Sounds Like Titanic - Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman Page 0,2

carries a large grocery bag brimming with clothing and household items. You aren’t waiting for a train, you say, you are spending the night. She tells you that you should come sit with her in the passenger waiting area. But the sign says it’s for ticketed Amtrak passengers. You don’t want to get into trouble. Rose points out that you’ll get into plenty more trouble once the group of men lingering around a nearby trash can notices you are alone. Okay, you say. And so you sit with Rose in the Amtrak waiting area, and she teaches you how to tie your suitcase to your leg with a plastic bag so it won’t get stolen if you fall asleep.

You are spending the night in Penn Station because you have gone AWOL from the Air Force. Eighteen hours before Rose introduces herself to you in Penn Station, you took a plane then a bus and then a subway and then walked to Manhattan College (located in the Bronx) where you changed into an ROTC uniform and followed a drill sergeant into the swampy mid-August heat to run laps around a glass-strewn track. In those few hours you completed many pushups for your country.

After an hour of exercise in the muggy Bronx air, you and the other recruits are marched into a lecture room where you listen to a presentation about the U.S. Air Force winning the war in Kosovo. “We killed everyone we needed to kill from the air,” the drill sergeant says, as if this fact should fill you with pride, instead of surprise. You’ve never heard someone brag about killing people before. He adds that the era of “real wars” is over, but the Air Force will still be the first to respond if the United States needs to “bomb someone.”

After the lecture you are marched outside for an orientation session. You sit with a small group of your fellow ROTC recruits on a grassy hill. The sergeant asks everyone to go around the circle: State your name, where you will be attending college, and what you’ll be studying.

Hi, I’m Marcus, and I’ll be a freshman at the Queens School of Aeronautics where I’m going to study aviation and I want to be a pilot . . .

Hi, I’m Javier, and I’ll be a freshman at the Queens School of Aeronautics where I’m going to study aviation and engineering so I can be a pilot or an engineer . . .

Hi, I’m Tyrell, and I’ll be a freshman at the Queens School of Aeronautics . . .

Hi, I’m Jessica, and in a few weeks I’ll be a freshman at Columbia University where I’m planning to major in music—I play the violin! My parents can’t pay the tuition, so, uh, here I am! If music doesn’t work out, maybe I’ll major in anthropology or history . . . maybe art history! I have a lot of interests! Apart from a violinist, I’d like to be a journalist, but apparently Columbia thinks journalism is vocational, so, you know, I can’t major in it. But maybe music will work out . . . um, so, yeah, that’s me! Hi! Thanks!

It is the first time you have ever introduced yourself as a music major, and in saying it out loud it now occurs to you that it is true. This isn’t some faraway dream. You are eighteen years old and have arrived in the big city, THE big city, to study music. And as you listen to the other kids talk about their life goals, you realize something else: You are someone whose upbringing was upper class enough to make you believe you could make music for a living, but lower class enough to provide no knowledge of how to do it. As for the money, your parents abide by the prevailing cultural notions of rural Appalachia, where you grew up: Any tuition shortfall can be remedied by signing up for the military.

Later that night—your first in the city where you will live for the next ten years but one that you have no idea how to navigate—as you wonder where you will sleep (Penn Station sounds like a safe bet!) and how many subway tokens it will take to get there, you write a note to your drill sergeant:

Dear Drill Sergeant,

I have decided that ROTC is not for me. My mom made me sign up to pay for college, but I never wanted to do this. I want to be a violinist,