The Amazing Color-coded Campus :: Personal Narrative Essay Example

The Amazing Color-coded Campus At a glance ours had seemed the perfect school, with its large remodeled buildings, looming green trees and a campus filling a whole city block. Everyone wanted to go there, just so that they could cut class and escape to the real world. For me, leaving a private school where everyone looked and acted the same for a school known for having the largest and most diverse student body in the United States was nothing less than a dream come true. On my first day, though, I realized why my parents had originally yanked me out of public school. I had rejoined all those same kids who six years before had been stapling their ears, whispering talk of sexual things I'd never heard of, and literally gluing themselves to their seats after being told to do so figuratively. In a way I was glad, having spent six years at a school whose students' only quirks were random temper tantrums and acting out scenes from the latest novel they'd finished. The school had fences protecting us from the outside world, and how it might make us feel about ourselves. I had learned to disappear in that crowd, to appear as one of them when I felt like an outsider. I would listen to their stories of shoplifting, knowing their allowances covered anything their hearts desired, and lie about my own shoplifting experiences. I couldn't help but think that there was more beyond those gates, things that mattered and things that were real. The sky seemed to hang dangerously low above my head that day, the clouds so thick and gray it was if the universe ended at their edges. I had survived a week of high school, but still walked around campus feeling anxious, as if everyone could see I was shaking inside. My eyes scanned the people pouring from the buildings, desperately wanting to find my best friend. Through the undulating sea of students, which lightened and darkened every couple of feet, I finally spotted Kay doing her best to be invisible. The path to where we ate curved through "The Slopes," where black and Latino football players hung out, and "The Bricks," which held mainly white seniors. Ashamed of our nervousness to walk through "The Slopes," we looked only at each other and talked in hurried tones.