On Junior Year of High School
"We sat around and drank very strong, very gross-tasting drinks from Nalgenes."
May 22, 2011
Gilford, New Hampshire
I was 17 years old
The spring play needed some background roles filled and my friend Sidney (the cutest—I adore her) was super excited about it and persuaded me to do it with her. The play was Metamorphosis, a collection of Greek myths, and Sidney and I were casted as sailors that get to row, reef, look scared, die, and tumble off the stage. I have to give massive props to the actors that do the plays every year because rehearsals are just torturous. It is just constant waiting around and boredom. It’s awful. My performances for the school were fun though. Dying’s a blast.
Prom was...prom. I had low expectations so I wasn’t disappointed. Stephanie looked pretty even though there was some drama about her dress. It was black and white so just a simple black and white tux for me. She doesn’t dance and I’m not about to grind with her so we weren’t on the dancefloor as much as I would have liked. Pictures beforehand were fun though.
We went to Nick’s afterwards. Andrew texted me, telling me I should go. If he’s interested in me, I can’t get my hopes up. But he’s been increasingly friendly toward me, says hi to me in the hall now. He’s a babe. The party itself was alright. Nick is all drama all the time. He’s so pessimistic and I hate being around negative energy like that but he can be fun. At times. I was one of the only juniors there. Brittany Murphy came. She graduated in 2009 and worked at Meadowbrook with mom. Once when I was a freshman, she came to my lunch table to say, “Your mom is Kris Burns, right? She is a bitch.” Nice girl!
I, of course, brought this up to Brittany as soon as she showed up. I was just kidding but Andrew made sure to alleviate the issue. She’s still not my cup of tea. The party was alright. We just sat around a bonfire and drank very strong, very gross-tasting drinks from Nalgenes that people brought with them.
SATs are totally and absolutely just validation for people so insecure in themselves that they need some sort of academic label to feel satisfied with themselves. Since when can a stupid score identify a person...that said, I’ve taken them twice and got a 1630 and then a 1760. I’m a joke. But I’m okay with that.
October 20, 2021
Brooklyn, New York
I am 27 years old
I don’t think I stand much of a chance here. Enlighten me to the contrary but in presenting these vignettes of my high school experience, I’m just shy of contractually obligated to allude to Lady Bird. A film I saw twice in theaters—the second time was with my mom on my 24th birthday and, on the car ride home, we both had a moment after catching the clock at 11:17, my time of birth. Years before I had my own star turn in Greta Gerwig’s little follow-up feature film, I just adored this movie. A masterpiece of tone, I found myself smiling, and only a little sadly, for all 94 minutes of it. Moonstruck has the same effect on me. And, perhaps not coincidentally, Mermaids too. If it’s a specifically “Cher” thing, I’m not so sure but I feel that smile most keenly anytime I’m watching a movie that feels kind of fleeting in its sweetness. Like a dream warm enough in recollection to almost make it okay that you had to wake up. A sum total of all these moments low in stakes and aching in humanity that, soundtracked correctly, might make a grown man cry over the slow rolling credits.
Because what is the high school experience but just some hazy-lensed series of big little moments? These vignettes varying in length if not angst that amount, with any luck, to an 18-year-old who can admit to feeling just a little fond about who and where they came from. This May 2011 journal entry, written just a couple days before The Oprah Show would air its final episode and I would come out to my parents, addresses at least three months of my life in almost as many paragraphs. I’d never been in a play before, this was my first prom, I’d pined for that boy Andrew for over a year by then, and it was entirely of my own volition to make that second attempt at the SAT and yet my 17-year-old self regarded each circumstance as casually as weather.
I suppose I could retroactively apply some gravitas to these moments that, as a junior in high school, I didn’t have the vocabulary for, or the time, or maybe even the interest. Then again, perhaps I should save this for a film of my own that could rack up five Academy Award nominations and earn eight times its budget. God willing. But alas, these events only remain so clear in my memory. I know one of my fellow dying sailors in Metamorphosis fell flat on her back during one performance and got the wind knocked out of her but I can’t remember if this happened to Sidney or to Emily or if Emily was a sailor at all. I know that I took the SAT for a third time and that I got a perfect score on the writing portion and a low enough score on math to leave me, once again, someplace completely average but if I felt any different about becoming my, say, 1800—who’s to know. And prom was...prom.
But to no surprise, as far as that prom after-party is concerned, I have total recall. My longing for Andrew had been unrequited for a lengthy enough amount of time that I’d fashioned a code name for him, something me and my friends could discreetly call him in our public school of 500 total students. His initials were A.K., so I called him “47.” And when a person goes from being a pseudonym whispered girlishly in the hall to a bonafide person who wanted me at the same party as him, well, these things stick.
I hardly ever partied, let alone drank in high school so my stolen sips from those boozy Nalgenes did the job. Anything was enough to get me giggling, life as I knew it—for such a chronically serious boy, no less—suddenly seeming so very silly. And so very, very slow. Watered-down vodka-orange juice making earth spin on its axis in just a little less of a hurry. The center of my universe fixed, for now, within the pines of this New Hampshire backyard where, across a burning bonfire, sat the other reason for life appearing to me then in soft focus. Andrew was smoking, probably just a clove but still—it’d be another three years before I smoked my first cigarette. Despite his explicit invitation, despite his getting in the middle of me and that girl who hates my mom, we wouldn’t end up interacting very much. I was out to all my friends but he was still closeted, though I’m not sure that’s what kept us apart all night. And while my heartache was real, so was everything else I felt looking at Andrew, looking at him looking at every person at that party but me. From somebody’s speakers, “I Melt with You” by Modern English played. Lending something dreamy and gnawing and massive enough to this scene of my life to make it almost feel like a movie. Even then, watching Andrew’s face change with the shifting shadows from that scorching thing between us, I was almost wise enough to appreciate it as cinema. And maybe, tugging at my cheeks, was that sad kind of smile, the first of its kind, grinning at something just hurtful enough to be lovely as I listened to a man’s voice sing, “The future’s open wide.”
Thanks my B. Another good read👍❣️