A Memory From Freshman Year In High School

Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash These were the exact lockers we had, only there was a combination lock built into them.

I boarded the bus for Glenbard North High School for the first time with a feeling somewhere between a kid heading to summer camp and a convict headed to prison. My natural reaction was the latter, but I had to pump myself with positive thoughts in order to make myself do it. I got on the bus with a bunch of older kids who knew the routine and realized I had to find a spot on benches already filled with kids. Somehow I managed to find a spot as the third on a seat and spent the rest of the journey trying not to fall off the three inches of seat that was mine every time we hit a bump. We hit a lot of bumps. Fullerton was only partly paved back then.

When I arrived at Glenbard North I knew it wasn’t summer camp. Add a guard tower and the transition to prison would have been complete. I walked through the doors, away from the freedom and sunlight into a dim world of insufficient fluorescent lights and uniformly square classrooms. It was a square-shaped building with four aisles, with only the outer side of the outer aisle having windows, and those only located at the top two feet of the wall. It had all the earmarks of enforced incarceration. There was only one thing that made it different from a prison: it was co-ed.

Never in my life, before or since, have I had the sensation of the beauty of the opposite sex and my possibilities for swimming in…