That Morning

I felt my stomach twist into knots as the van rushed its way toward its destination. My eyes were red as tomatoes from staying up late the night prior; my head was a dizzy hurricane; and above all, I was unprepared for what was about to happen that morning. As we pulled into the parking lot, my fingers began to sweat. My legs went numb like they did not want to leave the car. I wish it was the day before so I could have a second chance, but as much as I wished there was nothing I could possibly do.

Some would say mathematics is the hardest subject, and some would say science, maybe even spelling—all of these, perhaps, but Spanish was mine. Over that school-year, I had developed some strange dyslexia for Spanish. I couldn’t conjugate verbs to save my grandmother, nor could I memorize any vocabulary. I was a hopeless mess. The words and the spelling, the accents and the grammar—all of it was jumbled disarray in my head. I do blame a lot of my unpreparedness to my lack of Spanish savvy; however, at the end of that year, I had developed into a diehard procrastinator. I had also lost a lot of interest in the Spanish language, and on many occasions said it was the stupidest language on earth.

It was cold in that classroom, or perhaps my fear was influencing me otherwise. It smelled like fresh coffee (my teacher obviously could never get enough). The resonance of pencils scratching on pallid paper surrounded me. No one else was shivering, and that is something I probably never understood. How was every other student managing this class better than I? And I could not help but wonder if anyone else was unprepared; yet, as much as it puzzled me, it was irrelevant.

The first thing I needed was a pencil. To my avail, I had none. I borrowed someone else’s, but snapped its tip at the first touch to paper. Hurriedly, I sharpened it in the corner of the room and returned accordingly to my desk. Reading through the text, I noticed questions one through five were effortless to answer—it was everything subsequent that made me hopeless. Over and over, I guessed through the whole test, but an obscure entity locked far into the deepest recesses of my mind was telling me I was doing well. Of course, I did not believe this. My face and ears were hot with anger and embarrassment; after all, none of these questions made sense to me as much did my haphazard confidence.

Before I knew it, the class had finished the exam. I, on the other hand, sat miserably on the third-to-last question. As much as the test was hard, none of it was compared to the essay. It required me to write, in Spanish, about my favorite Spanish word. I chose the word loco which means crazy pertaining to how crazy the test was. Something about the essay, regardless of its intimidation, struck me with refined buoyancy. Perhaps I did not do poorly after all.

The next two days were gruesome. I experienced one of the most nerve-wracking weekends of my life. I could not for the life of me stop thinking what my parents were going to think of my final grade. Though, as much as I was sure I failed, I was sincerely surprised to find out that I had made an 87 percent grade. I could not believe the report card I was reading. I felt that surely I made at the least a 20, but an 87? True, it made me feel good about myself, but I was still reminded of how legitimately unprepared I was that morning. Never do I want to experience anything similar to it, and that is what good came out of this experience—it showed me how painful it can be to be unprepared.