No Hard Feelings
by Ken Hogarty
part 1
I recall first laying eyes on you. Your dad and I had been searching for you before the June Creativity/Curiosity Workshop welcomed your cohort to our High Potential Program. We spotted you sitting on the carpet, your back to a library shelf, legs splayed in front of you.
Your incoming freshmen classmates-to-be were gathering unseen at the far end of the brightly lit, impeccably furnished top floor library. Most had drifted alone from the elevator past computer stations, or with elementary school friends. Few parents accompanied them upstairs for that high school preview experience: “Some kids are shy.”
I bent over backwards mollifying your dad. “Faryn likes attention and doing things her way.” He startled me, exposing you so nakedly. As if on camera, you looked up and smiled at your dad and at me.
In personal fragments you later willed into narrative about your father leaving after your mom’s depression bouts, you referred to yourself as Strawberry Girl, alluding to your hair, freckles, and complexion. On that foggy San Francisco morning, you looked like a strawberry freshly ripened. You soothingly appeased us: “Needed a minute. Today might change my life.” Your words dripped sweet, without the edge I grew to love, common among favorite students.
“So that’s how your name’s pronounced,” I remarked. “Faryn, like Karen with an ‘F.’” In preparation for the two-day workshop to pique your cohort’s interest while bonding newbies through collaborative activities, I had re-enacted my new-students ritual: perusing the class list, familiarizing myself with names, imagining what students would be like.
In my first-year teaching in the early ’80s, I came across the name Albuquerque Greene. The gawky kid who went by “Kirk,” later confided that he’d been named for his place of conception. Like reading good stories, this ritual often provided surprises.
I knew kids in your class from siblings, others from our Admission Director. I didn’t, however, know how to pronounce your name, assuming I’d learn it during our introductory activity.
You know our school’s 1300 students sported unique names: Thai names, Greek names, Vietnamese names, Russian names, Eastern European and South American names, Latin-American names, Irish names, etc. It took months to learn to say, yet alone spell, Chakan Usvathongkul or pronounce Siobhan or Saoirse’s name.
“She won’t get Fs,” your dad interrupted, but you gave me one of your big smiles with which you’d charm your way through high-school interactions. “But, yes, Faryn with an ‘F,’” your dad as spokesman agreed.
“I’ll call you Farenheit 451,” I tossed off, figuring you’d miss the literary allusion until later when reading Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder in English class. You remember? The story about the time traveler who steps off his assigned path and squashes a butterfly, changing everything when he returns to the present. Synopsizing Bradbury’s novel then, though we’d read more contemporary novels — your favorites: Bless Me. Ultima, Mango Street, and Their Eyes Were Watching God — is when I anticipated you’d get the connection.
You, however, astounded me, gazing up with your big blues while breathlessly asking, “You think I’m hot? Like the book-burning temperature in that novel?”
Embarrassed, I stole a glance at your father. He looked... bemused... bewildered... bewitched? You might recall I stammered something about your literary precociousness. You, however, inviting a reaction rather than a response, assuredly sprang up to pass us and assume your place among your peers. After muttering something insipid to your father, I followed.
By the end of two days of interactive lateral thinking activities, you had mesmerized your classmates. And me.
They marveled when you revealed your completed creativity “test,” where you connected all four boxes, originally with just a scribble in each like a Rorschach test. You fashioned an actual storyboard rather than the clever, individually titled products others devised. Yes, Reid finished his colorful, fleshed out, individual stories upside down and sideways and literally out of the boxes, but, fittingly, he didn’t link them like you.
In the Marshmallow Challenge, teaming, as I recall, with Emma, Hugh, and Tobe, you won the competition, fudging the rules a bit to erect the highest structure still standing exactly 18 minutes after starting. Other teams watched their creations, fashioned with twenty pieces of spaghetti and a yard of tape and string, unravel when, time expiring, they teased marshmallows on top. Your team’s edifice, with taped pasta pieces crawling up the wall adjacent to your team’s table but with its base connected, stood the tallest ever, though bent.
You floored me again with the last activity, a workshop staple since I innovated the High Potential Program decades ago. You’ll recall the four students in each group collaborated to put 26 objects from their persons or backpacks on the desk, each representing a name starting with a different letter of the alphabet.
