“I don’t need to do
anything. My dad will take care of me
for the rest of my life. He’s super rich.” Lies. We know his dad isn’t around.
Hasn’t been for years. He glanced quickly at us, across the table, from underneath
his eyelashes. His feigned confidence a thin barrier; his iciness just barely
concealing his fear. He wants to believe that this is true so badly, you can
tell from the hope in his eyes. It’s purely on the surface though, every thing
else about him screams “It’s NOT true, It’s NOT true, he’s left me all alone to
figure out this world by myself.” We deflate his confidence with the prick of
our words.
“Can I ask you a question, pal?
and I am not trying to be a punk, I really wan’t to know. What do you want to
do with your life? What is your purpose?”
“I wanna do stuff with computers,
you know, fix em and stuff.” A moment of excitement, a glimpse of passion.
“And you don’t think you need to
go to school for that?”
“nup - my brother will tell me
how to do it” (no he won’t - he doesn’t care either.) The brief moment of
passion - gone away again.
It was at this point that he
leaned even farther into his chair, the eye contact he had been trying to avoid
now gone completely. We talked about the
instability of the job market and how many people were currently unemployed. We
talked about how people need to be more and more educated and hard-working and
efficient to even be considered for a job.
“I don’t care.” The tremor in his
voice, his slumped posture, his shifty eyes all told a different story. Oh, boy, did he care. I realized at that moment that this
discussion was destroying the only power he felt he had. I wasn’t going to change his mind using this
tactic. He was the most stubborn kid I had ever met.
“Can I go back to gym now? Is the
lecture over?”
“Yes, but just so you know, we
have to write a referral. The Dean will be calling home this weekend.”
“Don’t care, got 50 last year and
I’m still here. Peace out.”
He got up and left the room, his
apathy hung silently in the air. My teammate and I just looked at each other
across the table.
“Don’t you wish you were a time
traveler? Then we could go and see what happens, so we know what to do next.”
“Well, I’m going to go write the
referral,” she said.
“It won’t do anything.”
“I know, but I have to do
something.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
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