Strike Three

I have never seen anyone win a large prize at Strike Three.

For a while, I wasn’t quite sure why people played it. The carnival game looks insignificant compared to the other attractions in Krustyland. Turkey legs. Pelicans fighting the humans who bought said turkey legs. Swarms of tourists who seem to have forgotten their brains at home.

I spent my summers working at the “Krustiest Place on Earth,” donned in clown jail chic. There, I often ran Strike Three, a game that turned heads as sock bullets flew out of pressurized air canisters and collided with a pyramid of hollow metal Duff beer cans propped up on a ledge. Sitting targets.

Strike Three players get three attempts to knock six cans off the ledge simultaneously. Guests can only win the biggest prize if they hit all the cans all three times.

Thousands of people tried. The socks wore out. The metal cans got chipped from clinking against each other and falling on the cement floor. And the large baseball Homer plushies on display collected dust. The game was so difficult that the instructions had to be changed.

“This is the hardest game in the park. Just to let you know,” I’d say. They still wanted to play. Here we go again.

Usually on the first try, the player would aim the canister too low and hit the shelf, despite my constant pleas to aim high.

Strike one.

The next time, they’d aim a little higher and knock down around three cans. Not enough.

Strike two.

One more try. There’s no chance of snagging a big prize, but if they could knock all the cans down this time, they could still walk away with a soft baseball plush. Sometimes, they do. Most of the time, not quite.

Strike three. Y’er out.

“Thanks for playing,” I’d say.

“That’s it? No prize?” they’d ask.

I’d shake my head.

I never understood why anyone would attempt an impossible-to-win game, until I realized I played my own version of Strike Three.

I dreamed of being a valedictorian at Dr. Phillips High School.

I envisioned myself wearing the valedictorian stole as I led the procession at graduation. I would’ve given anything to rise from a black folding chair in the Amway Center, index cards gripped in my right hand as I strutted up to the stage to give my valedictorian speech.

“Grades don’t define you,” I’ve heard ad nauseam. Sure. But I still wanted a 4.0 GPA. Even though my friends didn’t exchange report cards like pen pal letters, and my parents never asked to see my grades except to get safe driver discounts.

No one cared.

I scribbled down homework answers as I scarfed down lunch. I fought with tired eyelids that twitched from stress, and no one was proud of me. No one was impressed.

No one cared.

As the youngest of three girls in my family, my accomplishments felt so insignificant compared to my parents’ mountain of more pressing matters, like spending long hours working or dealing with my oldest sister’s persistent stealing and lying. I wanted so badly for my parents to be proud of me, but nothing I did was ever enough. I thought that maybe if I won the game of high school, I’d turn heads. Maybe I could win my parents’ attention and affection, too.

But I fell short.

I received a B in three of my high school classes: European history, precalculus and anatomy and physiology. The way my grades slipped was always the same.

In the first two or three weeks of class, I tried not to panic. “My grade will go up,” I told myself. Sometimes, it did. But most of the time, it didn’t.

My European history e-book was too dry and longwinded to finish reading before tests. My eyes glazed over the content, and my low test grades dragged my class grade down to a B.

Strike one.

Halfway through the nine weeks of class, I’d switch into survival mode, double and triple checking every test question, fighting with every ounce of energy in me in the hope that I could garner enough points to hit at least a 90%. Even a single Duff beer can left standing led to ultimate loss.

My mind was as blank as the precalculus test in front of me. I learned the material in class but couldn’t remember the steps when it mattered most, resulting in another B.

Strike two.

By the last weeks of the quarter, I’d lost hope. I resigned myself to finishing with dignity.

My anatomy and physiology teacher constantly tried to catch me “cheating” and dissuaded my confidence in learning the challenging subject. My last B.

Strike three. I was out. I lost the game.

That’s it? No prize? Suddenly I felt like all those customers at Krustyland.

But those people lost their money and walked away with nothing. I, too, did not emerge at the top of my game, but I was no loser. I came to realize that my parents, the two people who loved me most, would continue to do so, no matter my grades.

They grew up poor in Haiti. My mother was one of 11 children and my father, the son of a single mother. Some of my peers at the University of Florida, where I am now enrolled, are third-generation Gators. My maternal grandmother never even learned to read.

In Haiti, my father couldn’t go to school to study agriculture without the right connections. My mother couldn’t escape the mistreatment from family members. But they managed to make it to America, where they made new lives for themselves. My father paid his way through vocational school as a line cook and became an electrician. My mother achieved her dream of caring for families as a nurse practitioner.

And they raised me with love. Everything I needed, I had. I owned plenty of shirts and colored pencils, though I still begged to go back-to-school shopping. My parents always found the money to pay for my school trips and my passion for theatre. I wanted to be valedictorian to present my parents with a trophy, a symbol of their success in raising their daughter.

At Krustyland, losing customers walked away with nothing but empty pockets. I struck out in my own version of the game — the valedictorian game.

But I know now that my parents are proud of me. And I am hardly a loser.