Diary of a Mad Senior
by ABBY DEUTSCH

We stopped on her corner.
"So I don't know," I said.
"Do what makes your heart sing," my friend said.
I didn't. I chose Stuyvesant.

It was spring 1998, and I was deciding between the Brearley School (all-girls, private, perfectly coiffed) and Stuyvesant, (gigantic, stressful, and far away). But Stuyvesant was free and exciting and full of opportunities, and my parents decided I should go there, and, a little weirded out by the Brearley girls' shiny hair, I halfheartedly agreed.

I agreed to one life-changing teacher, and nine great ones. I agreed to never knowing half my grade. I agreed to fascinating classmates. I agreed to loneliness. I agreed to English and history and disagreed with growing fervor to science and math. I agreed to September 11.

I was right to fear what I feared: Stuyvesant is big. It is stressful. The commute is draining. But there was so much I didn't predict: leaping down escalators after a boy I was half in love with informed me I was a poet; finding one soulmate, then another; discovering I wanted to major in history--no, French!--no, English! (Note that math and science, for which Stuyvesant is famous, never entered the equation...pun intended.)

Then there were weeks with little sleep. There were unreasonable academic expectations--especially this year, when many of us were so upset about September 11 we could barely focus on schoolwork at all. There was the feeling that you could walk down hallways crying and no one would see you.

So here's the truth: my heart didn't always sing. Sometimes it squawked, and sometimes it let out a desperate little whimper. But sometimes it did sing, and sometimes it sang like Pavorotti: loudly, with vibrato, oddly deep (considering I'm a girl). It sang like that during my English classes. It sang like that when it was snowing outside and I couldn't tell the river from the sky from the piers. It sang like that when, even as a senior, I made new friends.

The question is, if you go to a concert, and Pavorotti's singing, and some doofus a couple seats away is whimpering, what will you remember: the heavenly tenor, or the whimpers? I hope when I look back at Stuy I will be able to put aside my reservations and focus on the happy-birthday signs, the impassioned classroom discussions, punctuated by laughter, the sound of the chorus rising through stairwells--the good stuff that was there the whole time.

--Abby Deutsch