Monday, September 27, 2010

School Career in Limbo

I'm not at all certain what I plan to do with the rest of the year. Anyone who read my most recent post is aware that a major problem came up. I left some fairly major aspects of the situation out just because I didn't feel I could share them. I still cannot, and probably never will be able to.

I now have to decide whether to go back to school, to go to another school, or to homeschool, which would be sort of a joke since I've already been accepted at every college for which I've applied on the basis of my performance up to this point, since I've already completed grad requirements including those recommended for UC and Stanford admittance. If I wanted to do the home study route with serious courses, my parents are qualified to provide the instruction, but I'm not sure what would be the point. If I went to another school, it would be a private school, since my migh school is the only decent public high school within many miles of here. The only private schools with anything resembling respectable reputations are Catholic schools. I thought I was through with the Catholic school experience, but one never knows for certain what the future holds.

Even though my parents are leaving the options to me, I don't think one of the options consists of sleeping until 11:00 a.m. each day, then watching TV for the remainder of the day. And actually, though it sounds appealing at the moment, I suspect it would get old before long. I have the option of transferring to the UC of my choice after Christmas break, but the admissions/guidance gurus there aren't crazy about it. They say that they're prepared to offer supervision to minors in the dorms, but that I probably need more support than they can provide after the incident that just happened. The university of my choice recommended another possibility that we're considering, but I'm not too happy about it. I may at least look at the place, but chances are I'm not going to go for it.

My surgery may have to be put on hold because of legal proceedings as a result of what happened. My lawyer is fighting it heavily, but I won't know how things will come out until after court tomorrow. I'm not going to court tomorrow for the arraignment just because the prosecution wants to make the point that the case against the criminals is so strong that it could be won easily without any appearance or testimony from me. When it goes to trial -- if it goes to trial -- I will be there, though.

I think my decision as to what to do regarding the rest of the year hinges largely on one of the studpidest things on which it could be based, which is my sports participation. If I can neither dive nor hurdle, I'm not sure what's the point of sticking around my school for the rest of the year.

There is the pesky matter of the prom. Some of my acquaintances know that my prom date was broken rather unceremoniously last spring; I probably wouldn't have wanted to go anyway, as I would have been relegated to a wheelchair and would have been very uncomfortable besides, but having the decision taken from my hands was painful. If I stay at this school, the possibility of attending a prom still exists. Still, I'm not even sure anyone will invite me, and it's not one of those girl-invites-boy things around here. No law keeps such from being the case, of course, but I don't really feel like pioneering some kind of a new tradition.

In the past, it's been an absolute requirement of my brother and me that we keep incredibly low profiles as far as the offices at our school are concerned. If we had been referred for something that hadn't even been our fault, even if we'd been exonerated, the very fact that we had been referred would have been sufficient reason for my parents to suspend most if not all of our civil rights. My mother is an assistant superintendent in our diatrict, and she has always expected us not only to remain out of trouble, but so far away from it that we could not be connected by the weakest possible link to anything that went wrong on any campus we attended. I was afraid initially of her and my father's response to this situation.

I was wrong to be apprehensive. My parents have been more supportive than I ever dreamed they would have been. Even though we're not litigous people by nature (doctors are sued so often that they have both a mistrust of the legal sytem and a general disinclination to sue anyone when they themselves so abhor being on the receving end of a lawsuit).

My parents blame the school in part for what happened to me because my mother had said that she needed to see that I got safely home before she headed off to what the superintendent said was a meeting that absolutely required her attendance for its entirety. The principal was charged with getting me home safely. When I was dismisssed to visit the bathroom, the plagiarist, who played an undisclosed role in my attack, was also dismissed, and no one watched to ensure that he did not follow me. Furthermore, no one investigated when neither of us returned after a resonable interval. Beyond that, my mother said that it was ludicrous to involve me in an accusation of plagiarism when I had turned the paper in more than a year earlier than the person who stole it turned it in, and it was even crazier to take seriously the idea that anyone with his writing skills could possibly have authored the composition.

My parents are insisting that the school district provide for my best interests, whether that involves their paying my tuition at a Catholic school if I don't feel safe at my present school, or even that they assign a security person to ensure my safety. The ditrict superintendent made what was probably a big mistake in suggesting that my mother's employment is at the will of the school board, and if she makes any extreme demands on my behalf, my mother may soon find herself unemployed. The superintendent had temporarily forgotten that he was speaking in the presence of lawyers and other witnesses when he said this. Even though what he said is true -- my mother serves at the will of the school board and, as such, has no real job security and can be terminated at any time -- suggesting that she would be fired in retaliation was probably the greatest job security with which anyone could ever have provided her. She'd practically have to physically harm a kid or embezzle from the district before she could be fired now.

My parents say they aren't looking for any huge compensation on my behalf (damn it!), but they say that anything I legitimately need as a result of this incident must be provided by the district. (I wish I could share more, but it falls under te category of "too much information" where both I and my readers are concerned.) Truat me. There are some things you just don't want to know.

So depending upon whether or not the judge says I must be in court on Friday, I may or may not be having surgery that day. The worst thing would be if surgery were to be scheduled for the afternoon. I wouldn't be allowed to eat or drink anything after midnight. I'd be nervous. I would be dehydrated, and I'd be hungry to the point of being nauseous. Extreme hunger does that to me. So I'd be sitting in the courtroom in the morning vomiting up what little I had in the amount of gastric juices into a plastic bag or trash can. While I might receive some sympathy from the judge, my attackers and their families would be having a field day with it. They'd probably be photographing me with their cell phones and posting images of me barfing onto Youtube. It's not a thought I relish.

I want this whole thing to go away. I want to wake up and find that I never had a hurdling accident and I never even had a prom date, much less one who broke it off with me by announcing it to a caferteria of students instead of telling me. I want my time spent in my aunt and uncle's attic just to have been a bad dream. I want my composition not to have been stolen, and I want no one to have followed me into a school restroom to retaliate against me for claiming the work of my composition was originally my own. I want to be able to sleep at night without the fear of another brick being propelled though my bedroom window. I don't want anymore threatening messages from payphones to be left on my parents' answering machine. I want to go back to the days when my biggest problem was whether or not my dad would force me to have the H1N1 vaccine.

Is this really asking so much?

1 comment:

  1. Oh, dear!

    This sounds like you have had a very bad time.

    Hopefully it will get better soon.