A Disappointing Road Trip - Revisiting Maggie L. Walker High School 18 years later
Over the weekend, I made a trip down to Richmond, Virginia. It started off well, sprinkles of rain, puddles every which way. Such things have never bothered me. Hell, it could have been a downpour and I would have still went. Nevertheless, the plan was to visit a school that once rejected my application, Maggie L. Walker. I have no ill feelings towards this high school, even though I did fail to get in. This was many moons ago however, and besides, nowadays, I attend Georgetown University.
Upon arriving at the campus, I was surprised to see how small it looked from the outside. I remember that it once loomed large over my head. As back then, I thought that if I was to attend an elite college in the future, I’d first have to pass through those doors. The first time I visited the campus, there was a teacher who was talking about how they had two students last year get accepted to Yale. My parents were walking in front of me, talking to the faculty member about how I could get into Maggie Walker. They told them I’d have to take a test, which I eventually did, and failed.
I was in a large room with at least fifty other students taking the entrance exam to the high school. It was a nerve wracking experience, and I kept scratching my head with a pencil. I would drag the graphite back and forth along my scalp, stop at a particularly itchy section of hair, then scrape rapidly before stopping. Eventually, a girl turned and looked at me from her desk and blurted out, “will you stop doing that!” I was stunned, and incredibly embarrassed. Worse, I couldn’t even apologize because she turned back towards her test without a second glance. The silence was deafening, and I eventually went back to staring at the odd shapes on my test. I remember them being a long marching line of spatial reasoning questions. Asking me if when I mentally turned one of the odd looking shapes, how it would look if rotated left or right. I never did get my score back, and I was never accepted to the regional magnet high school.
As I drove by so many years later, I went to pull out my phone to take a picture of the grey, dingy looking building. Unfortunately, a little girl and her father were randomly sitting on the steps leading up to the main structure. This made the scene nothing short of ironic and disappointing, mainly because I’d purposefully chosen a rainy day, just to make sure there would be no people around to obstruct the view of the school. Perhaps I could have parked and gotten out of my car, but… then I’d be a random guy taking a picture of a high school on a Sunday morning. Not necessarily a crime, but most definitely not a good look.
“Well,” I thought, “guess it wasn’t meant to be.”
After another fifteen minutes, I’d arrived at my second destination, the Virginia Capitol Building, a place I once visited as a middle schooler on a field trip. As luck would have it though, upon nearing the entrance, a single red light away. I came upon a, “do not enter” sign leading towards the visitor center. The entire view was also blocked by a massive row of buildings. So I couldn’t even see the statues, and the actual building I’d driven an hour and a half to see. Throwing up my hands, I completely gave up. This type of travel experience was so typical of America, that I suddenly, and rudely recalled why I usually don’t bother doing much of anything with regards to trips in, or around major cities.
With my lid of disappointment sealed, I began my trip back home. On the way back however, there was something that I was appreciative of, Dairy Queen. Yes, I got lucky and found a Dairy Queen with a drive through, something which the DMV area cannot seem to conjure up anywhere in the city. I managed to get my hands on a reese's blizzard, and enjoy the treat within the comfort of my car, in a gas station parking lot. This may sound dingy, because it is. However, I was just glad to defeat the ghouls of disappointment at least once that day, since I had racked up so many losses as it relates to the actual reason I drove to Richmond in the first place.
Hello! We’re D.J. Hoskins
We are Davena and Jason Hoskins, co-authors of 50+ books and siblings who write under the pseudonym D.J. Hoskins. Three years apart and in our twenties, we have been fascinated by stories from a young age. Davena is a student attending Pembroke College, Cambridge, and Princeton University, and Jason attends Georgetown University.
