SassyBlonde

This is another entry that I really struggled with in terms of sharing with the wide world or password-protecting, but I really need to get this monkey off my back I think, and there's no way this will fit on a PostSecret card, so here goes.

There's nothing quite like a visit from a parental unit to make your internal timeline jump back a few decades. (In point of fact, this post and this post by Beth Fish and this post by Aimee also had something to do with it as well.)

All of the sudden, I find myself reminiscing and reliving my high school life, which may or may not be a good thing. See, high school for me was the nearest thing I can think of to Hell, which I know is not abnormal, but still. There were good things that happened, I know it, but there are also deep, dark and scary things there. Things that crawl out and go bump in the night and can derail your sanity when looked at in bright daylight.

I was the consummate band geek in high school. I say that not as an apology, but as an identification. You know, the kind of kid who spent way too much in little rooms by myself obsessing over exactly how perfect that sixteenth note in measure twenty-seven sounded. During the day, my classes were merely placeholders that took up time until I could get to the band room and play my clarinet. This, for me, was not a social activity or an extra-curricular checkbox, but something that quite literally I ate, breathed, and slept. By the time I was a junior, I spent more time practicing than I did doing homework. (Which did turn out okay for me in the long run, but just as an explanation, I'm just saying.)

It turned out that this was a good thing, because the next year it was all I'd have: I spent the near entirety of my senior year grounded for a stupid juvenile prank (that I still wish had gone off as planned, they deserved it.) I suppose most people look back on the selves they had to inhabit in high school as juvenile and naive, and are proud to have moved on. I actually look back on that poor kid as being pretty strong in the face of some pretty severe torture, and I'm more proud that she survived at all. More importantly, I'm proud that she had the iron will and constitution to make it through the next six years and come out on the other side of the dark tunnel that followed.

See, I was the victim of a pretty spectacular group of bullies in high school. Like I said, not that this is an uncommon situation for a high school kid, but I rather tend to think that my situation went a bit above and beyond. As I've mentioned before, my particular brand of high school torture occurred at the hands of a group of kids we later came to call the Band Mafia. Now, this bears a little bit of explaining to those of you who didn't grow up in the band-obsessed culture of the Deep South. There are two forms of religion in Southern high schools: church and football. Because of this, the high school band, if it's good, gets a bit of the coattail football glory and a little bit of a pass in terms of the geek-thumping you get elsewhere for being band geeks. In fact, if you're good, it elevates you to just below the status of a star athlete in the eyes of your peers, which is where the problems start to come in.

The band kids were actually popular at my school, and as we can all remember, popularity breeds hatred between rival cliques, right? Date the wrong person, be friends with the wrong person, and it's all over. In my case it was a case of both all rolled into one. My best friend broke up with a popular kid in the Mafia, and the shit hit the fan. From being an uncomfortable high school dating squabble between them it somehow grew into the wholesale bullying of our entire group of friends. And by bullying, I don't mean Give me your lunch money-- I mean outright abuse. I'm not exaggerating when I say that I used to have a group of kids who walked out the school door behind me and recounted every musical mistake I made during band rehearsal as if I were a steaming turd on the floor for each one: a missed note, a flat entrance, a squeak. Things I would never say to any human being on the grounds of being served a restraining order. And they did worse, too, but I'm not going to talk about that here. Pretty hateful people, and a large and painful pill for a seventeen-year-old kid to take on a daily basis. Kids are bastards at finding the most hurtful thing possible to do to their peers, right? I used to dream of running them off from toilet-papering my house with a shotgun or having them arrested, no lie. The worst part is that their parents supported them in their behavior, and when we tried to return the toilet-papering favor, we were sold out by a girl we thought was our friend and I ended up being grounded for the remainder of my senior year. Fun.

I spent the entirety of my college years battling the echoes of those kids' voices and deep in a fog of depression. Is it any wonder that I'm not so excited about staying in touch with any of the people I knew back then? It even taints the association with the kids I actually liked liked at that point. I've recently been friended by a couple of the lesser aggressors on Facebook and MySpace, and I have to say, it's still pretty raw. I saw one of the Mafia in a restaurant when I was back home a couple of years ago, and I did everything I could to hide in the back of the booth as he walked by. D couldn't figure out what was going on, and when I explained to him I had a hard time keeping him from going out and beating the crap out of the guy then and there.

Don't get me wrong-- it's these assholes I have to thank for my current career. If I had been able to socialize my senior year, I probably never would have practiced enough for that elusive full-ride music scholarship, and I certainly wouldn't have learned to deflect the harsh criticisms that come with a musical career. And there were lots of good things about those years too-- I met D at band camp, played in Carnegie Hall and all around the South for honor bands, and worked real-life jobs that still shape the way I perceive the world in a tangible way. Still, notice that everything good I remember has nothing to do with school.

So, high school? Not a place I want to get back to, thanks.