, like my Dad, a former math professor, had definitely held back—or maybe exams so traumatized him, Jonny had not done well without trying, and his average was a modest/safe 3.9.
Better to be a safe coward than a sorry hero. Why I’d thought such remarks were just stupid jokes kids made, I don’t know.
Fact is, I had just not been thinking. Later in my life, or rather in my next life, as a university student, when I would be studying psychology, at least a primitive form of cognitive psychology, I would learn about the phenomenon of “attention”—“attentiveness”—that is within consciousness but is the pointed, purposeful, focused aspect of consciousness. Just to have your eyes open is to be conscious only minimally; to pay attention is something further. In my schoolgirl life I was conscious, but I was not paying attention. Focused on tasks like homework, exams, friends to sit with in cafeteria and hang out with in gym class, I did not pick up more than a fraction of what hovered in the air about me, the warnings of teachers that were non-verbal, glances that should have alerted me to—something …
I would realize, in my later life, that virtually all of my life beforehand had been minimally conscious. I had questioned virtually nothing, I had scarcely tried to decipher the precise nature of what my parents were actually trying to communicate to me, apart from their words. For my dear parents were accursed with attentiveness. I had taken them for granted—I had taken my own bubble-life for granted …
So it happened, Adriane Strohl was named valedictorian of her graduating class. Good news! Congratulations!
Now I assume that no one else who might’ve been qualified wanted this “honor”—just as no one else wanted a Patriot Democracy Scholarship. Except there’d been some controversy, the school administration was said to favor another student for the honor of giving the valedictory address, not Adriane Strohl but a boy with a 4.2 average and also a varsity letter in football and a Good Democratic Citizenship Award, whose parents were allegedly of a higher caste than mine, and whose father was not MI but EE (a special distinction granted to Exiled persons who had served their terms of Exile and had been what was called 110 percent rehabilitated—Exile Elite).
I’d known about the controversy vaguely, as a school rumor. The EE father’s son had not such high grades as I did, but it was believed that he would give a smoother and more entertaining valedictory address, since his course of study was TV Public Relations and not the mainstream curriculum. And maybe administrators were concerned that Adriane Strohl would not be entertaining but would say “unacceptable” things in her speech?
Somehow without realizing, over a period of years, I’d acquired a reputation among my teachers and classmates for saying “surprising” things—“unexpected” things—that other students would not have said. Impulsively I’d raised my hands and asked questions. I was not doubtful exactly—just curious, and wanting to know. For instance was a “science fact” always and inevitably a fact? Did water always boil at 212 degrees F., or did it depend upon how pure the water was? And were boy-students always smarter than girl students, judging from actual tests and grades in our school?
Some of the teachers (male) made jokes about me, so that the class laughed at my silly queries; other (female) teachers were annoyed, or maybe frightened. My voice was usually quiet and courteous but I might’ve come across as willful.
Sometimes the quizzical look in my face disconcerted my teachers, who took care always to compose their expressions when they stood in front of a classroom. There were approved ways of showing interest, surprise, (mild) disapproval, severity. (Our classrooms, like all public spaces and many private spaces, were “monitored for quality assurance” but adults were more keenly aware of surveillance than teenagers.)
Each class had its spies. We didn’t know who they were, of course—it was said that if you thought you knew, you were surely mistaken, since the DCVSB (Democratic Citizens Volunteer Surveillance Bureau) chose spies so carefully, it was analogous to the camouflage wings of a certain species of moth that blends in seamlessly with the bark of a certain tree. As Dad said, Your teachers can’t help it. They can’t deviate from the curriculum. The ideal is lockstep—each teacher in each classroom performing like a robot and never deviating from script under penalty of—you know what.
Was this true? For years in our class—the Class of NAS-23—there’d been vague talk of a teacher—how long ago, we didn’t know—maybe when we were in middle school?—who’d “deviated” from the script one day, began talking wildly, and laughing, and shaking his/her fist at the “eye” (in fact, there were probably numerous “eyes” in any classroom, and all invisible), and was arrested, and overnight Deleted—so a new teacher was hired to take his/her place; and soon no one remembered the teacher-who’d-been-Deleted. And after a while
