Summit School - Flame Yearbook (St Paul, MN)

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An Exhibitor LED Rookie over to an inconspicuous corner where I could wait and watch the scene around me. A tense feeling of excitement and hurry hung in the air like smoke. The aristocratic-looking men and women in tweed coats, gabardine breeches, and shiny boots milled around the yard and stable in a mass of blues, greys, and blacks. I looked with pride at the red tag which fluttered against my shoulder. Exhibitor No. SZ, it read. Everywhere I looked, I saw similar red and yellow tags. The yellow tags belonged to spectators. The palms of my hands were wet, and I felt dizzy. I breathed in deeply, then held my breath. The smell of horses, leather, wet wood, hay, spring air, damp earth, expensive perfume, English tweeds, and tobacco smoke blended together into a rich, heady odor. I shut my eyes to steady my nerves. The buzz of conversation rose and fell like the hum of a gigantic motor. Certain phrases rose above the others, high excited voices piercing through the drone. Sam, lengthen these stirrups! Clarence, where is Major's blanket?', Alice, I haven't seen you in ages! Which class is this, the ninth? The horse in the stall against which I was leaning kicked the wooden partition and whinnied. Rookie put his nose on my shoulder and blew in my ear. I saw Mr. Lang hurry past the door. He waved at me, and I gave him a sickly smile. The ninth class was over, I had better mount. With shaking hands I led Rookie out into the yard and swung onto his back. His firm sides under my knees gave me more confidence. I walked him around the yard among the crowd to get the feel of it. I passed people whom I knew, and they waved and wished me luck. I began to feel better. I pitied the people who wore yellow tags, the spectators. They couldnyt have that feeling of suspense, of excitement. The contestants in class ten walked out of the ring. As I trotted over to the judges to get my number, I was very sure of myself. I was number 13, and this was my first horse show. JEAN MERRILL Form IV What We Were Waiting For HERE were three of us up in the tree. Our brown bodies were streaked with dirt and perspiration. We lay against the sharp bark of the tree wordlessly. Nowhere was there movement. It was as though life itself had stopped and was waiting for something. We thought of nothing. We, too, were waiting. From far away came the monotonous clank of dishes being washed. We felt no inclination to talk. In our child minds we wondered what we were waiting for. Suddenly, as though it had been prearranged, we got up and dropped from the tree into the long dry grass below. We started walking to the grove in the pine trees where we often played. The grass cracked as we walked. We started talking of the things nine-year-old girls often talk of. I have a new paper doll named Joanfy I said. i'My mother got it for me. I have one called Joan, said Sally, but it's old. Janey led the way into the grove, which was usually cool. We had arranged three houses, one for each of us. The rooms of each house had been carefully and laboriously mapped out. Our dishes were shells, and our walls pine boughs. The baking sun had penetrated even into the glade, and the air was so thick that it was hard to breathe. We lay down in our houses and fell silent. Again we were 24 THE FLAME

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rified lest someone should see me, hurried out the kindergarten door. In the little hallway beyond, the musty, underground odor that always seems to pervade deserted buildings met me as I ran up the steps and opened a familiar door. For a long time I stood looking in. This had been the miniature room. It was here that there had been the little semicircle of tiny desks cluttered with papers writ- ten in big lopsided letters. Here had been the piano with the middle CU which always stuck and the little round table covered with fascinating books about Disneyish animals and runaway streetcars. On the walk above the absurdly low blackboard had been pictures-streaked crayon and scrawled grotesque figures. There had been charts, too. The cat saw a mouse. The mouse ran away. The cat could not catch the mouse. There had been neat writing on the blackboard: Janey Lou is monitor for the week. Freddie is plant-waterer for the weekf' There had been sunlight streaming in through the windows, leaving golden streaks on the sand pile and the plants and the multipli- cation table and the goldfish bowl. None of these were left. The splatterings of sunshine sifted in through dusty windows to an empty, desolate room and left mocking patterns on the bare boards of the floor, the dingy walls, the swept, unfriendly black- boards. Depressed, I walked slowly from the room and up the stairs where I had raced so often between classes, clutching stacks of books or a dripping ice-cream cone bought at the corner store. The other rooms were all the same, bare and silent, smaller than I had remembered them, and all with the same shut-in smell. The math room alone had not changed much. The rows of stiff uncompromising desks were still there, and my eyes fell on a sheet of paper lying on a seat. The writing looked strangely fa- miliar, I snatched it up, excitedly blowing off the thick layer of dust. Progress Test IX--Comprehension and Grammar-Shirley Wright. Absurd to be sentimental over an old paper, but it was rather strange that it should be there-the only paper in sight. Strange and eerie, I thought, shivering. I looked through the other desks hoping to uncover other such souvenirs but found nothing but a dusty note: Jean's O. K., but her hair makes me sick. Why the heck doesn't she do something with it? I turned it over and read the terse statement, She had fleas. Putting them both in my pocket, I crossed to the closetiand opened it, half expecting to uncover a corpse but was re- lieved to find only several forgotten school books and some hangers. There didn't seem to be anything more to see, so I plunged downstairs to the gym. The locker room was deeply and frighteningly silent and so cold that my breath came in white clouds. I was stooping down to look at the curls of paper peeling from the walls when I first heard the cries. They were faint, as if from a long way off, and for a frozen second it seemed to me that I heard shadowy voices calling to each other in basketball, then the illusion faded, and I knew them to be only the shrieks of children somewhere outside the windows. But I hurried into the gym with a chilly feeling in my spine and the pit of my stomach. The gym, too, seemed somehow smaller, and the floor boards had warped sharply upwards in places, giving the appearance that the walls had stealthily grown closer together and pushed the boards before them. The baskets were still up, hanging limp and useless--no ball had touched them for three years. Suddenly I had to get out of there-out of the cold, hostile bareness, and I stum- bled up the stone steps as if pursued. Once outside in the glaring sunshine my fear melted, but an undefinable depression lay heavily on my mind. At the corner I turned for one last look, but some apartments had already hidden the old schoolhouse from view. SHIRLEY WRIGHT Form IV THE FLAME 23

