Campfyre Stories

So I was back where I had been a year and a half before.  I was a little older, a little more well-traveled and had a few more experiences under my belt.  I was still weird and, I figured, I wasn’t going to magically find myself somehow being considered "normal" by the standards of my peers, but I was determined to make a go of it.

I had a few friends from my stint in middle school  There were a couple of girls who lived not to far from me and we had spent the summer at each other’s houses.  I was shocked to find out that, once we were in high school, they weren’t interested in being friends anymore.  I just didn’t fit into their ideal of high school.  I thought I had started the year with friends, but found out shortly into the first week that I was isolated once again.

Here and there people who had known me in middle school sought me out to ask "What happened to you?  What have you been doing?" but the answer of having gone back to an alternative school and traveled the country over the previous 18 months mostly turned them off.  Eventually, I fell in with a group of girls who had always been on the fringes, not because of any kind of progressive thinking, but because they couldn’t find a way to fit in with the rest of the crowd.  I needed friends, but I think I always knew that they were a temporary measure, that these would not be lasting friendships, since they were not only dull, but seemed dulled to what was going on around them.  However, they provided me with a standard table at lunch and people to spend time with on the weekends.

I made a few friends outside of that circle that took me in, notably a girl who lived near me, but who I had not encountered before.  She was an outcast as well, but of a different sort.  An intelligent girl who modeled.  She was slightly younger than me, but looked several years older.  She had been a part of the outside world, which set her apart from the sheltered masses.  We met on the school bus and became fast friends.

For me, friendship was never about social climbing or fitting in, it has always been about the individual and what we can offer each other.  If someone were to ask me why I’m friends with any given person, I could answer them that they challenge me intellectually or they’re fun to be around or that we have shared interests.  It’s not easy for me to admit that the vast majority of my "friends" in my freshman year were friends only because I was desperately lonely and needed company.  There was, maybe, one girl who I genuinely liked and whose company I enjoyed.  The rest were friends of convenience, but it got my through the year.

I debated whether or not to have my teachers write me letters of recommendation to get into the honors program in high school, but decided against it.  I knew I was smart enough, but I figured I had enough on my plate without also having to work out more difficult classes.  It left me bored in most of my classes, but I think that had as much to do with teaching methods and materials as it did with how challenging the work was.

Math was the bane of my existence.  My math class consisted of completing worksheets every day until our test every Friday.  Talk about mind-numbing busy work.  I would read the chapter, understand the concept, sit through whatever half-assed lesson we were given and then do the same problems over and over again.  It didn’t take long before I had enough of that silliness and since my alternative education had taught me not to fear authority, I approached my teacher directly.

I explained to him that this idea of worksheets wasn’t helping me to learn.  In fact, I was more capable of learning on my own and would probably get more from his class if I could use it as a study hall.  I proposed that he give me the test on Monday, instead of on Friday and excuse me from the worksheets.  If ever I didn’t do well on his test,  I would go back to doing his worksheets and would forgo math class as study hall.

He called my mom.

I kid you not, he called my mother and told her about the conversation we had.  He said "I’d like to teach your daughter a lesson."  My mom laughed and told him to go ahead and do that.

I never failed a test and passed the class with a grade in the high 90’s.  At the end of the year, he called my mother again to tell her that his experience with me had caused him to reevaluate his teaching style and to consider something more interactive and challenging.  Turned out, I had taught him a lesson.

That summer was one of the best I can remember.  My parents went to an annual party on an island in Maine, but since I didn’t want to go, I was allowed to stay home alone with a good friend of mine.  We rented movies and called boys and ate fresh peas from my mother’s garden for almost a week.  Those are the only details I can remember, but the summer in general was an excellent one.

My sophomore year saw great changes in my life.  I had a boyfriend, albeit a long-distance one, had lost the 20 or so pounds that puberty had added to me and was ready to start fresh, again.  I started taking a Theater Arts class and found new friends among the theater people.  Most of them were a year or two older than me, but that had often been the case.  I related better to people older than me and, at 15, had become accustomed to losing people from my life after a short period of time.

Early in the year, I paid attention to the announcement that they were looking for candidates for student council and threw my hat in the ring for president.  I spent a long time working on my speech.  Not only was I an experienced public speaker from my years in alternative school, I had experience in democratic peer councils, knew Robert’s Rules of Order and had served as a student member of the NCACS Board of Directors.  I was filled with ideas of things that could be implemented in my school, like peer counseling and my grassroots action experience (through my parents) had my mind abuzz. 

After we gave our speeches, people looked at me in a completely different light.  People a year ahead of me stopped me in the halls to tell me that they had heard my speech and wished that they were in my class so they could vote for me.  People all throughout the school stopped me and wanted to know more about who I was.  I can’t say that there were many overtures of friendship, but people took notice, and in a much more positive way than before.

I won the election only to learn that all I was authorized to do was oversee school dances.  There were no real changes that I could make within the school, mostly because of who our class adviser was, a bitter, tenured woman who never seemed to like kids or teaching or much of anything.  She may have enjoyed being class adviser, though, as it gave her more power than a mere English teacher.

