Xtreme Hopp
Graphic by Claire Zhou
Trampolining through senior year
Claire Zhou
Claire Zhou, class of ’26, is currently a senior. She enjoys fifth-grader humor half the time and embodies a pickle. Her surname is pronounced similarly to “Joe.”
I’m 5-foot-3 plus three quarters, and I can slam dunk. I reach my right arm as a robotic voice reads over an intercom. The basketball falls swiftly through the orange rim that resembles a glowing halo. Yes! and I fall back onto the trampoline, jump up and down in celebration, floating mid-air for moments of ecstatic pride. The robotic announcer congratulates me, “…thank you for jumping with us.” I wipe sweat off my face as I bunny-hop to the rock-climbing wall.
An impressive 10-year-old in a sunflower tutu backflips while her father doesn’t even bat an eye. I clap for her courage as I shoo away my thoughts of cracking sounds and concussions. A young blond boy, wearing a camo shirt, twirls in the air like an acrobat. His parents and Xtreme Hopp workers stand around, cheering him on.
The rock-climbing wall stands characteristically unoccupied. Chipped blocks of black, off-pink, and neon-green foam jut out like stationary waves, ready to engulf any challengers. Save the America Ninja Warrior mega-ramp, this wall bears the most formidable challenge. Its unassuming stature angles subtly like the inside of a mountain. As I leap onto the first colorful stones, gravity threatens to leave my torso flailing. Gripping onto the rocks like a lizard, I track quietly and stealthily across.
But I’m not alone. Foam blocks come hurling at me. None of the 50-some throws hit me. I laugh. Riley Shen ’26 and Peyton Siphavong ’26 laugh too as I torque along.
I’m nearing the 70% mark when the defunct red-clock runs to zero. No alarm bells ring, so I push on. The ocean beneath me still frightens as my grip slowly slips from a tiny, Giza pyramid-shaped emerald on my left and a terracotta cap-shaped ruby on my right. The Terracotta cap wobbles precariously around one of the many loose, untended screws. Sweat glistens from my palms as I lunge forward. When I finally rest my feet on solid ground, my arms jelly-fy.
Bunny-ing back with Sisyphean-hill trajectories and landing on cells of trampoline membranes, I perfect my cartwheel with an eager young girl not yet 4-foot. I sing happy birthday from a distance, adults cutting cake as the kids wiggle and play. I team up with a boy who spins elaborate stories with himself, my undodgeable throws boomeranging foamy oversized gumballs off of Riley and Peyton. I oscillate with energy’s harmonic motion, yet thankfully none of the school’s stress overwhelms me in this now.***
Our Xtreme Hopp adventures began under the fire of College Applications. Each word craved some release not somehow tied to The Future. I found myself entrapped in this creative chariot, and like Phaethon, my stallions veered closer to earth ablaze. I remembered the carefree freedom of childhood, seeming suddenly robbed away with deadlines and stalling essays. I craved moments of the complete ignorance of time.
My brain drowning in hypertonic fluid, not even the mythical winter break cured my maladies. Sisters, tea, and school-lessness felt like a fleeting gem as sand slowly descended through the hyperboloid of life into its time-capsule pile. I chained “free” time to the constant gnaw of the list of never-ending dreams written in blue and red through my notebook. I boarded the train in August, expecting to stop for breathers in October—yet by christmastime, I stared at another empty document, preoccupied by the Medusa colloquially called senior year.
Even as I procrastinated by reading memoirs, over-analyzed countless games of catan to victory and defeat, and enjoyed bike-rides hidden under the lion mane of my ivory Michael Kors puffer, nothing staved away that insistent feeling that I was missing something: the shattered naïveté and curiosity I once bumbled the world with. Now, my mind fell entrenched in patterns of disillusionment.
***
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” Charles Dickens once wrote of the French Revolutionary period. Senior year hurled at me everything I habitually avoided. No longer could I escape the grueling deep-frier of representing myself in a positive light. My reflections needed an even-keeled memory, un-shooed by my constant tape of self-judgement. The insipid facade I developed to protect myself from my passions, whose energy often embarrassed me, also locked away my true memories—exactly the material of a great college essay. Every word fell into a black hole of “where was I going with this…,” until I succumbed to the event horizon and stretched out the C-shaped time my body spent editing every last hollow word. Nor could I any longer spend 110% effort on everything. Over my 4 years, I set it my daily mission to challenge myself at my boundaries, working ever harder, longer, and smarter. An obstreperous push to work drowned out my other voices—and like the devil, the Lernaean Hydra answered the call. Its heads surrounded me at all angles with an endless amount of potential work—from linear algebra finals to the infamous Pritchard poetry projects, the stream of club events and endless splashes of swim practices, the concerts and competitions and paperwork and volunteering and scholarships. Even text messages dropped a burden, like a splat of bird poop landing squarely on my head. Instead of divining me with a placebo of luck, it reminded me of the freedom I lost. No time to wash it away, I unironically thought, preoccupied again by Medusa’s glare. Though outwardly I bumbled to and fro, her gaze long turned me into stone.
