Emma Philbrook: STUDENT LIFE

It’s eight o’clock in the morning. The commons area is all but empty, but no wonder – it’s the first day of school after spring break, and nobody is exactly rushing back. The floors are clean, almost impossibly so. They will be their usual rubber-scuffed and mud-splattered selves in 20 minutes, but for now they shine in the April sun.

There is a pile of cloth crumpled on a table near the far end of the room.

Somebody notices – a staffer, perhaps, or a student struck by its incongruity with its tidy surroundings. They approach, the clop of their shoes bouncing brightly off the walls of lockers.

As they approach, they notice that there is a head of hair attached to it and a pair of legs in a nearby chair. The cloth, improbably enough, is a person.

Somewhat nonplussed, they say hello.

The cloth sits up and the hair falls back over it – a frizzy rose-gold braid ubiquitous within the Waitsburg school system.

“Hello,” I reply in my best feint at a chipper voice. “How was your break?”

“Good!” they gush, followed by a story about a humorous kayaking accident or how it rained the whole time they were in Hawaii. They end with the obligatory, “And how was your break?”

I shake my head slowly.

“A spring break to break all springs,” I say.

It’s not that funny, but we both chuckle anyway, mostly because we’re tired.

Then I head up to class.

Class starts. All present, in body if not in spirit. There’s an assignment – short, because the teacher has decided to take pity on us on the first day back from vacation.

We finish and the class starts chatting. Somebody mentions my little brother’s “cool shades” and asks why he’s wearing them in the building.

“Let him tell you the story,” I reply.

“Aww, can’t you at least give us a hint?”

I sigh and concede with the following: “I left town four times over break – two supply runs to Dayton, and two times for the same reason he’s wearing those glasses.”

“You mean – you didn’t go anywhere?”

“Not really.”

“But it was, like, the spring break of your senior year!”

“Mmm-hmm,” I reply, mourning the vacation that could have been.

Over the course of the day, they might wheedle out of me that there was more to my break than the sunglasses incident. Much more.

I could tell them the whole story – the stakeout, the men in black suits, the FBI’s decision to only allow the family’s least confident driver to leave town, and then only with an armed agent in the car to supervise. It took them the whole week to clear us of – well – it’s not important. We’re innocent, after all.

And the best they could do after all the trouble they put us through was to give Chris a pair of promotional sunglasses.

But I’ll just leave it at this – it was a spring break to break all springs.