We’re supposed to go into engineering, we girls.   It’s all the rage.   That’s what Mr. Haskins and Principal Davis are telling us: Girls majoring in engineering are the wave of the future.

The problem is, up to now I’ve only thought of engineers as men who drive trains, and driving a train is about the last thing I’d ever want to do.   I’ve babysat, tutored English, and hostessed, and all of those jobs sucked.   Right now I’m selling jewelry and piercing people’s ears at the mall; my managers are these two women in their 20s with big butts who crack their gum, and who have no idea who Nathaniel Hawthorne or Herman Melville even are.   I know I want to go to college, and I know I should try for a field that won’t let me rot away somewhere.  But until someone explains what engineering is, and what it does, I’m not about to jump on Mr. Haskins’ bandwagon.

He’s the guidance counselor and since I’m third in the senior class, I guess he wants to see what he can do with me.  Mom’s been on emotional shutdown, and Dad, well, Dad has been somewhere other than Ohio for the last couple of months, probably at his cousin Jack’s in Mississippi, or wherever he’s chosen to go hide out.  Dad is such a weirdo.  He doesn’t know anything.  All he’s ever said about my future was, “You could be a lawyer. You could go to Yale!”  Like he’d have any idea at all about either of those two things.  The Army paid for his college, some dumb teacher’s college that probably took anybody.

Dad pulled the same crap on my older sister, Melanie, last year.   I remember. Even though Melanie is, well, Melanie, I still felt bad for her.   Dad took her aside and said, “Whaddaya mean, you’re majoring in pre-physical therapy?  Why not pre-med?   You could be a doctor!  Why do you have to aim so low?”

“I want to be a physical therapist, Dad.”  Melanie’s face was all stone.  “I’ve done my research.   I candy striped.  You need a 4.0 to get accepted.   I’m not aiming low.”

“Well, I’m tellin’ ya.  You coulda been a doctor.”   His frown was pure disgust, disappointment.

Mr. Haskins is the only one taking an interest in where I’ll go after graduation.   He asks me into his tiny office.  “You ran cross country, didn’t you?   And lettered varsity?”

“Yeah,” I grin, not knowing how to dance around the truth, so I come out and say it.   “I ran it.  Ran, as in the past tense.  But I hate running now.   I have a job at Claire’s Boutique these days.  Not much time to go run, even if I wanted to.”

In the beginning of the year, the office had all of us with after-school jobs sign this paper promising we wouldn’t work over 28 hours a week.  What a joke.   I’ve been working 40, and I’d get even more hours if I could.  I’m going to be on my own when Mom and Dad sell the house and get their divorce.   I drive a rusted-out shitheap that always needs repairs.  And my buddy Lynn and I drink magnum after magnum of Canei rosé, and that’s not free.   I drive all over Summit County when we drink, since we can’t exactly drink at anyone’s house.  It all costs money.

“Well, my point is, you’ve shown an aptitude for physical conditioning.   You could train, beginning now.  I was a guest a few months ago at the Annapolis Naval Academy.   Ever hear of it?”

I nod.

“They’re looking for well-rounded applicants just like you.  Kids who can tough it out, but who also are smart.   You could handle the rigors of their physical training.  And you’re smart, there’s no way around that.   Look at this transcript!” He fingers the red and white sheet listing all seven semesters of coursework I’ve completed.  Only the last semester still needs final grades added.  Otherwise, the sheet is a set of rows of A’s.

I nod and give him a blank-smile acknowledgement of the upside-down transcript.  “The Navy.  You mean you’re saying I should join the Navy?”

“I’d be so happy to see you get into Annapolis.”  Mr. Haskins’ beady blue eyes sparkle.  I picture him thinking about his trip to Maryland, how officers there wined and dined him.

“And you also say I should major in engineering.”

“It’s the field of the future!  For you and any other girl who’s willing to try it.”

I humor Mr. Haskins.  In the weeks that follow I tell him once, then twice, then three and four times that I don’t want to try to join the Naval Academy.   He haunts me in the hallways in between classes.  So I humor him.  I tell him to set me up with a local engineering firm, and I will let him know.   I tell him to write me a letter of recommendation to the University of Akron, because I’ll apply for a scholarship to their civil engineering program.   I don’t want to, but I figure that an outright refusal will hurt his feelings.   Since he’s the only person right now who cares about what I’ll go on to study, I feel bad about lying, but revealing the truth would be too impossible:  that I’m jaded, confused, burned out, bitter about a lot of things, and above all, scared.

