I grew up going to “Gerald Westminster Fitzgerald Elementary” and then to “Barton Lucas Fuller Junior High”, nothing too great about them...just two schools amongst four other primary schools in town. But, in eighth grade, our neighborhood was split between the two major high schools: “Gerald Westminster High School”—Mr. Fitzgerald was a founding father of the city, so his name was everywhere— and “Wyatt High School, the home of the Pharaohs.”

Wyatt was a state-of-the-art school with everything digital: from the ID badges to the use of tablets fir our school books, The school’s motif was like the pyramids in Giza, with a lot do the school lying underground except for the gym, pool, auditorium and lunch room: these buildings poked out, giving the illusion of multiple, stand alone structures. Inside the school, the corridors were marked with hieroglyphs and color-coded to the class years. If Egyptology was your thing, then Wyatt was a real-life Hogwarts.

The high school was created by Alexander Carter, a man who wanted to give back to the city and his alma mater. The city, wanting to have some extra money, welcomed the development of the new school—but they had no idea on the grand scope of Mr. Carter’s idea and when ground was broken, not a lot of people were there—because he didn’t announce it and just started work. Nary a peep was heard from city hall—partly because Mr. Carter gave the mayor a check with a lot of zeroes to stay out of his way.

The school was built with the help of local businesses in the city and county with very little involvement from out of town corporations. All of the permits were lined out and followed to code. This kind of infuriated the local media and some of the politicians as there was nothing “juicy” to report on except that the underground, multi-tiered structure with parking space built above it was not costing the city any money whatsoever.
They did, however, find fault with the Egyptian motif; that Alexander Carter had desecrated ancient Egyptian culture and made a mockery of history—a commercial for “The Mummy” came on the station after that report. And they really howled at the school’s symbol: a death mask, kind of like Tutankhamen, but slightly different. Supposedly, it was the face of Emmett Wyatt—another town founder—with a gazing stare behind the gold luster.

My house fell on the line to go to Wyatt.
Yeah, I’d miss my friends.
And yes, my best friend would be at GWHS, and for the first few days I felt disappointed that we wouldn’t be going to school together. But—although I never admitted it to her— I was stoked to get my “wrappings”: school backpack, eventually a letter jacket for track or cheerleading, and scarab, aka, our student ID card, which was a digital card enclosed within what looked like a jewel encrusted scarab. At least I was up until the actual first day of school.

We were all gathered in the auditorium—which, like the rest of the school, was state of the art and adorned with columns dressed in hieroglyphs that read “Wyatt High School: The Mighty Pharaohs”. It was supposed to be a huge affair of welcoming the students to the school with a multimedia bonanzas, followed by the dismissal by classes into their respective tunnels. Although, on that day, a middle-aged woman stood at a lectern. She was dressed in a business suit and the projector screen was not down.

“Good morning, Wyatt High School. I’m Superintendent Karen Pierce.”
The crowd of students murmured a bit and then everything fell silent.
“I like to welcome you to your first day back at school. This year will be different for everyone as WHS will be part of an extraordinary event which we call Project Wyatt. Project Wyatt will bring WHS into the modem era alongside Gerald Westminster.”
I looked around the auditorium as men in suits walked up to the front of Superintendent Pierce. Each man carried a box and placed it on the floor.
“For our returning students, please bring your student IDs to the front. You will be issues a new ID, like this.”
She took a standard ID card out of her business jacket and flashed it to the student body.
The murmuring in the crowd turned into a low roar. She was asking, nay, demanding—in administrator parlance—that the returning students forfeit their scarab ID’s.
“If you do not run over you’re your cards, you will not receive your new one unless the fee for a lost ID card is paid.”
The cost of the scarab was about two hundred dollars, according to the handbook. I slowly fidgeted mine in my pocket. I would refuse to hand it over. Maybe ask to have it as a birthday present. Sure, I always wanted to have a suede jacket and my parents would say I was crazy, but I wanted to hold onto my most likely artificial gemstone, bug-looking, school pin.

We were dismissed to our classrooms and I was dismayed to see how much of the school had been “dismantled”. It was like a cancel-culture brigade swarmed the halls and took out everything that I heard about. One could see where there were symbols and colors for “Ra’ but only faded lines and cracks remained. Surely it cost more to renovate the school than to keep it the way it was.