Kristine Rusch - Red Letter Day

Graduation rehearsalmiddle of the afternoon on the final Monday of the final week of school. The graduating seniors at Barack Obama High School gather in the gymnasium, get the wrapped packages with their robes (ordered long ago), their mortarboards, and their blue and white tassels. The tassels attract the most attention everyone wants to know which side of the mortarboard to wear it on, and which side to move it to.

The future hovers, less than a week away, filled with possibilities.

Possibilities about to be limited, because its also Red Letter Day.

I stand on the platform, near the steps, not too far from the exit. Im wearing my best business casual skirt today and a blouse that I no longer care about. I learned to wear something I didnt like years ago; too many kids will cry on me by the end of the day, covering the blouse with slobber and makeup and aftershave.

My heart pounds. Im a slender woman, although Im told Im formidable. Coaches need to be formidable. And while I still coach the basketball teams, I no longer teach gym classes because the folks in charge decided Id be a better counselor than gym teacher. They made that decision on my first Red Letter Day at BOHS, more than twenty years ago.

Im the only adult in this school who truly understands how horrible Red Letter Day can be. I think its cruel that Red Letter Day happens at all, but I think the cruelty gets compounded by the fact that its held in school.

Red Letter Day should be a holiday, so that kids are at home with their parents when the letters arrive.

Or dont arrive, as the case may be.

And the problem is that we cant even properly prepare for Red Letter Day. We cant read the letters ahead of time: privacy laws prevent it.

So do the strict time-travel rules. One contactonly onethrough an emissary, who arrives shortly before rehearsal, stashes the envelopes in the practice binders, and then disappears again. The emissary carries actual letters from the future. The letters themselves are the old-fashioned paper kind, the kind people wrote 150 years ago, but write rarely now. Only the real letters, handwritten, on special paper get through. Real letters, so that the signatures can be verified, the paper guaranteed, the envelopes certified.

Apparently, even in the future, no one wants to make a mistake.

The binders have names written across them so the letter doesnt go to the wrong person. And the letters are supposed to be deliberately vague.

I dont deal with the kids who get letters. Others are here for that, some professional bullshittersat least in my opinion. For a small fee, theyll examine the writing, the signature, and try to clear up the letters deliberate vagueness, make a guess at the socioeconomic status of the writer, the writers health, or mood.

I think that part of Red Letter Day makes it all a scam. But the schools go along with it, because the counselors (read: me) are busy with the kids who get no letter at all.

And we cant predict whose letter wont arrive. We dont know until the kid stops mid-stride, opens the binder, and looks up with complete and utter shock.

Either theres a red envelope inside or theres nothing.

And we dont even have time to check which binder is which.

I had my Red Letter Day thirty-two years ago, in the chapel of Sister Mary of Mercy High School in Shaker Heights, Ohio. Sister Mary of Mercy was a small co-ed Catholic High School, closed now, but very influential in its day. The best private school in Ohio, according to some pollscontroversial only because of its conservative politics and its willingness to indoctrinate its students.

I never noticed the indoctrination. I played basketball so well that I already had three full-ride scholarship offers from UCLA, UNLV, and Ohio State (home of the Buckeyes!). A pro scout promised Id be a fifth-round draft choice if only I went pro straight out of high school, but I wanted an education.

You can get an education later, he told me. Any good school will let you in after youve made your money and had your fame. But I was brainy. I had studied athletes who went to the Bigs straight out of high school. Often they got injured, lost their contracts and their money, and never played again. Usually they had to take some crap job to pay for their college educationif, indeed, they went to college at all, which most of them never did.

Those who survived lost most of their earnings to managers, agents, and other hangers-on. I knew what I didnt know. I knew I was an ignorant kid with some great ball-handling ability. I knew that I was trusting and naive and undereducated. And I knew that life extended well beyond thirty-five, when even the most gifted female athletes lost some of their edge.

I thought a lot about my future. I wondered about life past thirty-five. My future self, I knew, would write me a letter fifteen years after thirty-five. My future self, I believed, would tell me which path to follow, what decision to make.

I thought it all boiled down to college or the pros.

I had no idea there would bethere could beanything else.

You see, anyone who wants toanyone who feels so inclinedcan write one single letter to their former self. The letter gets delivered just before high school graduation, when most teenagers are (theoretically) adults, but still under the protection of a school.

The recommendations on writing are that the letter should be inspiring. Or it should warn that former self away from a single person, a single event, or a single choice.

Just one.

The statistics say that most folks dont warn. They like their lives as lived. The folks motivated to write the letters wouldnt change much, if anything.

Its only those whove made a tragic mistakeone drunken night that led to a catastrophic accident, one bad decision that cost a best friend a life, one horrible sexual encounter that led to a lifetime of heartache who write the explicit letter.

And the explicit letter leads to alternate universes. Lives veer off in all kinds of different paths. The adult who sends the letter hopes their former self will take their advice. If the former self does take the advice, then the kid receives the letter from an adult they will never be. The kid, if smart, will become a different adult, the adult who somehow avoided that drunken night. That new adult will write a different letter to their former self, warning about another possibility or committing bland, vague prose about a glorious future.

Therere all kinds of scientific studies about this, all manner of debate about the consequences. All types of mandates, all sorts of rules.

And all of them lead back to that moment, that heart-stopping moment that I experienced in the chapel of Sister Mary of Mercy High School, all those years ago.

We werent practicing graduation like the kids at Barack Obama High School. I dont recall when we practiced graduation, although Im sure we had a practice later in the week.

At Sister Mary of Mercy High School, we spent our Red Letter Day in prayer. All the students started their school days with Mass. But on Red Letter Day, the graduating seniors had to stay for a special service, marked by requests for Gods forgiveness and exhortations about the unnaturalness of what the law required Sister Mary of Mercy to do.

Sister Mary of Mercy High School loathed Red Letter Day. In fact, Sister Mary of Mercy High School, as an offshoot of the Catholic Church, opposed time travel altogether. Back in the dark ages (in other words, decades before I was born), the Catholic Church declared time travel an abomination, antithetical to Gods will.

You know the arguments: If God had wanted us to travel through time, the devout claim, he would have given us the ability to do so. If God had wanted us to travel through time, the scientists say, he would have given us the ability to understand time traveland oh! Look! Hes done that.