The Sun bakes the school parking lot, hot enough to cause the metal rivets of my jeans to twinge against the tender patch of skin below my hip bone. Sawyer rests his elbow on the rusting roof of Wilbert, my ‘92 Corolla, his clear blue eyes, matching the soft cotton of his favorite 80’s band-shirt. As I lean back, I’m thankful that the doubled denim of my back pockets shields my thighs from the metallic burn of the car doors. He traces the oval zig zags of my braid and leans in. For a moment our lips find each other. When we pull apart he pushes a wisp of loose hair behind my ear and smirks.

“I love you” I say easily. Seeing as how we’ve become permanent fixtures in each other’s lives this past year, we’ve both come to know this rhythm of comfortable nonchalance well. We move just enough so I can ease the door open, and then we automatically come back for a last peck.

“Love you too.” He opens the door wider so that I can climb in. “I’ll call you tonight.” Our eyes meet and I smile, finding comfort in routine. Sawyer shuts the car door and does a little good bye tap on the tinted window, then turns to make his way to his own car. After a little coaxing, my crotchety Corolla comes to life. I let the air from the a.c. - the only part of the car that’s less than ten years old - spray against my face as I watch him cross the lot, a mirage of steam rising up from the asphalt around his treadless Converse.

The tires wind around pot holes and over cracked surfaces as I drive down Broadway. Usually, I don’t take this street because there are always miles of traffic around this time. But it’s Thursday afternoon, and I don’t have swim practice or anywhere else to be. I’m in no rush to get home. As Wilbert idles at a red light in the sea of wheeled toasters, I glance over at my passenger’s seat. Next to my overstuffed canvas backpack, filled with folders from classes that I’m tired of attending and assignments that show progressively less and less effort in completion, sits a white pie sized box. Graduation announcements came in today and everyone who ordered any amount of them got to pick up their pie boxes and take them home to stuff, address, and send off in hopes of getting some “congrats” cash in return. Mom ordered 50 announcements; I didn’t even know we knew that many people who would care that I was graduating, but I guess even distant cousins can count as close personal friends and family when money is involved.

Someone honks behind me and I notice that the light’s green. Peeling a little too quickly into the turn lane and then around the corner, I make a right onto Country Club and out of the glare of the sun.

As I make the turn, the momentum, and weight of all of my textbooks, causes my backpack to awkwardly summersault off the seat and land in a slump on the floor mat. This sends my copy of Beloved shooting out and reminds me that I have to read the remaining four chapters for English tonight. But I would be lying if I said that I will.

Truthfully I’m not sure how I feel about graduating. I’m pretty tired of school, but at the same time, high school has gone by so fast. College seems surreal. We have two months before graduation, which means I have about a month to decide where I want to go to college and two months to keep my brain from turning off completely so I can actually pass my classes and graduate. Some of my friends know exactly what they want for the future, and that means they want out of high school. But I’m comfortable, for the moment, with my high school life. Well, maybe I could do without my physics teacher standing right behind me and breathing way too loudly as I try to scratch out equations for velocity. And the added homework is getting a little old. But other than that, I’m not ready to pack up and leave my friends, or even abandon the nightly sit-down dinners with my family. How about seniors get the last quarter of school off to regain sanity and be with friends?

I pull up to our pink stucco house and shove the pie box under my arm as I pick up the daily newspaper, which is wedged in between the barrel cactus and the mesquite tree in our front yard. I’m the first home, as usual. I unlock the door and trek to the end of the house, lugging my pack until I get to my room.

The pile of college acceptances and catalogs on my desk stares at me like a teacher telling me to stay vertical, keep my head off the desk, and pay attention to the information on the board. I figure that since my teachers were just as fed up as I was today and decided to give minimal amounts of homework I should give that pile a little attention. I spread the glossy catalogues in a semi circle on my splatter-painted bedspread and sit cross-legged facing them. It doesn’t take long before last night’s four hours of sleep catch up with me and I attempt to convince myself that I’ll only take a five minute nap. As I create my cocoon of covers I wonder what the beds will be like in college. Will there be paper thin mattresses with mystery stains, or bunk beds, which would leave me with a permanent knot on my head from hitting the ceiling each time I get up? Those are the things I wonder about - silly insignificant things, like beds, or whether I’m supposed to get dressed in the bathroom after I’ve taken a shower or just go back to my room and dress. What do I do if I have to cook for myself? I suddenly remember rambling about my worries to my mom as I helped her cut up carrots and celery for a lentil soup recipe we were trying last week.

“Meredith,” She turned to me, wiping her seasoned hands on her fish patterned apron. “That’s what college is about honey - you’re supposed to learn and discover all of that when you get there. You’ll learn everything the fun way, by trying it!-Oh and I just brought a robe and changed back in my room after my showers.”

She turned back to the stove and poured a cup of dried green lentils into the sizzling pot of broth.

After stirring for a moment she looked over her shoulder once again, smiling knowingly.

“Really the only thing you need to know before you get there is how to do the laundry.”

The whole discussion was pretty reassuring. I still don’t know how to do laundry, but it can wait.

****

Friday comes and goes; you can tell our teachers are getting just as tired as we are by the shrinking pile of work they assign us, and the number of periods we spend in class with the lights off, a mundane movie lulling us to sleep on the cushion of our backpacks.

Sawyer comes over and we raid the fridge, pulling two of Peter’s juice boxes from its shelves. My younger brother always keeps a stash of them around the house. We lounge on the floor of the living room; my head in Sawyer’s cross-legged lap, milking those juice boxes till all we have left is sound of our straws searching for the last bubbles of purple grape.

“Do you ever wish you could just be a little kid again?” I think of Peter, whose carefree play dough-and-nap time-filled life always looks appealing.

Sawyer considers this for a second, pushing air through his straw so that he creates a pulsing juice box lung. “Maybe, but then we’d have to go through all of this again, can you imagine having these piles of homework that are enough to massacre multiple rain forests a second time?”

“True, but what if we could go through all of it again with the knowledge we have now?”

He raises an eyebrow, “Now you’re getting a little unrealistic.”

I aim my juice box at him and try to squeeze the last bit in his direction. But he’s right. “You can’t say that kindergarten wasn’t fun. But I guess all the hard stuff in high school, and those awkward pimply years of middle school are not things I’d want to live through again.”

“And you wonder why I didn’t start dating you until we were in high school!” Sawyer taunts, poking my face as if to indicate pimples. This time I shove him which causes me to roll off his lap and makes us both erupt with laughter.

****

That night I fall asleep with the thought of being a little kid again looming in my mind. Sawyer was right – –being little was fun, but there definitely were moments of adolescence that I would rather not relive. It’s just that growing older is, well, weird to think about.

****

This morning I rolled over to be greeted by the illuminated face of my alarm clock. Seven o’clock, too early to get up for a Saturday. I let myself begin to fall back into the dreams that I’d been visiting for the past few hours but then I feel something heavy plop onto the edge of my bed.

Mom begins opening the windows, maybe thinking the light will magically make me more alert instead of make me want to burrow farther into my paisley sheets. I crack my eyes open enough to realize that the thing sharing my bed is the laundry basket, brimming in all it’s wicker glory with multi colored terry towels and unmatched pairs of socks.

“It’s too early, go away, let me sleep…” I grumble trying to pull my pillow over my scrunched eyes. Saturday morning is the only morning I can sleep in, and these precious few extra hours are usually always followed by more hours in front of our big, vaguely static, television, which provides mindless cartoon entertainment. “At least let me sleep a half hour more.”

“Nope”, my mother says all too brightly for how early it is.

“Today, you learn to do laundry.”