Years before, when I subbed in a rowdy Psych class, a senior dropped a condom on a desk (“C for condom?”; “P for Prophylactic?”; “R for Rubber?”). When I saw a sports bra on your table (“U for Underwear”), brazen for an eighth grader, I knew it was yours.
* * *
During junior year, while discussing your future at Reed or Antioch or Kenyon, you had that thing, you’ll remember, with Mr. Corcoran. Still not sure what to call it, though you called it harmless. Maybe, to you. Your dad was out the door by then, and your mom was succumbing to the drugs and alcohol about which you confided to me.
Cork was a weird duck: staunchly Christian, seven kids, socially obtuse, non-deodorant user, back hair creeping Neanderthal-like from his shirt, strange interactions with students and teachers.
Though he didn’t last five years, he made my faculty’s informal Hall of Shame. Besides hitting the catcher with a bat when he took what looked like his first ever swing in the senior/faculty softball game your sophomore year, he proposed changing our age-old school nickname to something asinine like the U.C. Santa Cruz Banana Slugs. He also suggested the Chess and Step Teams become varsity sports and that we teach history classes chronologically backwards.
The latter might have had some merit if his department hadn’t thought he was an obtuse contrarian. He drove the administration, especially Mr. Dickerson, crazy. His oldest daughter came to school the year you graduated, shut down and freaked out by him like many of his students, until both left for a Christian school near Sacramento.
Yet, the buzz around school held that you, as if starring in Shrek or Phantom of the Opera, sat holding hands in the front seat of the bus all the way back from the Tahoe ski trip he chaperoned. Other kids claimed he nuzzled up, unloading to you about his wife and the restraints she and his belief system laid on him. You denied being anything other than empathetic, but you’ll remember I warned you he puffed up just mouthing your name, even after Mr. Dickerson, Dean then before he became Principal, pulled you out of his class and threatened to fire his tenured ass if he got anywhere near you.
I still marvel how unaffected you seemed with the resulting teenaged taunts, whispers, and jokes. It surprised me you hadn’t written about him, or the innuendos and social media posts targeting you, in the writing journal you handed me the week before graduation. The one you said to keep for you because, like Huck Finn, you were going to strike out for new territory, leaving everything in the rear-view.
In a journal entry, you loved my advice not to fear forcing a moment to its crisis, recognized my teaching you not what to think but how to think, and seemed to heed my mantra that people reveal themselves through their language. And to make your own choices, to choose your own path. Maybe, I should have listened carefully to my own words.
* * *
You also wrote about Senior Seminar and its three-hour nighttime discussion classes with primary source readings from Plato and Aristotle to Greer and Kaku. I still find the way you posed your journal’s story of the Wednesday night class before Christmas vacation captivating, playing off Biblical allusions to bring the night’s essence front and center.
During that class, you’ll remember, you dramatically read MLK’s incredible 310-word sentence from “Birmingham Jail,” or “BJ” as Reid flippantly teased, as if to make illegitimate your seriousness of purpose. You marveled at how King keeps readers waiting for the periodic sentence’s last word, “wait,” while emphasizing his people’s pain in being forced to do so.
As we wrapped up, classmates gave quick previews of proposed January Projects, the one in which you spent your hundred hours learning trapeze, with an academic thread about the physics of motion. Some of the crasser boys inferred you took the circus classes at Kezar Pavilion just so you could strut in your cute little performance outfit during our early February presentations during which you showed your filmed “act” and explained trapeze jargon, verbally and with props.
Phrases and words still stick in my memory: “first and final position,” “a ‘hocks-style’ knee hang,” “staying tight,” and “swinging, hanging, and remounting.” Having your hands chalked up enlivened your presentation, though it was what Reid called your “pole-dancing outfit” that stood out in his peer evaluation. I think he was one of many intimidated by but enamored with you.
As nine o’clock neared, Jordan, the last to speak, didn’t address his proposal. Jordan, the Filipino kid who had won the AP History class award the year before, the award you thought you deserved, announced he had missed school for a couple weeks because he had slit his wrist. I knew the story, but he hadn’t yet told classmates, noting painfully how he always smiled around school but felt nobody really took the time to know him or care about him.
Copyright © 2026 by Ken Hogarty
