On the last day of sixth grade, I took the bus home as I always did. It was hot. I stood to heave the window down, and sat again on the scalding green vinyl seat. I had a best friend now, I had one year of public school. I looked out at the bright maple trees, and felt tears come. It had been so hard, but I was almost sad it was over. Maybe it was a moment of grief for the girl who walked into that school nine months before, and didn’t know middle schoolers cussed, or screamed at each other, or could make you feel useless for wearing your brother’s clothes. The bus pulled out of the driveway in front of the school, gaining speed to the corner of Seven Mile Lane. I didn’t know it then, on the bus home from sixth grade, but six years later, on a similar bright day, Shira and I and our friends would lounge in front of the high school under the metal awning, smelling the asphalt melt in the heat, and I would stand, get in my father’s green Honda Accord, and drive Shira home, leaving that school and that place for the last time, our arms out the windows, our faces bright with relief.
Mara Koren is an English major at Ursinus College, with intended minors in Creative Writing and Visual Art. She has been published in Runestone, and was the recipient of Ursinus’ Creager Prize and the Sigma Tau Delta E. Nelson James Poetry Award.
116 Mara Koren