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Essay: No reunion for the school of crocs
Maybe reunion is not our thing. We’ve been different than other high schools since the beginning.
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Some people are longing to walk down the memory lane, we were satisfied with keeping the high school memories in our own heads. (Shutterstock/File)
I
t was almost midnight, but my wife was still busy with her phone. Her look was intense, her fingers tapped on the screen mercilessly. From where I sat, it looked like she was dealing with a matter of life and death. One minute she would scream, “Oh my God, so ugly!” The next minute she growled, “Aarggh, who would wear that junk! What a waste of education!”
Almost 30 minutes in, I was finally a silent observer no more. “Can you believe I would wear this?” She asked my opinion while showing me a shirt design with messy graffiti and fake signatures all over it.
“And would it even occur to you that this was made by someone who has a Master’s degree from a London college?”
This year marked the 25th graduation anniversary of my wife’s class from their high school. Since last year, almost 20 alumni have rolled out a big celebration plan that resembled the Queen’s Jubilee.
A shirt that must be worn at the event was designed, WhatsApp groups for all classes were created, class representatives were appointed, warming-up events that included a half-marathon, blood donation and charity for teachers were organized. And, of course, old flames were rekindled.
My wife told me that two of her friends who had a crush on the same boy back then now competed again for his attention. This time, instead of asking the boy to do their math homework, they asked his opinion on the best invitation design for the reunion. From bashing the ugly shirt design to deciding which New Kids on the Block songs to perform, everyone was psyched to celebrate the heyday of their high school years.
My answers to my wife’s questions hang in the air, as she turned back to her phone to chat her friends about the looming fashion faux pas if they ever wore the shirt. I glanced at the WhatsApp group of my high school class. The last time someone posted a message was 3 months ago. And it was Arabic honey my friend was selling that could treat cancer.
While my wife’s high school was the ultimate school-to-go for the brightest and most ambitious young minds in the city, mine never made the list of any ninth-graders who aspired to spend the next three years having fun or to improve their chance of being accepted at top universities.
In fact, it was the 110th state high school in the city and was established simply because the government didn’t know what to do with a vacant building occupied by the latest batch of a teacher school program they were about to terminate. It was never our first choice of school, either.
The 13th state high school was where we all wanted to be. So many students, including me, didn’t care that the obscure new high school was our second option suggested by the system. We believed our hard work — and tahajudprayers — would help us make the passing grade at the national exam and we would not have to set foot in a school we had never heard of.
As it happened, we set our hopes too high. And by we, I mean at least 300 ninth-graders in North Jakarta who were shocked to find out that they hadn’t made it, because the passing grade that year was the highest in years.
Other than being an ex-teacher school, my high school has indeed some unconventional characteristics you might not find in other schools. To get there, for example, you had to choose between the two ways that were equally challenging, especially for us, the students.
First, a 300-meter street that was also used as a makeshift traditional market, and second, a drier path but one known for being the hub of thugs, drug dealers and small-time thieves in the area. If the late Amy Winehouse mourned that love is a losing game, for us — either you soaked your new sneakers in the mud or handed them over to a thug — going to school was never a winning situation.
Once you overcame the challenge of picking the right way to go, you would be welcomed by a U-shaped one-story building that sat oddly in the middle of a plot the size of two soccer fields. Its massive backyard was left undeveloped since 1978 and had transformed into a swamp, home to a crocodile or two and a family of roaming snakes that occasionally visited the classrooms located the closest to the swamp.
Some of my adventurous friends who had plotted to skip classes Alcatraz-style by climbing the school walls decided to cancel their escape, knowing that they would end up being caught, not by the headmaster, but by any reptiles that might nestle in the swamp.
And if you happened to occupy the classrooms previously used by students majoring in kindergarten teaching, you would feel like studying in, well, an actual kindergarten. There were balloons hanging on the ceiling and ribbons plastered from one end of the wall to the other. A senior girl once left her origami papers on her desk and nicely asked me if I had seen them.
“Hey, Adek, did you see my origami papers? I think I left them somewhere here,” she asked me super-nicely; her smile was so wide, as if she was talking to a four-year-old. If I hadn’t known that she was studying to teach little children, I would have mistaken her for being high from the mysterious stuff she bought from the nearby drug dealer.
It’s not that reunion was never a subject of discussion among our class. A guy from the school’s flag-raising squad — a subject of ridicule for months among North Jakarta’s educational circles for raising the flag upside down during a regional competition — had tried to arrange a meeting to discuss the reunion.
I attended the get-together, and there was no lack of cool ideas on the reunion. We exchanged phone numbers and emails, created a chat group on the spot and promised each other to beat neighboring schools’ meh reunion. But the chat group was mostly filled with messages on job vacancies, knock-off stuff offers or lame jokes.
Maybe reunion is not our thing. We’ve been different than other high schools since the beginning. From its first inception, our school was anything but ordinary. Other children were dropped by their cars straight to the gate of their school, we had to endure a muddy path or use our most beat-up sneakers to avoid being mugged. Other schools decorated their front yards with caged birds, we had crocs and snakes in the backyard.
Other schools’ alumni may include bankers and ministers, our seniors probably taught the children of these people how to cut and glue in kindergartens. Some people are longing to walk down the memory lane, we were satisfied with keeping the high school memories in our own heads.
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Primatmojo Djanoe is a development worker who got stuck in the 1980s and thinks the world would’ve been less chaotic if Seinfeld ran for at least 15 seasons.
