INSTITUTIONAL HIGHLIGHTS Student Works
SPRING AND SUMMER, 2017 by Hannah Schoettmer (IAA 19-20)
Back when Charley went by Charlotte, she took me to get soup and complain at a diner just outside the city limits. She bought a papaya from a fruit stand and told me to give it to a friend that I was fighting with, and I did, and he laughed at me. I started spending more time with Charlotte, learning about the Impossible Project and how they acquired Polaroid so now they’re basically Polaroid and what intermittent fasting is and how to trick yourself out of cutting your own bangs at night. She would tell me about her crush on Anakin Skywalker and then go back on that and talk about her crush on Noomi Rapace and then ask me if I’d ever considered going goth or soft girl or something more fun than glasses-wearing and skinny. She herself condensed all her eating into a six hour window and designed a diet consisting largely of hummus and tomato soup and cheat meals and would ask me for metabolism boosting tips. I told her try being born tall and she called me a jerk. I asked her how to stop letting people walk all over me and she said you should grow a pair . When Charlotte nicknamed herself Charley and went south, I realized that I should have left with her, a modern day Thelma and Louise except both the girls have square jaws and they’re on a pilgrimage to the bridge that Kurt Cobain slept under when his parents kicked him out. Instead, I fantasized about the things I thought Charley would be doing—going to the city pool to be baptized
by a Shakira impersonator from Orange County. Shooting an airsoft gun. Taking a papaya, a big green firm unripe one,
and launching it like a bottle rocket so it spun and turned and splatted on the top of a parking garage. Piercing her nose. I began a quest to become Charley. I spun out and skipped town and drove 11 hours to Idaho so I could light a candle on top of a hill that I first visited when I was fourteen and eat Trader Joe’s sushi and Google photos of Noomi Rapace in her goth getup and sit with her, watch the cars on the expressway and laugh at them. When I got home I looked up Charley on Instagram and found out she’d enrolled in a city college, shaved half her head, gotten a cat named Lucille. I considered going to the barber shop, but instead I started Googling colleges on the East Coast and best dog breeds for small spaces and how to grow out your hair .
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2020 ANNUAL REPORT
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