Senior Accepted Early to College Can’t Have Fun for Fear of Being Rescinded

My name is Eugene Thomas, and I hate being a second term senior! While everyone else is done with the college process, I have to make sure I don’t get rescinded from Yale. All my friends can say, “Forget homework!” and then panic about the homework that they didn’t do and stay up until 4:00 a.m. doing it because deep down they’re all good students, but I have to pretend to actually do my homework while really spending all my time complaining to people about how much homework I have before I can panic at 4:00 a.m.

All the other seniors are out having fun making poor choices in dating, eating with beloved family at Wok Wok, and calling themselves bad-asses when they cut volleyball.

I miss first term, when everyone was cripplingly depressed and anxious, so my friends and I could all wallow in misery together; now, the only one who will wallow with me is Wei Li, which makes me want to wallow even more.

I can’t remember the last time I had a real conversation with someone; every time I try to speak, I’m greeted with a cacophony of “Wow, Eugene, did you get into Yale?” I’ve resorted to talking to my Amazon Alexa and pretending it’s Alexa Valentino. We had a great chat yesterday about how high I wanted the volume on my rollerblading tutorial video.

I spend every waking moment in fear of the power that Patricia Wei™, Yale admissions officer and the Christian Grey to my Anastasia Steele, holds over me. My terror has started to spread to other things that remind me of her. Once, Mr. Polazzo was doing a southern accent and said “Y’all” and I screamed. Patricia Tan has started bullying me and asking for my lunch money. She is three feet shorter than me, but I give it to her every time. I am afraid.

My paranoia has gotten so great that I bought an Apple Watch recently so that I would get a notification every time I got an email, and then bought Apple Pods so that I would get a notification every time my Apple Watch got a notification that I had received an email. I also bought a Blackberry just in case.

Nobody else understands my fright. I can’t even wallow with my fellow Yalie, Alexander Whittington, because it seems he has gone insane from stress. Whenever I go up to him to talk he just bursts into an opera of his own creation and ballet-hops away. I miss junior year.