The Magnificent Temper of Catherine the Great

“Sharpen those minds, folks. It’s test time!”

Hark, the holy master doth cry.

Seriously though, how do they expect us to be excited about our futures when they use discount Eugene Levy as the personification of a fulfilled education? I stare at him as he stops at my desk, licking a grotesque finger onto a stapled manifesto of misery while a sickly smile spreads on his sagging face like a delightful disease. He leaves a spot of saliva on my paper as he slithers onto his next victim. I am simultaneously mortified and mystified by this meagre man. You know how you pick at a piece of mystery meat, wondering what culmination of beast endured slaughter for the sake of performative nutrition?

He has hairs like frayed violin strings stretching over his matte bald head, doing their best to reach the other side of the moon, but running out of steam just around the left eyeball. This follows a trajectory not unlike that of his dreams which, I’m sure, started off strong. I’m no Nancy Drew, but those plush eyebrows indicate fertile follicles at some point. And yet, the scene is set with a full moon and a sad tune, “The Ballad of the Bald” - brought to you by Mr. G and his violin quartet. There is perhaps nothing sadder than the thought of an Axel Rose decomposing into a teaching toadstool, trading in wicked pedals for A4 spores.

“This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.” – T.S. Eliot.

Why not bite the bullet, Mr. Gallagher, and shave the damn thing? Admit defeat, accept surrender and obey the fate of the Magic 8. See that Eight Ball over there? Gleaming, glossy and grand sitting way across the Emerald city? That marvelous marble glides in a different garden. Billiards, not bowling, but we’ve still got jackets. Leather ones. So button up that oatmeal cardigan and fare the well. Nevermore, Mr. G, the raven of this feather flocks with another.

There you go, holy master, two literary allusions for the day. Can I go now? Or am I still subjected to this demeaning display of my scholastic worth?

You, old Q ball, orbit a plain sphere native to unfinished dreams. I hope you like your yellow brick road filled with potholes. The only way you’re getting to Oz is by aerial fright – carried by the ghost of your Long Lost Potential.

You stand at your altar of instruction and destruction spewing curriculum like a priest rambling in Latin. But you are just a false Pope and this a Feast of Fools. Lost in translation, I’m afraid. I speak in a different tongue – one foreign to surveyors of the mediocre. Metaphors, simile and the art of arbitrary literary are tools for a different shed. You want me to sharpen my mind? How about I sharpen my sword first and carve myself a new existence?

The stork that carried me must have been flying under the influence when it dropped me off here in the middle of Connecticut. Thanks for the lousy lift, you boozy bird, but this joke has gone on long enough and I’m not laughing. Time to sober up and realign the stars you scattered in your drunken stupor. It’s New York City after all. We take cabs, not Corollas.

Name.

Do you want me to write my real name or my stage name? I should probably start going by my stage name now if I want to shift my manifestation into express gear. Silence makes no waves. I’ve got to make like Ariel and use my voice. Where Catherine Richards flounders, Cat Ritchie will flourish.

Explain the importance of setting in Catcher in the Rye.

God, no, I can’t do it. The mundanity of it all! With a screech of my chair, I announce my departure from this dreary existence.

“I need to use the restroom,” I gasp and flutter out the door before he can trap this monarch with his butterfly net.

The metal lockers and waxed floors reflect the demons of drudgery all around me. It’s a house of mirrors that I can’t escape. Plaques of valedictorians and principals line the walls like tombstones. The Hallway of Excellence. More like the Corridor of Clowns. Soon enough, we’ll all be tumbling in and out of cars in an infinite loop of congestion.

I stumble in the bathroom and clutch the sink for balance. I look in the mirror. The artificial light is wreaking havoc on my complexion. Too much of the Connecticut Kool Aid has jaundiced my skin. I am horrified by this ghastly stranger masquerading as me.

No, don’t let them fool you, Cat. You are not a concrete crawler like the rest of these germs. You are a ferocious feline lost in the rat race. Out of this blazer and tie and you’re a dead ringer for Liza. In pitch and profile. How can I be taken seriously as a rising Broadway star while branded by this hot institutional iron? I’ll never be scouted looking like just another member of the freshman flock. Besides, celebrities never advertise for free. And no offense to you, St. Andrew, who probably was in fact a grand gentleman who definitely deserved having a whole school named after him, but being the poster child for your fellowship of social conditioning, I mean, learning was not in my contract.

