Sydney’s eyes slowly opened. Her classmates were standing up, pulling on backpacks and stretching. Class must’ve ended, but she’d been asleep. That late-night job at Popeye’s was getting to her.
She popped a piece of gum in her mouth and slowly made her way out of the classroom. At the door, she once again noticed the now-faded sign Mr. Thompson had posted on the wall – “Stay on the path.”
What the heck did Thompson know about a path. She looked at the teacher – he was at his desk, his bifocals balanced on the end of his nose, as he frowned at the laptop screen.
They’d all heard about Thompson’s frustrations – he was secretly a rock star. Many times, they heard him brag about the gigs – did anybody really use that word anymore? – he’d snagged at some of the bars downtown.
But here he was, day after day, year after year, slaving away at teaching freshmen literature. She had no interest in Jay Gatsby or Daisy Buchanan. She had even less interest in Shakespeare.
“Follow your dreams,” Thompson would tell them. “Stay on the path, get a good college education and don’t forget to register to vote.”
What kind of mediocre dream was that Sidney would wonder. Not hers, that was for darned sure.
She yawned, melded into the crowd, and made her way to gym class. For the first time, Sydney wondered if anybody else questioned the sugary goop pedaled by teachers.
“Don’t follow the path. Blaze the trail,” was a poster on the wall in the gym. That was a direct contradiction to what Thompson had posted, but the gym teacher was certainly different than the rock star.
Ms. Booker was young, and rumor had it she’d been courted by the WNBA. For some reason, nobody really knew, Booker had finished her college basketball career and returned home to take a teaching and coaching job at Southmore High School.
Booker sure hadn’t blazed any trails. She’d followed the path and it landed her in this back-woods town in a dead-end job.
Sydney yawned again. She hated her job at the grease pit, even more so because she closed up at night. It wasn’t that Sydney was a go-getter – the late-night shift manager made more money, and Sydney had to hand her paycheck over to her mother.
That woman had followed a path all right. The same one her mother and grandmother had followed – get pregnant young, drop out of school, take a job making minimum wage and spend your later years with yellow teeth and nicotine-stained fingers, complaining about the landlord.
“Do better in life, Sydney,” her mother would tell her in a tired voice as she laid on the couch, surrounded by cigarette smoke.
Sydney pushed the image from her head and wondered if she could escape dressing out today. Maybe she could claim she was sick, or she’d pulled a calf muscle. But before she could approach the coach, Booker blew her whistle.
“Don’t even come up here and tell me you’re too sick to participate today,” she yelled. “Unless you’re bleeding from the ears or nose, you’re dressing out.”
So much for weaseling out of gym class, Sydney thought.
She dressed out in her smelly gym clothes, not caring that she smelled like day-old fried chicken. As she stood with her classmates, noticing with smug satisfaction that nobody stood too close to her, Booker began to talk.
“Today, we’re going to talk about motivation before I make you run laps around the court,” she said, holding a basketball under her right arm.
“My college coach had a saying – sometimes the right path is not the easiest,” she said. “That’s definitely true in here. Sydney, stop that yawning and spit out that gum.”
Sydney swallowed her gum, not caring if it rotted in her stomach for the next 75 years as her best friend had told her numerous times.
“But sometimes, the right path is the easiest one,” Booker said. “And today, the right path is running around this court twice and then taking a seat on the bleachers.”
She blew the whistle and indicated the girls should start running. Sydney didn’t mind the warm-up. Running was something she enjoyed. She had a course she followed in the evenings – around her block, cross the street to the abandoned house, down the sidewalk, being careful to avoid broken concrete and the barking pit bull, and then around the corner for the last leg home.
The mindless running allowed her time to think, time to sort out where she wanted her life to go. That’s the mindset she adopted as she ran around the basketball court, past the nicked-up bleachers, past the rack of basketballs and past the girls who brought doctor’s excuses and got out of running.
Sydney wondered if those girls had a path already forged for them. Excuses after excuses to get out of doing what needed to be done. Her mother certainly had her fair share of excuses – she couldn’t ask for a raise because she was afraid of her boss. She couldn’t look for a different job with better pay because she didn’t think she had the skills to get a better job.
She was on that same path she’d always been on, and she’d passed the same markers, the same rejections and put downs she’d always heard. Familiarity was comforting if not exciting.
Sydney had decided a long time ago that wouldn’t be her lot in life, but as she turned the last corner for her laps, she realized something. In her four years at this god-forsaken high school, for the hundredth time she’d seen that stupid sign, she hadn’t blazed anything. She wasn’t an honor student; she wasn’t the fastest runner and she wasn’t filled with creative ideas.
She was a plodder, somebody who followed the path that others had laid out years before. What if she made a change, she thought. What if she decided to take the road less traveled – she’d heard something about that in freshman literature class.
Without thinking, when Sydney turned that last corner, instead of heading to the bleachers, she kept running out the door, into the hall.
“Robinson, come back here,” she heard coach Booker yell. But Sydney wasn’t listening. She was on a different path, not the same one she’d been on for the past 16 years.
She wondered how far she could run before she either ran out of gas or the security guard caught up to her on the golf cart.
Only one way to find out, Sydney thought. Keep running on a different path, starting right now.
And so, she ran.