A memory prompt written for Dirt + Diamonds, a creative non-fiction writing class taught by the legendary Molly Guy.
My mom insisted that I got my senior photos taken the summer before my senior year. I couldn’t just wait for school to start and roam the halls instead, returning to my classroom just before the bell rang, insisting to my teacher that there was a really long line to have pictures taken because everyone else was just dying to strike unnatural poses and I am simply polite.
She made the appointment months in advance and gave me little reminders almost hourly until the day came. I woke up early to straighten my hair, do my makeup, and drive myself to my high school so I could wait my turn for hours in a windowless room. I had to awkwardly socialize with people I intended on avoiding those few months but who had the same task of pleasing their parents.
The photos came in the mail a few weeks later and thank god Julie approved so I didn’t have to retake them. I could not fathom wasting any more time wearing the top half of a fake chiffon graduation gown nor balancing a plastic rose on my shoulder. I looked presentable enough to be mailed across the country and grace refrigerators everywhere for years to come. Those photos gave my parents bragging rights to tell our family members that they’d done it, they didn’t raise a total fuck up. That their daughter would cross a stage in June and receive a piece of paper that wouldn’t even make it out of its little folder before going directly into the trash. She’d walk among classmates who would drop out of community college after less than a year to pursue their lifelong callings of selling weed to minors. My family would all attend the ceremony, pressing me about people I haven’t spoken to since elementary school. “What happened to Olivia? We saw her there today. Where is she going to school next year?” We’d take staged photos in the entryway of the auditorium, alternating who got to stand on either side of me, centering my diploma. Aren’t you proud?
Every time I come home I see her framed throughout multiple points in our house like I’m dead or something. My parents’ crowning achievement is that girl, suspended in a moment in time, but never the one right in front of them who forgot to get the oil changed on the way home or pick up the extra milk her father asked for. She was a disappointment.