I yank the cloak of clones off me, hurl myself into a stall, and thrust it into a toilet. I watch the navy darken and the scholastic seal drown, gasping for breath in the wake of the Kraken’s gurgles. Sorry, Captain G, I sunk your battleship.

But, what the heck, here’s a life raft.

O Captain, my Captain!

There’s another literary allusion for your troubles. Grab hold to that and, if you’re lucky, you’ll ride the horizon back to shore. It won’t be a long journey. For those who are confined within the pillars of the community, the horizon is a near sight. And for those divines who dare to dream, les royales and les reves, the world is a limitless sea of unopened oysters. Along the shore of Schrodinger’s clams, we search for our treasures, the fruits of potential yet untapped. We climb over the decaying ruins of these petrified pillars that colonize crumbling empires. This will be the Athens of my Adolescence. I shall soon bid my farewell to this ancient civilization. The future is bright. Bright as Broadway lights.

My hand hovers over the sliding lock as my eyes catch a scrawl on the stall.

Kill me now.

How quaint and yet pungently emotive. How better to serve an acrid testimonial of flushed dreams than on a bathroom stall? But listen closely and you can hear faint murmurs within the tile walls. They are the echoes of the Optimistic Youth- an endangered species threatened by the gaseous toxins circulating the pipes. Follow the path of the plumbing plumes and you’ll spot the hole in the ozone and the even bigger one in their dreams.

Here among the desecrations, dirty minds and desperate hearts unite to scar the walls with phone numbers and salacious sketches, like hieroglyphs of the primitive. If only they knew what we know now, future explorers will say. Then maybe they wouldn’t have sacrificed so many bulls and goats.

Toilet water floods around my feet and I carry myself down the river like Moses in a basket. The Pharoah has ordered an extermination of all ambition, but I shall save myself. To all those who face their own person Global Warming, I say this. Discard thy blazers and shed thy layers of industry! Remove thy polyester blends and synthetic silks! Dump thy hosiery back to the bargain bin from whence it came and join the enlightened masses on the crusade out of Connecticut!

I swing the bathroom door open and march back into the hallway, passing old Mrs. Dubbs as she scuttles to the library. She stares at me from the huge windows of her glasses, like a hermetiss on house arrest, watching the Thanksgiving parade pass down the street. Oh, if only I could summon Cronos and reverse the curse on this crone. Believe me, Mrs. Dubbs, if I could take you to a rest stop on your journey of life and pump you full of collagen and hope, I would. Alas, it is near curtain call for you. A parting of the red velvet sea where you can exit this terrestrial prison and stage left into the afterlife, leaving behind a trove of overdue books and arthritic medication. Hopefully God doesn’t stamp a late fee onto your spine.

In the wake of Dubbs’ slime trail, Kelly and Cohen slither from their love nest by the lockers like Hallmark cards of homecoming. Adam and Eve, coiled in each other’s arms as if bound by the invisible serpent of seduction himself.

“Bite the red apple,” he said. Quench your thirst for knowledge. That one might’ve been from one of those motivational posters in the office, actually.

While not exactly discovering gravity or a groundbreaking computer processor, these two are clearly drunk off the apple juice. It’s a good ole chomp off the poison apple that’ll sentence this Disney princess to death by suburbia. She’ll live out her sentence with a view striped by the bars of a cradle. And floating above the crib in lulling succession will be her hopes and dreams, a revolving model of college admissions and showbiz auditions.

“They said I looked like Michelle Pfeiffer”, she’ll whisper to the bundle of joy, the only person who will listen.

Who knows, maybe she’ll drain the vestiges of her vicarious vocations into the helpless runt, forcing them into child stardom. Wouldn’t that be something? Kelly’s spawn and I crossing paths on the red carpet while the expired cheerleader witnesses the serendipitous encounter on TV because the precocious rugrat was too embarrassed to bring their own mother to the Tony’s.

I shiver. Maybe it was the draft of the hallway, the unsettling current of Cohen’s pheromones, or the coldhearted rejection of a mother by her own kin. Imagine, sacrificing all your bulls and goats only to get rejected by the gods anyway. All that blood on the walls. Don’t worry, Kelly, all you have to do is redecorate. A splash of eggshell, or maybe paisley wallpaper, if you’re feeling feisty. Things will seem normal again. The stains will come out. Blood, wine, whatever.

