Ridgeview Middle School
Boulder City, Nevada.
... Look to the future now... It’s only just begun...
You sit in the stuffy, heavy auditorium of Ridgeview Middle School, listening to Lizzie Anderson drone on and on and on. Hundred of eyes, yours and your peers, watch the large auditorium clock hanging on the back wall, behind and above Anderson’s head. The room is dead quiet, but there’s that heaving, nervous, excited energy of a countdown. The minute hand strikes 29.
Tick, tock, tick, tock.
You sit in rapt attention.
"... and your test results will be sent out in a few days! I’m sure you can’t wait..."
Tick, tock, tick, tock.
"Finally I want to say..."
Poor Lizzie notices a ripple run through the room, and desperately tries to swim against it; to suppress it in that teacherly ‘the bell doesn’t dismiss you’ fashion. She tries to raise her voice among that new wave of fidgeting.
"... Have a wonderful Christmas. Be careful and don’t do anything..."
The shrill ringing of the school bell. Pandemonium. A cheer breaks out all around you. Manners forgotten, students begin to burst from the auditorium. Equally excited teachers do little to stem the tide. Just enough to keep old Lizzie off their backs! The woman throws her hands up in the air in surrender.
"... to embarrass the school." she lets out, defeated.
You all get swept along in the tide. You feel that bloom of hope and possibility inside you. Christmas break. And then you’re outside. Ridgeview champions the education of several hundred students, all of whom are now making a desperate bid to get away from the place. You look around at this great exodus. Everywhere, children run for buses, or, more sheepishly, their mother’s car. Some mount bikes and speed away in packs.
You see some of the bigger, meaner students making cruel faces behind the back of your math teacher, "Cuckoo" Hernandez. And there’s that funny little bicycle helmet he always wears. You cringe. That thing is a lightning rod for cruel treatment. He walks to his car, seemingly oblivious to the bullies.