She figured that the student council was at her beck and call, that they would do for her whatever she could justify as being associated with student council or the sophomore class.  This largely meant running errands and passing messages to the officers who were too busy to find time for student council meetings.  As far as the adviser was concerned, the entirety of responsibility that fell on sophomore class president was to track down the rest of the student council and try to schedule meetings for times when all four officers could attend.  What was worse was that she would keep me after class to discuss how the rest of the council wasn’t living up to their responsibilities (again, not my fault or problem, *I* hadn’t voted for officers with sports conflicts, but the rest of the class apparently had).

I disagreed.  I felt that it was the responsibility of the president to facilitate and run the meetings and to present whatever proposals the council came up with.  I felt that if it was the responsibility of any of the officers to go running around tracking people down, it should be either the vice-president (who was one of those missing) or the secretary.  To me, those were the offices that seemed to fit tracking people down and delivering messages.

Never one to avoid the issue, especially if it was affecting me on a daily basis, once she had pulled me aside one too many times for my liking, I confronted her during our 10 minute break.

"Running around and finding the rest of the officers is not my job.  In fact, as the class adviser, it’s yours to ensure that each of the officers is doing her job as an elected official of the sophomore class.  The reason that you keep laying this on me is because I happen to be in your class and the others have a different English teacher.  This is inappropriate behavior and I refuse to put up with it.  I am not your errand girl.

"I am more than willing to compromise on when we hold the meetings and to help schedule them for times when we’re all free, but this consistent running of your errands and passing information to my fellow officers needs to end.  This is not the role of class president.  You need to stop trying to get me to do your job.

"This ends now.  I just want to make that clear, and if this affects my grade in any way, you and I will go down to the office and have a little chat with the vice-principal."

Now I made a point to do this between classes, and during the 10 minute break so that we could have a one-on-one conversation.  It was never my intention to put her on the spot or to humiliate her, but as I went on my tirade, her next class started filtering in.  Also, I found as I left the room, people had congregated in the hallway to listen to someone speak out against a teacher who was widely derided.  By the end of the next period, rumors were flying.  Few people knew it had been *me* having that conversation, nor what we had been discussing, but that a student had been standing up to this teacher had gotten around.  "Did you hear that a student was yelling at [our English teacher]?" they asked me.  "It was me and I wasn’t yelling," I replied.

It gained me a little more notoriety and people, again, started looking at me differently.

It was my antics that made things easier as time went on.  Sophomore year was easier than freshman year, and junior year proved even easier than the previous two.  I knew people, had some measure of respect and no longer bore the scorn and isolation in which I had started.  Much of that I attribute to the fact that people were growing up and wanted to know about the world outside their hometown.  I had experienced it and for those who migrated toward the fringes of society (at least of high school society), I had become somewhat appealing.

No longer were my friends chosen based on who was willing to talk to me, but instead they were based on the people I best related to and found common ground with.  I started to feel my way through fair-weather friends, in-school (only) friends and the friends who I would actually see during the summer and care about.  That said, I also have to mention that few of my friends lasted for very long.  Despite what Facebook may indicate, I’ve only really kept in touch with one person from that time period.  Even year by year, my group of friends changed radically.  There were always one or two who remained consistent, but I never managed to work out how to make my way into a circle, or to create a circle of my own friends.  Each year had different circumstances, different experiences and different friends.

I turned 16 and studied hard for the learner’s permit test, but in a terrible stroke of luck, I happened upon the test that focused almost exclusively on DWI.  I knew the rules of the road, I knew traffic laws, but I didn’t bother to memorize the BAC that constituted DWI vs. DUI.  I didn’t feel that the exact levels of breathalyzer scores were important factors in terms of learning to drive.  NYS DMV disagreed.  I failed my permit test and was so disgusted by the lack of questions on actual traffic regulations that I didn’t bother to try again.

That summer was also notable in that my parents had a baby.  My little brother was born the day after my birthday - 15 years younger than me and 11 years younger than my other brother.  He was a good baby and I adored him, but this new addition to the family didn’t change *my* life all that much.  My routines stayed the same, except for the occasional babysitting, there wasn’t much new except that our family had grown.

My junior year passed mostly uneventfully.  I became more involved with drama and journalism and was often involved in extra-curricular activities.  I didn’t drive, but most of my friends did, and since I wouldn’t have likely had a car anyway, no one minded trekking up the mountain to pick me up for outings.

My boyfriend came from MI to attend my junior prom, which was wholly forgettable.  Sure, there are a few things that stand out in my mind, but none that make good stories and little that is worth remembering, let alone sharing.

By the end of my junior year, I had accumulated almost as many credits as I needed to graduate.  I was required by state law to take two  half-credit classes, but according to my school, I was also required to take another year of English (despite having well more than the required credits), history, PE and several others.  I was told that I could not graduate early, despite the number of credits I have accumulated and I would have a full enough course load that half-days weren’t an option either.

At that point, I decided that I had had enough of public school in general, and this high school in particular, and that I would find another option.  I decided to use the summer to find that way out.