Trisha Ricketts
Jake was sixteen, extravagantly tall and brilliant—a student in my Junior English Honors class. And, smart as he was, he rarely turned in an assignment. Not interested, I guess in dancing to the monkey-rote music of high school. Oh, sure, he did well on check tests and vocabulary quizzes because he read voraciously, but he was failing my class. Miserably.
Nonetheless, he liked me, and I liked him.
One day, as fate would have it, I was running late for class. The room was dark, the glow from the screensaver of my three thirty-year-old children, the only light in class. Which grabbed Jake’s attention. Who are these people? he wondered. Could they be her kids? God, how old must she be?
Besides being brilliant he was brazen, so he asked me. “How old are you?” To which I responded, “I’m not telling.” Which started a curious chain of events because Jake wanted to know. Maybe needed to know somehow. So, he created an entry-fee’d contest to “Guess the Teacher’s Age.” The prize for the winner would be eighty bucks! Eighty bucks! Eager, ever looking for a distraction from schoolwork, fifty-four of my students placed their two-dollar bets and entered their guesses, which became topic for lunch table and classroom conversations.
I knew nothing about the contest he was running.
With the end of the schoolyear looming, Jake was still failing, however. Near the last day, he asked if he could announce the winner of the contest to guess my age at the beginning of class. “Sure,” I said, mystified and secretly delighted with what had gone on behind my back.
One lucky girl claimed the eighty dollars with her guess of a year younger than my actual age. The kids were thrilled when I finally told them: “Fifty-eight…” Some, God love them, even squealed, “No!”
Jake remained after class that day asking if he could talk with me about something important.
Again, I said, “Sure.”
Towering over me in the dimly lit hallway, he handed me a flowery Hallmark card, in which he thanked me for making this class interesting and fun. He then brought out a thirty-one page research paper divided into sections: an Introduction, a Conclusion and three chapters titled #1 Mildly Curious, #2 Intently Interested and #3 Morbidly Obsessed. In it, he used charts, his TI-81 graphing calculator and psychological studies to deduce my age. It’s hilarious, insightful and well-written. While incorrect, his rationale behind his guess was way off. Utterly entertaining, nonetheless. And thirty-one pages long! Longer than anything I assigned to the class that year.
Of course, I passed Jake because he demonstrated skills far beyond curricular instruction or points. And then he gave me a hand-wrapped box which contained this necklace, which he purchased with the remainder of the entry-fee money. I felt honored.
Every time I wear it, I remember a school boy’s crush, the delight and drive of curiosity and the moxie to seek another way.