Perfect Attendance

8th grade science class. A year later, this dude wouldn’t even acknowledge me in the halls of my high school.

I have heard it said that life is just junior high school with money. I wish. 

I submit to you that life is more like high school with money, with all of its general anxieties about status, performance, friendships and relationships. 

I honestly think I peaked in junior high school. Those were two of the best years of my life: pranking Principal Bob, stealing dissection frogs and hiding them in Mrs Miller’s filing cabinet, stealing the newly arrived 6th graders’ lunches and divvying them up in the Shop Room, and, of course, rolling (I believe some yankee’s call it “TP’ing”) any and every house we could, which was no easy feat, considering we didn’t have cars or easy access to toilet paper. 

Northside Junior High was the home of the Vikings, although I’m not sure any actual vikings ever made it south of the Mason Dixon line. This 1960s brutalist structure was a magical place. Unlike elementary school, we now had lockers. Lockers! Just like in Pretty in Pink. No longer were we confined to one classroom all day with the same teacher. Now we had bells and class changes and six different teachers a day. Gym class came with uniforms and we could choose where we sat at lunch. The freedom that this all conveyed to me seems minimal now, but felt mind blowing at the time. 

During my years I spent there, very few of my classmates had yet to discover sex, drugs, or rock n’roll. Our vices of choice were benign vandalism, pizza, and synth pop. Weekends involved the aforementioned rolling, going to slumber parties, prank calling, and getting dropped off at the mall to eat pizza and buy Bongo skirts, and if we were very lucky, anything from Benetton. 

There was no way to know that while we trashed the hallways with our papers and books on the last day of 8th grade, that life would never be that free again. We would have one more blissful summer before the reality of life would set in. 

Of all of the special kinds of hell that humans have to endure while on earth, I am convinced that high school is among the worst. It’s something only a psychopath could have invented.

“I have an idea! Let’s wait until these kids hit puberty and are at their most vulnerable, mentally, physically, and emotionally, and then put them in a building together for four years, five days a week, eight hours a day. Oh, and let’s make them take Physical Education and not let them drink or do drugs to dull the pain!” I can imagine said psychopath saying. 

I am also convinced that people (my husband included, God bless), who have fond memories of high school had some sort of chip implanted in their brain or have had CIA memory erasing sessions. 

As I was not given either of those options, I had to attend and remember the thing that is high school. Every day. For four years.  And high school was a rude awakening, having come from the carefree daycare that had been junior high school. 

The first day of high school I realized  those halcyon days were over. That first day, it being 1986, I wore a mini-skirt to school. Walking through the cafeteria with my tray, looking for a friendly face, I suddenly found myself horizontal and on the way to the floor as my lunch flew in the air. I had, it seemed, fallen for the “let’s throw applesauce on the floor and see which freshman falls first” trick. I was off to a great start. 

Walking into that building that first day, I was still a “very good girl”: I went to church three times a week, I did my homework, I hardly misbehaved, and I was pretty self sufficient. Other than being a general teenage slob, I was a good kid. 

Although middle school was socially off the charts for me, my home life had been less than stellar, as my father’s alcoholism was coming to a huge crescendo. Maybe that’s what made school even better for me. In the midst of this domestic breakdown, I had decided that I would be “popular” and won a prized spot on the 8th grade cheerleading squad and promptly quit the band. 

High on middle school and human pyramids, I had assumed I would go on to be a high school cheerleader, but at the first tryout, I realized I was not high school cheerleader material. My friends from middle school went on the JV squad and I did not. 

I also quickly learned that high school was not “fun.” This was some serious shit and everything you did, wore, ate, and listened to was mercilessly judged. I don’t do well under this kind of pressure. I cannot even imagine what all of this is like now with the added hell that is social media. 

So, while my friends joined sports teams and the Model UN, I found friends who were less ambitious. I also managed to switch all my honors classes to general study without my parents finding out. This meant that instead of taking chemistry, I was in General Science class with some of my middle school friends. Without realizing it, I was giving up and no one had noticed. 

For a tightly wound, Type A perfectionist, the feeling of giving up was exquisite. I had lived my whole life worrying about failing out of school and living in a van down by the river, but now I just embraced that destiny. There is a freedom that comes with saying fuck it. 

As my mother and father got more into my father’s recovery at home, I felt more and more alone at home and at school. I tried to do the “normal” high school things, hosting the homecoming float at my house and going to some sporting events, but I always had the feeling that I was missing something, a handbook or a flow chart of some kind. 

I made some more friends who were even more invested in giving up than I was and they taught me how to skip school. You just walked out the fucking door. Who knew? It was relatively easy to do in the 80s and if we did get caught, our vice principal, Colonel Compton, could be bought off with whatever fast food you brought back for him. Win, win. 

As an aside, my husband, the son of a retired Air Force colonel, rejects that fact that Colonel Compton, head of our JROTC, was an actual colonel. More investigation is needed. 

They also taught me that giving up was a lot easier with the assistance of mind altering substances. Anything from beer to Robitussin to trucker speed to weed. Anything that made you not feel what you were feeling was good. 

