It was June, the last day of my sophomore year at Canyon High, and the temperature had staged a coup. The campus was no longer a school but a human sauna—heat shimmering off asphalt, the smell of suntan lotion and hormones hanging thick in the air. Education had fled.
Students drifted across the courtyard in various stages of undress: shorts, bikini tops, cutoffs, tank tops. The place looked less like an academic institution and more like a rehearsal for a Beach Boys video. Even the teachers had surrendered. Lesson plans were tossed aside like molting skin; the day was given over to signing yearbooks, gossip, and the open display of what could only be called collective infatuation disorder.
Love had broken out like a rash. Everywhere I looked, couples were holding hands, whispering into each other’s ears, stroking hair, rubbing shoulders, and gazing into each other’s eyes with the same expression of caffeinated bliss. Even the nerds—the pale, calculator-clutching tribe of outcasts—had been swept into the delirium. It was an egalitarian apocalypse of affection. Everyone was paired off, melting together in the heat.
Everyone except me.
Apparently, I hadn’t received the memo that June 12 was Love Day at Canyon High. While the rest of the student body was basking in hormonal radiance, I sat alone on a bench near the cafeteria, marinating in my solitude and trying to figure out how romance had managed to skip my ZIP code.
I sighed, stared at the ground, and summoned Master Po—the inner voice of my sarcastic conscience.
“Grasshopper,” he began, “your lonely condition should be obvious to you.”
“To you, maybe,” I said, “but to me, it’s as mysterious as algebra.”
“Let’s begin,” said Po. “First, you spend too much time staring into your own navel. You are self-centered.”
“Guilty,” I said. “Next?”
“You talk too much. You deliver speeches when you should be listening.”
“Double guilty.”
“If you wish to see the humanity in others, you must first see the humanity in yourself. True transformation begins within.”
“Master Po,” I said, “I’m already transforming. Six days a week in the gym, three hundred grams of protein a day. I’m practically evolving into another species.”
“I meant transformation of the soul,” he said.
“Oh. Right. The invisible muscle group.”
“Your self-deprecation is merely cowardice dressed as humility. You fear your own potential.”
“Maybe. But I’m warning you—every time I meditate, Raquel Welch rides through my mind on horseback in slow motion. I can’t stop her.”
“Your distractions,” said Po, “are the result of an undisciplined mind. Seek silence.”
“You mean meditate.”
“Yes, Grasshopper.”
“Then prepare yourself,” I said. “Because after Raquel Welch, the whole cast of Charlie’s Angels usually shows up.”
Po sighed, the eternal sound of a teacher realizing his student is hopeless.
And there I sat, the only unloved, unseduced, untransformed soul on the Canyon High campus—a bench-bound philosopher surrounded by teenage Aphrodites, sweating through his solitude while Raquel Welch galloped through his brain.
Cinemorphosis 
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