The Harvard High School seniors were only 14 years old, gangly and geeky and unenlightened 8th graders, when they filled out “time capsules to be opened on graduation day, in the year 2000.”
In loopy handwriting that has changed over the years (“nobody dots their i’s with hearts or daisies anymore”) they recorded their predictions. And wishes. And testaments to who they were before they had to grow up.
There was the girl who wrote, “I will have a kid by 18.” She did.
There was the boy who described his family as “a mom and dad and brother and sister.” Nothing’s changed, except mom and dad live in separate houses, and dad just took a new bride.
There was the girl who wished for a boyfriend. She found him, but he dumped her, and nothing has been the same since.
There was the boy who wished for good times and success. He found them, but he broke somebody’s heart along the way.
There was the girl who left the “my predictions for the year 2000” entry blank. All this time later, she’s still trying to come up with a good response.
The teenagers giggled and blushed and poked fun–one girl cried–as they read what they had written before they knew what they know. Then, when the familiar strains of “Pomp and Circumstance” started, they marched forward, all 112 of them, leaving their time capsules scattered and crumpled behind them.
Standing there in black caps and gowns and National Honor Society badges and new dress shoes and too-tight ties, they looked exactly the same as the generations that had come before. But there was something different too.
The valedictorian clutched a typewritten speech that contained the observation, “We are the culmination of 1,000 years worth of hopes and dreams.” And the district’s school board president was going to synthesize it even better:
“Maybe we can learn a little about the world we live in by looking at these kids we’re producing–who they are and where they’re going.”
Against the odds
The baby, in her one stroke of perfect timing, came during Harvard High School’s winter break.
Her mother was just 17, a popular, pretty girl named Crystal Smith who wore maternity clothes to the homecoming dance, worked two exhausting jobs and had a meager–but growing–savings account.
“She’s perfect,” Crystal said when she saw the baby. For the child’s first name she chose Brookelynn, after a far-off place she had never seen, and for a middle name she picked Ann, after her favorite high school English teacher.
Brookelynn wasn’t one of those babies who slept through the night well before anyone expected her to. She cried, and she was always hungry. Winter break didn’t last nearly long enough.
In the hallways of Harvard High School, Crystal often looked like she was sleepwalking; her mom took care of the baby while Crystal worked and attended math class, but things were anything but easy.
Crystal decided from the beginning not to glorify her situation to the young girls around her. She loved her baby, but she didn’t walk around school with pictures illustrating the cuddly side of this life she had chosen. Instead, her classmates saw that she sometimes had dried spit-up on her shoulders and circles under her eyes and C’s on her civics papers when she knew that she could have earned A’s if she’d had the time or energy.
“I tell everyone, `Don’t even think about doing this.’ It’s hard. It’s so hard,” she said.
She started dating again, this time a longtime family friend who is three years older, a responsible guy who attends college and isn’t embarrassed to have a car seat in the back of the Chevy. She went to prom–almost six months to the day after she had gone to homecoming with swollen ankles and maternity clothes–and was back down to a strapless Size 5. And despite raising a daughter and working 40 hours a week as a nurse’s aide and waitress, she earned a diploma, a piece of paper she hopes will eventually propel her to nursing school.
So when she opened her time capsule at graduation on May 24, Crystal couldn’t help but laugh, as though it were a bizarre moment of comic relief, when she read her “prediction for the year 2000.” Her response makes you wonder if Crystal Smith was simply dealt a tough hand, or if she cheated and grabbed the cards she wanted: I will have a kid by 18.
“Maybe I always knew how my life was going to turn out,” she said.
Picture perfect–almost
Adam Morris has never smoked a cigarette. Or tapped a keg. And drugs, no. Adam wouldn’t smoke a joint if the surgeon general himself handed it to him.
In an age when people view teenagers through the lens of Columbine and MTV, Adam Morris is a throwback. He would have been just as comfortable in a 1956 high school classroom as he was in one in 2000.
“I’ve just really loved school,” he said, and though he doesn’t say the “aw, shucks” out loud, it’s there.
If the Harvard High School senior class had an unofficial mascot, it would be Adam, all 5-foot, 4-inches of him, from his never-stationary feet to his wild mass of copper, curly hair. Sometimes his classmates tease him, but mostly they listen to him, even when he drives them a little crazy by acting as the self-elected conscience of the class.
Adam was the one who chastised the entire senior and sophomore classes when, in misguided homecoming zeal, they launched a paintball-gun war in the woods surrounding Harvard, slightly injuring one 10th grader.
Adam was the one who lectured the senior guys not to call their prom-night limo driver “Jeeves” because, “hey, it’s kinda rude.”
And Adam was the one who rounded up his classmates to attend some of the less popular seniors’ graduation parties so “they wouldn’t feel bad.”
People often tell Adam’s mom, Cori Morris, that she’s got a fine boy there, and she likes to beam and say, “I sure think so, but it’s nice to hear other people say it.”
But if Adam breaks most of the stereotypes of what typifies the modern American teenager, he upholds one. Like at least half of his peers, he’s a product of divorce. His parents get along–his dad came over to his mom’s house to see Adam off in his Regis Philbin-esque black suit and shiny tie for the senior prom–but the couple called it quits almost four years ago.
“It’s OK,” Adam said. “I mean, it was hard at the time, but it’s OK now.”
