During my freshman year of high school, not unlike all my years of high school, I was a pretty bad fuckup, in the “I don’t care, I’m just going to put my head down on my desk and sleep through class” way. I didn’t particularly have to put any effort in to eke out passing grades in most of my classes, at least at that point. However, there was one class this did not hold true for: Japanese. It’s hard to bullshit foreign languages with foreign-er alphabets. I would occasionally put in effort, but I never seemed to be able to get it right. My Japanese teacher, at the time, wrote me off as a failure and occasionally scolded me. In the middle of class, she once asked aloud how I intended to pass the course, before scowling at my mumbled, incoherent answer and turning toward her brighter pupils. She was very committed to the idea of working hard in school.
Our final was a grueling, two class period affair, with an oral component (hurr hurr hurr) and an essay portion, which I recall most of the class fucked up. We wrote a love story about the test’s picture of a young couple underneath a cherry blossom tree, when she wanted a mature and sophisticated novella about the two kids severing all romantic ties in order to prepare themselves for college.
Or something.
Anyway, when all was said and done, instead of handing our finals back out to us, or emailing us, or something reasonable and discreet, she decides to READ EVERYONE’S GRADE OUT LOUD TO THE CLASS. My heart seized in my chest as she began to chant off pairs of names and their excellent, dazzling, grades. My high school was full of overachievers and people who were accepted early to Harvard. The grade of a layabout like me was not only none of their business, but the attached social stigma of being the idiot of the class, who didn’t study and would clearly never go anywhere in life, hahah point and laugh at him, was reason enough to commit hara-kiri. Not to mention that the rest of the class was predominantly Chinese, so it’s like learning Spanish for them, right? Easy A. Anyway, she read the list alphabetically, and eventually, as alphabets do, she is lead to my name.
Reading aloud from a gridded chart inside a manilla folder, she says, “Robert Gable: sixty-seven.” Before my mind could begin pumping the chemicals appropriate for the spirit-crushing response to getting such a low grade on a final, as well as the embarrassment of having it read aloud to kids whose parents would cane them for anything below an 90, she looked up from the grades and said, in the most earnest voice I had ever heard from her, “Good job, Robert, you passed!”
As her rock-bottom expectations for me became clear to everyone in the room, the students turned to look, even though I had already dissolved into the folds of my hooded sweatshirt.
