Last year on July 21, I moved from Kansas to Illinois, a drastic change. Dodge City is a small town in Kansas, and the term ¨city¨ did no justice to its actual size; everyone in town knew each other, almost like the countryside, and there was only one high school in all of Dodge City.
Dodge City High School is a very compact community. Both my sophomore and junior year were in DCHS and I had never attended any school events, such as homecoming. I wondered how it would be coming from Egypt to the states because there weren’t many of these celebratory school events. Due to religious guidelines, I never went to any, but this year marks my fourth and last year of high school, so I was very intrigued by the experiences my friends shared with me about school events. The dresses, jewelry, music and dancing all sounded so fun and inviting.
That Saturday marked my first and last homecoming. It was an overwhelming experience, not an enjoyable one. Initially, the night started off well; however, the lines were astonishingly long, something I didn’t see coming partly because I didn’t expect school events to be such an immense thing. I saw that almost all of the school participated, which just made me reflect on how much I’d missed out in the past.
At first, everything turned out as I imagined: the beautiful sparkly dresses, the radiant crowds and formal suits– that is, until I entered the building with two of my female Muslim friends. We headed straight to the gym, where the music blasted, and the disco lights flashed with a mass crowd jumping to the music; this is when I knew that this was going to be my last time ever attending anything like this.
The attitude towards the music seemed to be highly subjective. Most people enjoyed it, such as my friends. On the other hand, I didn’t. I felt so out of character and somewhat guilty; generally, it’s against my religion to listen to music with instruments– not only that, but some songs seemed completely inappropriate for what is a ¨school¨ environment. My friends and I left the gym to go to the commons. We ate snacks and even talked about math. This was how bad it was.
Eventually, we returned, which ended up being a horrible idea. We saw large groups of students rushing to leave the main gym, and we were notified that someone had had a medical emergency. I heard others saying that it was a threat, and others said it was a fight. This marked my final decision to leave. I took my friends with me with thoughts of disappointment: Everything from the music and ambulance, to the fact that there was a threat. I ended the night with Burger King and went to sleep thinking about how horrible this was and how these events are ill-portrayed in the media. I thought about how completely different they were. This would be my last time doing something like this.
