Student sample for assessment
Written by a Year 9 student in Footscray, Victoria, Australia.
My sister tells me on a Tuesday afternoon. We are in the kitchen. The light is coming through the window in a way that makes everything look amber and still. She says: 'I'm not going to uni. I'm going to stay and manage the cafe.' I have known this was coming. I have watched her stop talking about her courses, stop mentioning her friends from her cohort. She started spending more time with Dad at the cafe after Mum got sick. Now Mum is better, but the cafe still needs her. That is what she will say. I already know the argument I will make—that she is good at the subjects she loves, that she can do both, that the cafe was never meant to be her life. I make it anyway. She listens. She does not argue back. She just waits for me to finish and then says: 'I know what you're saying. I've thought about it. But this is what I want.' I don't believe her. I believe she wants to stay because she feels she should, because Dad needs her, because guilt is easier than the risk of leaving. But I cannot say this without hurting her, and I cannot stop her by saying it. So I do what you do when you know something and cannot do anything about it: I say nothing more. I finish making my coffee. I ask about a shift she is covering tomorrow. The conversation moves on, and the decision stays. That night I think about what staying means. She will work in the cafe. She will become the person who knows the regulars' names, who opens at 6 a.m., who eventually takes over when Dad retires. She will have a life, and it will be fine, and it will not be the life I think she should have. That is the worst part. It is not that the choice is objectively bad. It is that she is closing a door I think she should walk through, and I cannot unlock it for her. I could try again. I could text her articles about the cafe industry, about salary caps, about how hard it is to scale small business. I could make the argument one more time. I could do what I know will not work because doing something feels better than doing nothing. Instead, I call her on Thursday. 'I want to come by the cafe after school,' I say. 'I want to learn how you run it. Not because I think it is wrong that you stay. But because you stay, and that means something to me now.' She says yes. When I arrive on Friday, she shows me the roster, the supplier accounts, the way she reads which regulars want talk and which want quiet. I watch her move through the space like she is made of it. Maybe she is not closing a door. Maybe she is opening one I did not see. I still think she could have gone to university. I still think the cafe will cost her things. But my job is not to save her from her choice. My job is to stand beside her while she lives it.