OPRF

“Simon**, you hyped for today's game?”

“Actually, no, we are all getting mic’d up for the entire game”

Mic’d up? Our football team? “Five years ago there was a claim made that some racial slurs were being used by a coach here or something, now they are making a documentary.”

Bemused, I slowly consumed each bite of the information I heard. The first taste was sour, a little bit of anger, this wouldn’t happen at our school, but that quickly became an aftertaste in a nanosecond. The news mellowed out and I processed it with all of my educational abilities, applying my context clues and my prior knowledge. Homogenous, white, rich, affluent, high-achieving, Hinsdale Central. It was bound to happen, bound to have conflict. That little snippet of information spread like wildfire across the following days.

Tuesday crept up stealthily as it does. A fire alarm of a wakeup sound jacked and jumped as the blurry, white letters read 6:05. It took me another nanosecond to process where I was, what day it was, what I had dreamed about, and that it was a Citizens Club day. Stumbling around in the dark, I reached for my phone. The instant bang of light sprang all my senses into rapid, dramatic action.

Text from Jensen Spears**: ‘I spoke to the department chair, we aren’t going to be able to talk about OPRF today.” Another nanosecond of shock, and then the mellow of reality. Hinsdale Central, high-achieving, demanding parents, loud community. Perfection. The happenings of that Friday night football game - so dramatic and drastic as they were - our mere club of overachieving nerds who wake up early to talk about politics was being censored. We were being censored from talking about it. Censored. The irony came as our group settled to talk about Chinese censorship for the morning. A constant process at Hinsdale Central, with a nanosecond of shock, followed by a mellow of reality. I should be far from shocked.

** The real name of the individual is not used here.