Field Trip Story

   Nora lived in an old schoolhouse. It was six cracking, musty, unheated rooms inhabited mostly by her father's restaurant. Many years ago, her grandpa had decided it would be a great idea if this dusty, spider-infested shack was a place to eat burgers and fries. Her father took the job after him, and now Nora was stuck living ten miles away from town, making tuna melts for truckers at three in the morning.
   The only part of the house that Nora really loved was the bowling alley. That had been her grandmother's idea. "We all know that nobody here can make food worth shit, anyways, Amos," Nora had remembered her saying one day with a mouthful of cigarette smoke. "The least we can do is give those poor customers a goddamn game."
   And so Nora's grandpa made the bowling alley. It was old but terribly charming in Nora's opinion. There were three lanes, all with cracked floors and tarnished pins. After school, Nora would bring her school books into the room and do her homework in there for hours. Her grandma would join her, sitting in a rocking chair and knitting finger puppets.
   The room had accumulated many saved and broken objects over the years, until it had become less of a bowling alley and more of a storage shed. There was a sunset-colored bongo drum that Nora's grandma had received from Grandpa for a birthday present one year, and which she now tipped upside-down and used as a stool. There was an ancient playground horse which her father had ripped up from the former schoolyard one night when he was drunk. All old, silly, useless things that Nora wished they could find a different place for.
   So it was not at all an unusual day, at least not to begin with, when Nora's life turned around. She was in the bowling alley, lying on one of the lanes and studying biology. She was in her favorite blue Northface fleece, drinking a Kool-Aid Jammer, her hair piled into a bun not meant to be seen by anybody else. Her grandma was sitting in her rocker, chain smoking and knitting a scarf.
   "I remember when that old flagpole outside had a flag on it."
   "An American flag?" Nora asked, not really paying attention.
   "No, not an American flag. I believe...I believe it was the anarchy symbol."
   Nora looked up. "Really?"
   Her grandmother nodded. "Believe it or not, your grandpa and I used to be quite the rebels. In the fifties, this place was a hangout for all the beatniks."
   "Wow."
   "And in the sixties...why, I couldn't even tell you what we did in here then."
    Nora blushed.
   "I actually wouldn't lie on that floor if I were you, Nora, dear."
    After that day, Nora never looked at her grandmother the same way. When she died two years later, Nora cried, of course, as any sensitive teenager would. But then, she went through all the junk in the bowling alley. The drum, the horse, broken guitars, worn black berets, a copious amount of ancient, half-smoked joints on the floor which Nora had always assumed were cigarettes. Until finally she found what she was looking for.
   One misty morning, before her mother woke up and starting screaming at her, before her father woke up to another massive hangover, before the grisly smell of burning fat filled the air...Nora hoisted the flag again.