My Awkward Phase

I struck an orator’s pose.
“I’ll play devil’s advocate. If we don’t record these adolescent passages, aren’t we abdicating our roles as journalists?”
Anne yawned.
“Been there, done that: we reported on date rape drugs last year, got a football player expelled.”
“I was three years a hostage in a monastery masquerading as a prep school. I want memories to sustain me during college.”
I gestured downing a shot, smoking a bong and snorting a line. Quinn crumpled and threw another drawing into the garbage can.
“Partying got you kicked back into this hell-hole?”
People often asked what Caulfield-esqe faux pas had gotten me ejected from my elite Jesuit prep school. The truth, that my Jesus-loving roommate reported me for dildo-masturbating while cross-dressed, was too embarrassing. I hewed to a safer fiction.
“I organized a rally for a suspended gay teacher, lost my scholarship.”
Barb gave me a thumb’s up.
“Their loss was our gain. Screw tradition, toss normalcy, and invoke chaos. Let’s gay date on Homecoming. Me with Anne and you with Quinn.”
“Truth or dare?”
“If not now, when?”
“Seize the moment.”
We anointed ourselves the Intellectual Mafia, and dominated debate, academic decathlon, yearbook, and journalism, pursuits to which our classmates indifferent. The ordinary curriculum was beneath us; we took mostly AP classes. We obsessed over Existentialism.
We were outsiders, friends only with one another. Quinn was openly gay, Barb was lesbian, and Anne and I classified ourselves as ‘questioning,’ which in my case meant that I was too intimidated to come out.
Uni High had been a top public high school but had been reduced to mediocrity by the legacies of busing and budget crises of the Nineties. Wealthy residents of the surrounding neighborhoods sent their children to private schools. Only a handful of gifted students remained, stranded by their parents’ modest finances.
In the traumatized aftermath of 9/11, the other students of Uni High had cocooned themselves in social certainties of the past.