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Cherry bombs down toilets? Wet willy the occasional nerd? Vaseline the door handles then pull the fire alarm? Angel dust in the punch at prom? Did you know more than they thought you did about that missing jock?
So, anyone ever act up in your school days? (The statute of limitations is probably over.)
Me, I rarely did anything bad, and for a long time I was one of those types they'd show off as an example when important visitors came along (after reading that admission feel free to puke on me), but as I mentioned I did shove the leader of the b***h Posse down hard one time (got in trouble for it) and I did used to use nail polish to write EMMR 97 in places someone would be likely to see one day, under tables and atop bathroom stalls, beneath hand rails. I considered that less about vandalism than leaving micro-time capsules.
I p**sed off the gym teacher by refusing to play on the school tennis squad, even though I was gearing up to enter Jr. USTA and had won multiple amateur tournaments. I told her, "I hate team sports." (She also tended to leer a bit at girls in shorts and tennis skirts.) In gym she'd make me go up against her pet players and I'd take them in straight sets, and she was the only teacher I ever had who wound up passionately hating me, mostly for all that.
But to balance it out I had an as-close-to-real-friendship-as-it-got relationship with my academic adviser, this twenty-something Floridian with a brand new MA in Education from (I think) Georgetown, whose entire job was to run the program I was in and monitor us all like prized orchids, and I'd talk to him a lot, often in ways that were not school-related, which was maybe not entirely wise.
He tried to keep me happy with the program when in my last couple years I'd done a 180 and wasn't so compliant and safe anymore, I was a walking cynic about school, living admittedly ahead of my years, and he'd let me hang out in his empty office sometimes to get away from it all, and I knew he was also working for the other side, sure, but I wasn't ready to learn one day how much he did sell me out, so I went off on him when it was just the two of us and told him this all had nothing to do with him being on staff there and me being a student, what he did to me was a person-to-person betrayal and he knew it.
Well, although he never came out and confirmed it since he worked at a religious school in a less tolerant era, I was 90% sure he was gay, and I concluded my rant with, "Why don't you go blow some man and quit selling me out?"
And you know what he did? He laughed and said, "Well, I would but at the moment the man I usually blow is out of town."
I thought, wow, he just said it's true???
I stared at him a second and started laughing and so did he. I was even more surprised he was apparently going to let me get away with saying that to a staff member. He ended up hugging me and saying nice things and I felt better about him doing his job, which is what reporting back about me and all of us was.
Still, he must have told someone, because later that year when my father was making a list of all the things I'd been doing wrong, beginning with telling lies and ending much higher up the food chain, one of the charges was, ("....telling your adviser to go blow a man...")
So the adviser obviously did rat me out after all, less shocking for a moment than hearing my dad say something like that.
That little rant of mine sticks out in my mind as being un-nice but I also drove off a few times, usually to go walk around a cemetery and think (I am not kidding). For that they took away my parking privileges eventually, but I got them back, largely through the help of my adviser, who was cool to me whenever he could be, though sadly, his final verdict at the end of 12th grade was that no student had ever disappointed him more than I had. (Mostly by turning down an admissions offer from a university that would have looked good on his resume. He was ambitious.)
I guess there's also the fact I would've just plain been expelled if they knew about my living arrangement in my last semester, since no matter how good your grades are and what university you're getting into, there are some things a Catholic high school would not let slide, and also while I never cheated on tests or exams, I did help others do it.
So in short I was a homophobic, borderline necrophiliac goody-two shoes with zero street cred. Yes! Hopefully all of you were way cooler.
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