Just One More

One more to go, cockroaches. Not too shabby,” Fish said, right before they started handing out the paper and pencils again.

“Another quiz?” Carmen said as the other kids started to groan.

“Nope,” Pittman said. “These materials are all you’ll be taking with you this afternoon on your solos.”

“Our what-o’s?” Burp said.

“Solos,” Pittman said. “As in—on your own. It’s a time for you to sit quietly by yourself and reflect on what you want to take away from this experience.”

When I got my paper, I saw it was just a blank sheet.

“I don’t get it,” D.J. said. “What are these for?”

Fish took that one. “Each of you will use this time to write yourself a letter. In that letter, you will answer one question. And that question is: What do you want your life to look like one year from today? Think hard about it.

“At the end of your solos, when you’ve shown us that you’ve written a real letter, you will seal it in an envelope, address it to yourself, and hand it back to me. Then, one year from today, you can expect some mail.”

“Ooh, super-deep,” Carmen said with a snicker.

“Stow it, Carmen,” Fish said.

“How long do these solo things last?” Burp asked.

“All afternoon,” Fish said.

“And what do you mean, a real letter?” Diego said.

“We mean actual sentences. We mean more than one paragraph,” Pittman told us. “We do not mean writing I am so bored over and over on your page.”

“Anyone who chooses to not write the letter, or spends his or her solo goofing off, can expect to be packing his or her bags this evening,” Fish said. “My suggestion is—take it seriously, cockroaches.”

That’s when I started to figure out why this all felt kind of familiar. Hours of sitting there, alone, with nothing to do but some kind of homework? Yeah, I’d done this before, all right. In school. And more than once.

Maybe they called it a solo, but I knew was it really was.

This was an in-woods suspension.