I’m scared about my life.  My future.  A lot of the things I’ve wanted to do have been desires more fueled by anger than rational thought.

I want, for example, to have sex.   But I don’t have a boyfriend, and every attempt I’ve had to go with a boy or date a boy has always turned out rotten.   I’ve been with boys a lot dumber than I am, and if they didn’t have the bodies they did, the whole thing would have been a waste.   And I’ve dated a couple of boys who seemed smart and on the ball, but they were older and they either wanted just to have a one-time trial of me, or they’ve moved on to some girl way more popular than me, usually someone living in the snootier end of our district.

I want to be myself.  But 99% of the kids at school don’t even think like I do.   And if they do, they’re the biggest nerds.   The only kids who read and discuss books are the ones who also play that stupid Dungeons and Dragons, or who belong to some stupid fucking Sherlock Holmes Club in Akron.   You read Edgar Allen Poe and it’s just mindblowing, and you would love to talk about the themes, the language, the setup of the story, the horror you feel inside as you read what essentially are simple words typeset on paper. But try to strike up that conversation in the high school cafeteria.  Just try.  Some senior across from you at the lunch table will just say, “What a nerd!” and go on eating his hamburger and fries.

I want to live overseas.  Idiot Melanie—little miss goody-goody parental brown-noser—got to go to Geneva for three months on a Youth for Understanding summer exchange. She got to go see France and even Italy, and the host family treated her like gold, like a daughter that was really wanted.  And she came back home and rubbed it in my face, and that’s when I knew I wanted to leave here the same way, but better.  I want to go to Europe and speak French.  I’ve had French since I was eight years old.  It’s obvious I would want to use it someday.

But I don’t know what to do overseas.  What to do when I get there?

And how should I be myself, when I haven’t even really ever had the chance to?

And boys.  I know a boy will come along who will be just the right one, in a place that isn’t so stupid as this town.  But where will I go from here?  With no money?

***

I hate Mr. Haskins for what he did.  He lined me up with a career day at the Cuyahoga Valley Water Treatment Facility.  Crap.  I hadn’t been in the valley in a long time, but I remembered the rotten sewage smell like it was yesterday.  “Just breathe it in like you would normally do,” some man in a suit and a hardhat told me when I first got there. The jerk.  It smelled like total shit.  I ignored him and kept pinching my nose, trying not to barf up the bagel I’d eaten on the way.  The guy walked me through every stage of their crap treatment process.  Akron’s shit rolled past me on a conveyor belt.  Big tanks held even more of the liquid filth. That poor little Cuyahoga River.  No wonder it caught on fire up by Cleveland. First all of our shit down here, and then the Clevelanders’, and there you go.

The worst part of all were these guys in the hardhats trying to be all nice to me in their shit-smelling cafeteria, buying me a chicken sandwich and potato chips and a Coke.  Like that was going to make me decide to become a waste engineer.

I drove out of the valley and home, glad as hell to get out of there.  The way I figured it was this:   A person doesn’t get to Europe through majoring in shit treatment studies in Akron, Ohio.

A person doesn’t get a great boyfriend doing an internship that makes her smell like shit, and think about shit all day.

Engineering has nothing to do with Edgar Allen Poe.   Except maybe in “The Cask of Amontillado,” where Montresor builds that brick wall to enclose and thereby murder his buddy, Fortunado.  You could count that as structural engineering. That’s as far as it goes, though.

Engineering, from what little I can tell, is dreary.  Dry.  Totally unlike me. Haskins doesn’t know me.  He doesn’t know what flashes in my mind.   He thinks I’d be happy getting yelled at by some military person while running my lungs off on an obstacle course.   If I didn’t know better, I’d almost bet that Haskins himself wanted to go to Annapolis, but he didn’t get in, so he became a guidance counselor instead.

I never even dropped by Haskins’ office after the sewage career day like I was supposed to.  But he chased me down the next day at school.

“Wait up a minute!” he said, grinning, his wiry hair standing up on his head. “Have you, by any chance, received the letter yet from the University of Akron?”

“No.”

“Well,” he said, lowering his face, staring at me hard.  “You just be sure you get the mail.  You’ll see.”

Two days later, I came home at eleven at night and saw an envelope on the dining table:  Office of the President, the University of Akron.   Congratulations! it said, You have hereby been awarded a full four-year Presidential Scholarship in Civil Engineering.

Shit.

Shit.