I stop outside the gym and peer into the small square window. I see the girls’ volleyball team. I harbor no grievances against them in their nylon blue jerseys. Like me, they are propelled by lofty ambitions that reach as high as their ponytails. I watch as they slap that ball back and forth like hot potato, as if it carries the small town curse of perpetual suburban domestication. The worlds of thespians and athletes rarely collide, but here we are, building the same rocket to reach a galaxy far, far away.

Number five lobs the ball so high it nearly knocks the ceiling light. I’ll bet she’s the one to make it out of here.

I shiver again. The school can’t afford proper heating. There too many ghosts of the extinct, or “alumni” as some like it call it, still roaming the halls, coating the air with the stench of prolonged mediocrity. Where are the Ghostbusters when you need them? Maybe I shouldn’t have flushed my blazer…

Wait.

Who am I kidding? Flush that blazer. Flush the ghosts. And flush this whole school. I stand to shiver for as long as it takes until I make it. Whether it’s the hot spotlight of the Broadway stage or the actual California sun, I will reserve my right to bare arms. I will make Bill Murray proud.

I continue down the hall, my wet shoes squeaking on the buffed tile. I hear a quick shuffle of footsteps . Adderall Andy, the school janitor, runs by with a mop and bucket in hand. He turns the corner and the ropey hair of the mop swings like a horse’s mane. He’s headed straight for battle like a Shakespearean hero. There goes Mike to steer the ark back to dry land where we, as a civilization, can start anew. Back to ploughing fields and growing wheat. Might as well be back in the Agricultural Age. They make us get up at dawn like farmers anyway. Must we really find X at 7:30 in the morning? She can’t have gotten that far. I’m sure we’ll still be able to find her at ten or eleven.

I turn on my squealing heel and head in the opposite direction of the girls’ bathroom. In my evasion of Mike, I stop outside the trophy case and see my reflection among the little make-believe trophies and ribbons. I imagine Liza Minelli, made anonymous by apocalypse, forced into servitude as just another member of the common collective. She wears a straw hat and denim dungarees, trading in her sequins for a scythe as she unironically toils in a field of rye. She is completely off book at this point. This is just one of a daily succession of labour so she knows what to do. She hits every mark and catches every light. She finds only one way to temper the steel of reality and forge her sword. In the sweet heat and from salty lips, she lets out not a whimper, but a bang. Her song travels far and across the yellow fields and she thinks,

“Maybe this time. Maybe this time, I’ll win.”

I hear someone yell “Hall Pass!” and I jump. I hurry down the hall, racing around corners, cursing my squeaking shoes and Adderall Andy’s immaculately waxed floors. My sharp turns make the halls sound like a basketball court. See, drama kids and jocks, we’re not so different.

I return to the classroom and sink into my seat, trying to hide my ragged breath with short little gasps. I wipe my warm, sweaty face with the back of my arm.

Finally settled, I face the test before me. I acknowledge the absurdity of the questions and the corresponding nonsense that I agree to reciprocate in my answers with the pen as my sword.

It’s like Liza Minelli in the straw hat, but instead of ploughing wheat, she’s the Harvester of Souls like a very glamorous Grim Reaper. She uses discretion, of course. She won’t take just anyone under her happy little bluebird wings. She extracts only the bold, the brazen, and the beautiful and whisks them from the common crop. Ok, Mr. G. I’ll bite. I’ll play the role. And I’ll play it damn well too. That’s showbiz, baby.

At the bell, I hand in my paper. Me being the last one, he takes a chance to look it over. He scans the first page, licks and flips to the other. Before I can leave, he says,

“Looks like excellent work, Cat.”

I smile. Not about the test; I couldn’t care less about that dish rag. But I’ll be damned if “Cat” doesn’t have a ring to it.

Excellent work, Cat!

We love you, Cat!

Cat, one more photo! Over the shoulder!

Pleased as Fancy Feast, I head to the door, but stop, dead cold. There stands Adderall Andy, a sopping school blazer dripping from his fist.

“That’s not mine,” I say, shrugging.

With a dramatic huff, he flips over the collar of the coat where I once scrawled my name on the inside tag.

Dammit, Catherine!