1990

I was in the academic Olympics again. I qualified for the state round of the National Geography Bee again. My standard school outfit was a sweatshirt from an Ivy League university with the sleeves pushed up paired with shorts. (I lived in coastal California. Sweatshirts and shorts weren't such a strange combination.) I went to sixth-grade camp, which wasn't as cool as I'd been led to believe it would be, but we all pretended it was anyway.

I graduated elementary school; when I switched schools a few years before, I began attending a school with a very small enrollment. Our graduating class was 12 students, so going to junior high with "all" of my friends wasn't really a big concern. I wanted to attend the junior high on the other side of town because it was said to have a better honors program, but my parents didn't want me to start high school with all my junior-high friends at the other school. However, comma, our town was undergoing a demographic shift as families with children were priced out of town, rendering some schools obsolete. The school district reshuffled students, busing thousands of kids across town, meaning that the kids who would attend my high school would be attending my preferred junior high. So I maintained my cross-town bike commute and book reading.

I only knew four people at my school, and three of them I didn't want to know. But I attached myself to one boy from church and became friends with all his friends. These were my friends for the rest of my schooling.

Around Halloween, I was sitting in the back of English class, crushing up Smarties to eat them like Pixie Stix. (We were ahead of our time.) We noticed that the white Smarties resembled cocaine when crushed. (At least, we noticed they resembled TV-and-movie cocaine, which is all any of us had ever seen.) I left a few lines of crushed white Smarties on my desk with a note that read, "Fifty dollars per line. Leave the money in Locker B-69." Then we moved on to our next class.

Here was the brilliant part: B-69 wasn't my locker. I figured I'd get away with it. But several periods later I walked into science class and the assistant principal was waiting for me. The jig was up. I was suspended for three days for "possession of a drug lookalike substance."

via oneofthebest

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