When I stepped on those grounds I immediately started to feel self-conscious. I walked through the throng of "cool kids" and past the huddles of stoners and skateboarders and around the geeks and punks that didn't fit in anywhere. I brushed by two girls who were yelling out "You don't wear a one-sleaveled top with a strappy bra!" to a girl who was trying her damndest to ignore them. They giggled maniacally.
How callow and raw and rude. I saw myself in all of them and remembered a time when I either did the same to someone below me or swallowed back a lump in my throat as someone tossed a barbed comment my way.
That's what I like about visiting high school. It reminds you that no matter how crappy you might be feeling, you can't feel worse than you did back then.
The comparison of adolescence to a roller coaster ride is so very perfect. They're designed to thrill and make your heart pound, and sometimes, you even want to throw up. The ride seems like it's taking forever, but when it's over it seems like the shortest trip of your life.
There are days when I long for the lack of responsibility I had when I was in high school. There are moments when I wish I didn't have to pay bills or rent or buy my own groceries or cook my own meals, but most of the time, I look back with a sigh of relief that those days are over.
Or are they?
Remember that movie Heathers? When Christian Slater tells Winona Ryder that the school was the society? Yeah.
Every time I think back on my high school days I think "Wow, good thing there are no Heathers where I am." But there are. There are just more of them. They may be further away, but that's because in the real world that the high school setup mimics, I'm even lower on the foodchain than I was then.
I was always one of the different kids. Cursed with a large vocabulary, a smart mouth and very little social skills to speak of, I was everyone's favourite stereotypical class clown. I don't mean that I was a goof ball. I mean that I sat in the back and made fun of everybody. Teachers, cool kids, geeks, jocks, cheerleaders, the smart kids, nobody escaped my wrath.
Which is not to say that I didn't occasionally bend those rules and cross those boundaries, because I so did. I was a drama geek and a band nerd. I took yearbook photographs and wrote for the student newspaper (Some articles, but mostly snide commentaries on why I shouldn't have so goddamn much homework and some artfully rude horoscopes that I actually parlayed into a five year career in University.) I could be a nerd as well, staying late during science classes with my fellow smarty pants classmates to dissect the brain of the foetal pig as well as the pig itself. I wasn't much for the sports they offered in high school, but throughout junior high and high school, I played on ladies fastball teams and excelled at the position of backcatcher, earning myself the team nick name of "Canuckle" after I once caught the fat end of Cricket Moore's swing on my catcher's mitt and didn't tell anybody that the blow broke three of my fingers, causing the knuckles to swell up so badly that they had to take me to the hospital and cut the glove off after the game.
I hung out with people from every crowd, the super cool, the cool, the uncool. I occaisionally smoked up with a doper/goth friend, drank and puked and partied with my redneck headbanger friends and once made an english teacher cry with a fellow smart-ass who shall remane nameless. (Incidentally, if you're reading this Mrs. Jensen, I'm really sorry. I know you thought it was the boys, but it was us. When I die, and the time comes to count my deeds, good and bad, I'm sure that one will tip the scales, dooming me to an eternity of brimstone and sulfur and satanic suffering, but at least I'll have company, eh Gripper?)
Too cool and stupid for the cape-wearing guys and girls who talked about Star Trek and made their own computers, and to uncool and smart for the jocks and cheerleaders and princesses who primped and preened themselves to look good and be the best they could possibly be. I hovered somewhere in the middle.
There are things about high school that make me want to cry. Like the time I had a huge, silent, fight with my best friend in the middle of an english class wherein she stole a very valuable library book that I had gotten special permission to borrow for an assignment. And there are things that make me howl with laughter, like the time I had to drop my pants on stage in front of the whole school for the school play "Lie, Cheat and Genuflect." Or the time during that same play that my much taller good friend Christine had to bend me over backwards and kiss me without really kissing me in the space of about two seconds. Again, in front of the whole school. Carazay.
And there are things that can never be adequately described.
A close friend killed himself in November of Grade 12. We had went from kindergarten on up together. I'll never forget that phone call.
"Did you hear? Will shot himself."
I don't even remember who called me. Maybe it was Gripper. I remember dropping the Christmas decoration I was holding and collapsing on the couch, near tears but trying not to show it.
"Is he dead?"
"Yeah."
"No."
"Yeah."
"No!"
"He is."
"I...when?"
"Last night. This morning."
I remember my mother asking me what was wrong. I remember hanging up the phone without saying goodbye and trying to staunch the flow of tears that was threatening to overflow. I'll never forget my mother's "What's wrong, honey?" as long as I live. How to tell your mom that a guy you once considered your best friend on the face of the earth, a guy who used to cry when he got yelled at by the principal, a guy who never once said a bad thing about you while all the other boys called you a dyke or a loser because you hadn't been out on dates, how do you tell your mom that he is dead? I don't remember what I said. All I remember is getting a big hug and a kiss and staying home that morning and drinking tea and blankly staring at the television.
I'll never forget the funeral. I remember the haunted looks in the eyes of these kids I had grown up with. A guy I hadn't really spoken with in over five years coming up to me. Shane. Shane and Will and Nikki and I once smoked dandy lions behind the tool shed in elementary school. Shane and Will and I went fishing for perch in the creek behind my house and we got together on Will's 13th birthday and watched every Freddy Krueger/Jason/Halloween movie ever made (Comparitively fewer then than there are now). We were so very young then. We still were when Will died.
I'm so sorry. Mouthed Shane. I didn't ask what he was sorry for. Maybe for forgetting. For not keeping in touch. We're so stupid. I said. This is all so stupid. Yeah.
I'm reading: The Exorcist. Again.
I'm listening to: Derkommisar's Fametracker CD mix that I got in the mail yesterday.
I'm in love with: My red-hooded sweatshirt. Shama-lama-ding-dong.
I'm eating: I'm biting my nails again. Dammit. Does that count?
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