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waiting. Again we became restless. In vain We tried to play house with our usual interest. We left the grove. We went into the barnyard. All the animals except the chickens were waiting, too. The chickens never wait. They are always noisy, running about, pecking in the dirt. Even the little calves and their mothers were silent. In the milk house it was cool and damp. There we each had a piece of the water- melon which was kept in the tank of cold water regularly used for cooling the milk. We felt better when we left the milk house, but soon the oppressive heat again overcame us. We went back up the hill and lay in the grass. The dishes were no longer clanking in the kitchen. On the road a rapidly moving cloud of dust heralded the approach of the mailman, but we didn't move to meet him. A bird started sing- ing but soon stopped. The creak of a loaded hay wagon came temptingly from the fields, and still we lay, waiting. Mother saw us from her window and paused long enough to call down, Girls, why don't you turn on the sprinkler and run through it? You may, in just your shorts, if you want to. We needed no further invitation. Slipping off our sandals, we turned on the WLIICF. just as the sprinkler began to revolve, the loud report of thunder cracked through the air like a whip, the skies opened, and rain poured forth. Near-by a bird sang. In the barn a cow mooed. On the lawn Janey and Sally and I laughed. Now we knew what we had been waiting for. That horrible stillness would be no more. We laughed as We ran on the lawn through the rain. PEGGY JACKSON Form V Un Cours de la Croix Rouge Maintenant ma mere suit un cours de la Croix Rouge. Je devrais dire que ma mere et moi, nous suivons ce cours. Les premieres semaines j'etais la maitresse, et Maman etait l'eleve. C'etait tres drole. Me voila, le livre a la main, posant des questions a Maman. -Vaimais poser des questions a mon eleveg cietait facile. -Vai appris plusieurs faits interessants. Mais-je niaimais pas etre son modele. La premiere fois, quand jietais un modele, jletais une noyee et Maman a du me faire la respiration artificielle. Je me suis couchee sur le plancher, et Maman s'est assise sur moi. Alors, elle a sauve ma vie huit ou dix fois pendant que je regardais ma montre pour voir si elle le faisait bien. C'etait bien difficile de faire un bandeau sur ma main et sur mon pied, mais Maman se chargeait de tout cela. Le bandeau sur ma main etait tres drole. Il avait l'air d'un ballon blanc, et mon bras dans une echarpe qui etait vraiment faite avec un torchon de notre cuisine. Mais quand Maman a bande la plaie sur mon pied, j'avais l'air d'un veteran de guerre. Ce bandeau sur le pied glissait constamment, et Maman avait bien de la peine a faire le bandeau comme il faut. Le projet suivant etait une eclisse sur ma jambe. Ce projet etait un travail bien lent. C'etait plus facile de le faire que de le defaireg pendant deux heures j'etais assise au milieu d'une montagne de bois ct de gaze! Clest Papa qui m'a sauve de cette melee. Apres cette derniere aventure, je ne pense pas que je resterai a la maison le soir que Maman prepare son devoir pour la Croix Rouge. Si je reste chez moi, je suis certaine que je ne pourrais pas venir a llecole le lendemain. faurais vraiment besoin de respiration artificielle. BETTY BREMER Form V THE FLAME 25