(Sorry. Better late than never.)

Ah, high school… Back to being a member of the lowest pecking order. The girls you knew in elementary school that were covered in cooties had suddenly become cute and made you say and do stupid things for them in their presence. You found out you’re not the only one that can recite Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail line for line by heart. And there’s a class where they actually let you cut animals open and pull out their guts, all in the name of science!

Young bullies discovered the football team and the weight room and grew into young adult jocks. The troubled kids discovered the science room bunsen burners and blossomed into amateur arsonists. The class clown discovered a larger audience and became the school clown. Little nerds and geekettes discovered the computer lab and became… bigger nerds and geekettes. It’s the cycle of life.

We had frosh week, but luck of the draw paired me with a grade-twelver that was notorious for always skipping school, so me and three other guys (out of the hundred or so froshes that year) with the same luck pretty much just hung out together for most of that week. We missed out on being dressed up in embarrassing costumes. Missed out on being humiliated in frosh court. Missed out on being driven around everywhere in the trunk of a compact car on pot-hole laden Saskatchewan roads. Missed out on frosh slosh. It was a blessing and a curse, really.

I wish I could remember the name of my Grade 9 A English teacher. She was all proud that she had just finished Special Ed. (presumably as a teacher, but we all assumed the other, of course) and was filled with all sorts of new techniques and practices that would shape and mould these young minds into the future’s great thinkers. I particularly remember how two girls looked forward to crushing her hopes every step of the way, and how, every day when they did so, she was completely oblivious to that fact.

I told you the glasses and haircut would be gone. Back to a more respectable nerdy side part and comb over. All I can say is thank God I was friends with the jocks. Red mark on my cheek is still there, too. And go back and look; those are new glasses… honest.