***
The day after Christmas, I text Peyton, desperate for a break—any break. Presents already unwrapped under our hastily ornamented tree, my hope that I would find the golden ticket in pirouetting bows and flying crumples of Santa-hat-Snoopy papers only left me with bitter dregs of disillusionment. I sit again in front of my January 1, 2, and 10 deadlines. With Amelia Zhou ’24, my sister, out with friends, the house lulls into an odd quiet. The white screen, my frenemy, broils with despicable gatekeeping. I see before myself an incredible expanse of memory, but cannot reach any of it. In this garden of joys and struggles and stories, its glare throbs an impasse rendering culling the flowers an impossible feat.
I finally break Medusa’s slit-eyed stare at me through the blinking cursor. “do you still want to hang out tmrw” I text out casually, trying to hide my desperation. He responds in less than 20 minutes, to my itchy eyes’ relief.
On my half birthday, the three of us arrive to the personable attendant, Nahmere, who, to our shock, gifts us $12 tickets and a one-cent upgrade to membership-level. Dressed in a striped referee work uniform, he looks about our age, maybe even younger, catching our eyes in a wry smile. We ready our neon-green wristbands conspiratorially, slipping on our grip socks, and head into a stampede of backflips and exclaiming children. At first, I feel like a toddling Mona Lisa, my eyes moving imperceptibly to answer the questions of my memories. As I habitually think of everything that could go wrong, I watch with a detached unknowingness at the carefree spirit these hoppers unleash without worry. My perpetual scowl breaks out into a tiny smile, the 3 of us facing each other as we wordlessly achieve new heights. As I hop from trampoline to trampoline, I absorb their springy courage like how Black Panther’s vibranium absorbs kinetic energy. With each new unleashed grin, I begin to see everything that could go right instead.
Yet, to my surprise, I still test my limits. Even without an affable coach and the scary Big Red Clock motivating me to swim harder, I seek out the rock wall, each bead of sweat accompanied by a feeling of accomplishment. Unlike each forced essay, I jump with a natural trust in myself. We laugh and play and banter under Xtreme Hopp’s protective ceiling against Medusa’s glare. The eyes of adulthood and The Future and each new responsibility search for us everywhere but in this dingy building. We play red-light-green-light, guess and act in jumping charades, and wobble across a sock-wide bridge. We play with childish glee. Without the constant eyes of external pressures, an intrinsic love blooms.
***
By the time twilight hits with winter’s shortened days, I feel taller. Though we walk back into the inevitable “real world” of college-talk and the fear-mongering Future™, the weight pressing into my spine loosens a little. I begin to understand what Princeton meant by “What brings you joy?” The essay already written and untouchable, I feel a twinge of regret. I promise myself: after. After I slay all the Hydra’s heads, I will finally sit down and write for pleasure again. The Future seems like a world full of non-corporate non-career-related possibilities and excitements.
And so, upon my third membership trip to Xtreme Hopp, I finally write. My biggest regret? Unlike what I anticipated, it’s not that I faced Hydra or The Future, nor riding unstable winds with my flying creative chariot, nor writing uncleaned bird poop after plopping bird poop of now-sent college essays. It’s not even that I wasted Saharan hours staring at a cursor, petrified by the mortal Gorgon sister into a brittle stone statue. It’s not even that I chose to take AP Lit (ironically my favorite class). It’s that I lived in the perpetual word “after.” I took upon every moment a gigantic seriousness that left no room for freedom: saying all of that came “after.” I would take care of my health after, write after, pursue what I loved after, play after, dream and celebrate after. I hailed the second semester as a holy grail of everything that came, somehow, after. I told myself to enjoy life after, but never lived fully in the now. So to any future Medusa-stricken or Hydra-fighting seniors: please enjoy the now. You may feel overwhelmed with responsibilities and dreams you never asked for. I know that the stress you feel now is real, uniquely yours, and filled with pressures and promises only you can fully understand. Showing up to Northview for class, clubs, sports, and responsibilities may feel like a Herculean effort, not to mention all the extracurriculars, jobs, or extraneous circumstances you need to manage. It will get better, but please, do not cling to “after” as die-hardly as I did. Cling to the present.
Find your coven of friends who will stick with you, and importantly, enjoy senior year with you. Find the people willing to watch “Wicked” and eat late-night Jeni’s ice cream, laugh over wavelength or stupid jokes, and just dance with you ’cause nobody’s watching. Find the people who say “YESS” to the now. Your essays and sanity will thank you. Because first semester may be brutal, but remember Charles Dickens. Though it may be the worst of times, find the best of times too. And, maybe, find a haven in Xtreme Hopp, rediscovering the joys of laughter suspended mid-air, time stopping for the briefest of moments. Heal the ailments of senioritis with jumping. And do something for your own sake, slam-dunking a deflated orange ball into a glowing halo, re-remembering the you.
