Letters From High School Survivors
We had them all: jocks, trouble-makers, geeks, party-annimals, teacher’s pets, weirdos, bullies, pot-heads, and sluts. But no Prom Queen. Our private, college-prepatory school was above that silly stuff. Beauty contests were reserved for the public schools. However, in reality, my high school was as absorbed in reputations and gossip as a hot-off-the-press edition of an US Weekly magazine.
Rumors galloped from person to person at a feverish pace and with urgency as if we’d just been told the sky was falling. The juicier the gossip the quicker it spread throughout the school. In our tiny school we knew everything about everyone and what we didn’t know we assumed or fabricated. We didn’t give a damn, we just wanted excitement. A secret quickly entered the realm of public knowledge. Fact and fiction, scandal and deceit, all of it out in the open. Having my life put on display, assessed, and critiqued, that part I won’t miss.
But high school really was a blast. Who can forget weekend parties while the parents were out of town? Even though a small get-together always turned into a school-wide jamboree and something always got broken. Friday nights when a vivacious crowd gathered to support the school’s grid-iron gods. The blue and white bleachers filled with rowdy Cyclone fans. The elaborate dances that were the most anticipated and dreaded events of the year. Waiting to be asked, finding the perfect dress, trying to shed those extra pounds.
But all of it was about appearances: who looked the best, who scored the winning touchdown, who showed up with who. I always got the guy, made good grades, stayed enemy-free more or less, and ended up at one of the hardest colleges to get into; there wasn’t too much they could say. That’s probably why I liked high school after all.
Mallory, 2006
check out my blog Wanderlust
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But, when I got to high school, everything changed. Where once my grade school and junior high had been filled with kids I played with from the time I was five or six, my high school was now a melting pot of kids from other schools in the town I grew up in, those ‘Catholic’ kids, plus kids from the area where all the blacks lived.
High school was very different. It was class-based. Of course, I didn’t know that then, but I certainly can see it now. The kids that I considered my friends from my early years had now become part of the crowd of kids that were the jocks, the student council member, the beauty queens.
But I was no beauty queen. I was different too. Having contracted arthritis at age 10, my jaw somehow stopped developing and I had a severe recessed chin. And, to top things off, having been conceived by two parents who were both of British decent, I had big, round, green eyes. Have you ever been to England? I hadn’t, and this, of course, was how people in my family looked, and they seemingly accepted me just fine. So, what I was in for was completely unexpected. The ‘new’ kids in High School soon realized that I had these ‘abnormal’ features. So, with a recessed chin and big eyes that I was so fortunate to have inherited, I became known to those kids I had never met as ‘Fish’.
Being called ‘Fish’ every day of my freshman year had a profound effect. I withdrew. I contemplated suicide. And, my parents, rest their souls, had no clue. Not because they didn’t want to know, but because I refused to bring them into my tortured world.
I did what I could to self-preserve. I tried to avoid these kids. I would take stairs between classes that I knew they didn’t take. I would come to school through different doors, and I began to limit my interactions to those kids who were more like me… ostracized. Band members, geeks, unattractive kids, kids with good hearts.
I soon found myself. I became a people pleaser. I did whatever it took (within limits, of course), to be accepted. I found that I needed to focus on making a career that I knew later I could throw in these kids faces. So, I hunkered down with my new-found friends who thought I was fun, funny, smart, and had a clue as to what was really important, and in my last
her?
ruled and the one who was prom queen had made sure I was the one wearing
the clothes from TG and Y when they did the fashion show…I went to a
class reunion hoping that someone would be leading her in on leash…That
the years of dippity doo had gone straight to her brain and nothing worked
everything sagged and the world had dropped something akin to pidgeon doo
on everything she had hoped and dreamed of…. But I got over it… Years
passed and when I actually went to a reunion she could have been lead in on
a leash and I was sad… I needed a little more good honest hate you till I
die kind of attitude to get me through the rest of life … What am I going
to do… Twenty years of hoping to show her how I had out shined and I’ll be
damned if I hadn’t done it and neither one of us cared… Who knew…
Then there were the cheerleaders so little, cute and perky while I was tall and gangly.
However, years pass, and as I discover at high school reunions – those cute little cheerleaders are not so cute as chubby little ladies – though still perky. Strangely, the mohair girls so full of themselves now confess they too were scared and insecure
