As Leaving Cert Results land and anxious students around the country tot up their points and consider their options, one writer remembers the night her future was decided, or so she thought… It was a
golden brown envelope, soft to touch and miniature in size. As the school principal handed it to me I wondered was it relief that I detected in her smile, or sympathy – shared regret. I couldn’t read her little tight-lipped spectral grin. And when I joined the spilling crowds of girls outside the building and gingerly opened the envelope I had to stare for some time at the piece of paper it contained. I trained my eyes along the column of numbers, up and down.
My principal’s smile had been one of congratulations, because she was happy for a student that had failed tests and underperformed through secondary school, who’d stopped attending class at various stages, a student for whom expulsion loomed. During most of my fourteen years of schooling, I had no understanding of schoolwork; lessons all just drifted meaninglessly past my head, over my more interesting daydreams. My parents had despaired.
Maybe it was the wrong door – I must have the wrong exit, I thought. I didn’t own a mobile phone; my mother and I shared one, implausibly. I didn’t even have an email address; mobile phones and emails were only just becoming necessary human trackers, in a time that also saw the aftershocks of 9/11 and the beginning of the so-called ‘War on Terror’; Roy Keane’s devastating departure during the World Cup; boomtime in Ireland and the advent of fake tan.
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