Freshman and sophomore year went along as well as they could and I did have fun and I think I managed to cover up most of my ennui and inebriation in public. It was junior year that was the real kicker. Three years into my four year sentence, I had given up on a deeper level and was having a really hard time keeping up with my school work and generally giving a shit. 

This time unfortunately coincided with our school installing this thing called a “computer” in the attendance office which meant that skipping school would now be harder, as there would be a permanent record of all  of my transgressions. 

Luckily for me, my new best friend’s mom had a best friend who was the attendance secretary at our school. And guess who got to work in the attendance office junior year?

This was a high school hater’s dream. My friend and I could digitally alter our attendance records at will. According to this machine, we were always at school, thank you very much, and computers, as everyone knew, were infallible. In addition, we could provide this and other services, such as excused absence slips, to our fellow classmates for the low, low price of substances both legal and illegal. 

This is the montage part of the movie, where a Kenny Loggins song is playing while we are raking in weed and tequila, and sliding slips across the counter and changing “As” to “Ps” on the computer. Cut to my best friend and I cruisin through the Taco Bell drive through in Nashville (open at that time at 10:30 am, 7 days a week), listening to The Cure, and then spending the rest of the day in one of the Warner Parks, Edwin or Percy,  with our newly acquired substances This is the montage scene that makes you want to be involved in the scam, damn the consequences. It was like a high school production of Goodfellas, minus a coked up Ray Liotta. 

Sadly, we all know how this movie ends. At 16, there’s no way I could have known that you have to get out while the getting is still good. It could have been worse, but since the person who caught us was the best friend of my best friend’s mom, she simply sent us to study hall without informing the administration or our parents. In retrospect, I imagine she might have gotten in a shit ton of trouble herself, seeing as how she was supposed to be there to supervise us and was probably outside smoking. 

Study Hall was its own kind of unique hell. It was boring and cold and too long after lunch. It was, however, a great place to sleep, which was good, because I wasn’t doing a whole lot of that at night, either because I couldn’t, or because I was busy sneaking out of the exterior door of my bedroom (my parents’ fault entirely) to go to Nashville on school nights to see bands like The Replacements (I am not sorry).

The worst part of all of this, of course, was that we now technically had to stay in school. Sure, we could get away with skipping a class here or there, but whole days were now out of the question. Unless, that is, you decided to go all the way into the abyss, stare at it, tell the abyss to fuck off,  and give up absolutely. I’m pretty sure some famous philosopher said that, but I skipped most of my world history and literature classes. 

The second worst part of this was having to procure our own “substances.” Ray Liotta never had to suffer this fate, as his worst consequence was federal prison, which honestly, at that time, would have seemed like a Teddy Bear Picnic compared to Brentwood High School. I soon found out that this is what boys are for and found myself a boyfriend who could obtain things I could not and who was also dumb enough to do it. I am so, so sorry, Steve. 

Maybe the dumbest thing about all of this is that the intoxicants got to me before the attendance office did. To the best of my knowledge, no one ever called my parents to report my truancy, nor was I ever summoned to the principal’s office. I guess they really couldn’t run that place without us. 

My after school special came to an abrupt end in the spring of my junior year, at which time, I was sent away to a “special place” to rest, recuperate, and take bullshit classes that would enable me to actually pass the 11th grade. 

When it was time for my senior year, my father had been federally indicted and, having lost our house and most of the things in it, we moved to another town, where I finished high school without much fanfare. I still skipped here and there. It turned out that the male attendance officer at my new school was unaware that women only menstruate once a month and so, being 18, I often checked myself out for imaginary cramps. Do what you have to, kids. Learn the system and use it to your advantage. 

My senior year of high school was memorable only for the fact that I fell in love for the first time. The rest of it was a wash. Even though I didn’t know the people in the school, I was still acutely aware of their hierarchies and cliques, only now those included a much more diverse student body, including a large number of Laotian students whose parents had been brought over to the middle of goddamn Tennessee by the local missionary Baptist Church. Most of them didn’t speak English and it was more than interesting to watch them interact with the other foreign student: the Future Farmers of America, who, wearing overalls often with no shirt underneath, spit into their empty Sundrop bottles everywhere in the school as they dipped. As if. 

Prom and graduation were rituals I went through, because you do, but neither was the greatest part of my life. Actually, graduation, with its air horns and cow bells, was a pretty great day. That was my independence day, the day I never had to step foot inside a fucking high school again. 

It is now several decades since that last day of high school and I can tell you from personal experience that real life is a lot more like those four years than the two golden years I spent at Northside Junior High, which is sometimes a bummer. I have spent most of my life making my way back from the place that is Giving Up, and I still go up to the edge of it and entertain the idea of jumping in from time to time. It’s tempting. 

But I have found that  if you look really hard, you can find  eople around who don’t take it all so seriously, the other people who didn’t peak in high school, the people who know that stealing a dissection frog or freezing bras at a sleepover is a lot more fun than judging what everyone wears and does and says. Those are the people who will keep you from giving up. They will keep you far from the abyss.  Find those people and keep them close and then life really can be junior high school with money, which is the best life I can possibly imagine. You can drive yourself to buy a LOT of toilet paper.