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Who’s to say why anyone turns out as they do, but Adam Morris has one overriding personality trait: He’s hell-bent on keeping people together. He was named “outstanding senior” for his commitment to his class. He’s always organizing class barbecues and senior bonfires and, just last weekend, at his graduation party, he sat in the grass with a dozen of his classmates, dreaming about their five-year reunion.
“I’ll organize it if I have to,” he said, adding that he’ll probably have a psychology degree from the University of Illinois by then. “But I want us all to still be friends–even then.”
Not according to plan
Here’s how senior year was supposed to go for Hannah Kirkland and Justin Cahill, the senior class’ perfect couple:
Same class schedules, and teachers who didn’t care if they kissed in the halls. The perfect homecoming, with the home team winning the big game. Prom in black tie, slow-dancing until dawn. Then, after graduation, an amicable breakup as they headed off to different colleges, friends forever.
The way it really worked was that their teachers snapped at them for groping by their lockers, the home team got pummeled, prom was a bust and the breakup was anything but amicable.
After Justin broke up with her this spring, Hannah cried every day at school. The guidance counselor was called in. Teachers worried. Already rail thin, Hannah lost weight and couldn’t sleep, and no one in school could avoid her angst.
None of them would have said it to the kids, but some teachers talked about how high school has changed. It moves fast, gets too serious too soon, they said. Things weren’t like this back before an entire generation was raised on “Dawson’s Creek” and “Beverly Hills 90210.”
“He was my first love,” Hannah said recently. “I sometimes wonder if I’ll ever get over it. I didn’t think it would turn out like this.”
“I can’t believe it has become this,” Justin said. “It’s just a mess. I figured we’d just be friends and everything would be OK.”
“It’s like the breakup was this little obstacle for him, and he jumped right over it,” Hannah said, bitterly pointing out that Justin is dating already–of course, she is too. “But me–I’m drowning.”
Tell them that someday they will hardly remember this episode, and they won’t believe you.
They’ve made plans for the future. Justin is headed to the University of Wisconsin at Madison; Hannah will attend Lake Forest College. They avoid each other for the most part. But graduation day, in cap and gown, they talked briefly, leaning up against a row of lockers.
For a moment, it almost looked like old times.
Weight of the world
The future can be a slippery thing.
Just when you think you have it pinned down, under control, it slithers right through your fingers. Ask Sara Evans.
First it was one college, one career. Then another. At one point she was spending as much time talking to the school guidance counselor about financial aid as she was with her girlfriends gossiping about prom dates.
“I just don’t know,” was her pat answer for every question that dealt with the day after tomorrow.
It’s not that Sara is indecisive. She’s serious. She thinks a lot and analyzes a lot; her face is a study in concentration.
When a popular Harvard teacher lost his young wife to a car accident just before homecoming, Sara was the girl who wondered aloud whether it was appropriate for the school to go through such immature and lighthearted tomfoolery when one of their own was hurting.
“What a year,” she said, taking her graduation gown off the hanger.
Has she settled on a plan for the fall?
West Virginia Wesleyan College, she says. For sure. Probably.
One more time
Here’s the thing about high school: It’s never different and it’s never the same. Next year, Goth will be out and no one will be caught dead wearing Capri pants, but someone will fall in love and someone will flunk algebra and someone will wear a turtleneck to hide a hickey, and then sometime in the future, Capri pants will be all the rage again.
Every senior class thinks that no class will ever be quite like them, but then a new crop of 17-year-olds comes along.
Eric Korslin knows all about living down Harvard High School legends. On graduation day, watching his sister Michelle get her diploma, he was sitting next to his own living legacy: his brother, Michael, Harvard’s best quarterback, now a quarterback at the University of Wisconsin.
Football is religion in Harvard, and people expect to see the Hornets win. Last year, as a sophomore, Eric was asked to step in as quarterback after an injury felled an upper classman. At 15, he was supposed to fill his brother’s famous shoes.
He did. He’ll do it again, as a junior, in the coming season. Where the radio play-by-play guys had nicknamed Michael “Air Korslin,” they christened Eric “Cool Cat Korslin.” He’s getting used to the pressure now.
Eric’s got a girlfriend. And a driver’s license. Summer won’t last long enough.
A few weeks ago, Eric participated in a longtime Harvard tradition that always takes place on the seniors’ last day.
The entire school is called to the gymnasium–along with the 8th graders from the middle school across the street. As the seniors are dismissed for the last time, the juniors move into their empty chairs, then the sophomores into the juniors’ chairs, then the freshmen, then the 8th graders.
“High school only rolls around once,” their principal, Gary Calsyn, lectured them that morning. “So when you settle into your new chairs, you better be prepared to enjoy them while you have them.”
Graduation day
One by one, alphabetically from Adams to Woods, school board President Bill Crowe announced the graduates.
“Justin Conway Cahill.” With honors.
“Sara Beth Evans.” With a plan for the future. Mostly.
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“Hannah Louise Hill Kirkland.” With a smile, finally a smile.
“Adam William Morris.” With honors. With honor.
“Crystal Lorraine Smith.” With the odds stacked against her.
When the last graduate had her diploma, the Class of 2000 threw confetti and streamers and Silly String, everything but their hats because hat-throwing had been banned by school administrators worried that someone might get an eye poked out and file a multimillion-dollar lawsuit.
“Can you believe we can’t throw our caps?” Adam asked. “Man, haven’t times changed?”