Recoil

When George W. Bush was re-elected in 2004, I was a month away from turning 17 years old and was settling into my junior year of high school. Like most teenagers not yet eligible to vote, I wasn't much interested in politics. I had a fuzzy sense that I agreed more with the Democrats than the Republicans, and that Bush had turned out to be something of a doofus as a president, but my political leanings ended there.

At 7:20 a.m. on the day after Election Day (which my computer's calendar function tells me was Wednesday, November 3, 2004), I walked into my first-period class, Drawing III. I sat at my drawing table and waited in anticipation for Suzie.

Suzie and I were both high-achieving SuperNerds who also really loved art classes. Semester after semester, Suzie and I ravenously and systematically took every art course our school offered: 2D and 3D Art, Drawing I-III, Painting I-II, Graphic Design I-II, AP Studio Art. We weren't friends outside of art class -- we probably could have been, but we moved in different circles and didn't feel the need to expand our social lives to include one another -- but we were steadfast art-class buddies, and over the course of four years we both came to love and look forward to the 40 minutes of every day that we would spend chatting over our canvases or charcoals.

Even though she was also a 16-year-old nonvoter in 2004, Suzie was extremely passionate about the election. (She was passionate in general about politics and government. For a painting class, she once produced a 24x36-inch oil painting depicting a caricature of Karl Rove controlling Bush with puppet strings.) Leading up to the presidential election, Suzie spent many art-class periods attempting to explain the issues to me and get me to care about them as much as she did. She regarded Bush as a war-mongering tyrant and Kerry as the great redeemer for a country going sorely awry. She would ask for my opinion on things like welfare and would correct me as I haplessly responded in vague generalities half-remembered from the news. I, meanwhile, regarded her zeal as a sort of charming personality flaw. I spent most of high school trying desperately not to take anything too seriously, and the gravity with which she took the election struck me as amusingly eccentric.

And so, on that Wednesday morning, knowing that Bush had defeated Kerry, I waited for Suzie's arrival. The morning prior, on Election Day, she had dressed in patriotic colors and insisted to me, in so many words, that the world would literally end if Bush was re-elected.

Just before the bell rang at 7:25, Suzie entered the studio, gathered her materials, and wordlessly took her seat at the drawing table facing mine. For several minutes, we both worked on our projects in silence. Every 30 seconds or so I would glance up in her direction, but Suzie kept her eyes on her paper. She knew that I was breathlessly waiting to hear what she would say on this, the day of Armageddon.

Finally, at around 7:32, Suzie set her pencil down with a snap and looked up. In a fierce and aggravated voice, she declared, "Bush won, but our country lost." For a moment, she glared at me in anger at the indignity of it all. Then the edge of her mouth flickered.

I burst out laughing.