High Anxiety

An Arlington mother finds that, as the competition for college intensifies, ninth grade never seemed so important

Sebastian positions the bottle of chocolate syrup over his glass of milk and is beginning to give it a hard squeeze when I say casually, "There's a high school information meeting tonight at 7. Want to come?"

The almost empty bottle lets out a rude gassy noise. Sebastian says nothing until he's squeezed the last drops into his glass. He rights the bottle on the table and looks at me wearily, long curly hair almost obscuring his hazel eyes.

"Do I have to?"

I'd felt from the beginning that this was futile -- my casual tone had been a ruse -- but I give it one last try. "It might be a good idea. I bet a lot of your friends are going to be there."

He gives a derisive snort. "Yeah, right. If I go, no one will be there. If I don't, everyone will go. What's the point?" His spoon rattles loudly against the glass as he stirs, watching the brown liquid swirl.

Our son is poised on the knife's edge between middle and high school, and we have arrived -- as if by time machine, it seems -- at the moment when we must decide where he will spend his last four years of mandatory education.

We live in Arlington, and Sebastian has spent the first nine years of public school in partial Spanish immersion programs at Francis Scott Key Elementary School and Gunston Middle School. That's a choice my Colombian-born husband, Adolfo, and I made for our three sons, so they would grow up bilingual and get an early appreciation for their father's Latin background. Arlington's rich cultural and economic diversity is also why we've chosen to raise our kids here, in a county where the public schools' Web site boasts of its 19,000 students from more than 120 countries, speaking more than 100 different languages. The desire to continue this life education is about the only thing Adolfo and I are certain of as we embark on the journey to find the right high school for our oldest. It's hard to tell what Sebastian wants. He is reluctant to engage in the "which school" debate, but I sense his anxiety about the upcoming transition.

"I don't know," he says hollowly from the back seat one afternoon on the way to a tennis class. "I just think about the fact that all the credits are gonna count. What if I totally tank?"

"You're a good student," I reassure him, perhaps too brightly. "A smart kid! You'll be fine. Don't worry about it!"

Secretly, I wonder: Is he organized enough? Is he sufficiently motivated, ambitious, resilient, confident? Can he turn down the amp in his brain long enough to write those papers?

High school prepares you for college, college prepares you for life.

Ergo: High School = The Rest of Your Life. So here we all are, parents and child, facing an assignment that feels weighty enough to crush us all under its terrible implication: