News item: A 32-year-old former state social worker successfully posed as a teenager and became a student in three Boston high schools.
When I read the news that a 32-year-old woman had passed herself off as a teenager and gulled three different high schools in Boston–the Athens of America!–into admitting her, I thought to myself: There’s hope for me.
While I piled up a lot of insignificant accomplishments in grades nine through twelve (French Club, National Forensic League, junior class Vice President), I left behind a lot of unfinished business.
Like basketball. I once told my younger son after a particularly lousy practice in which he pulled the sullen teenager act on me–his coach as well as his father–that I’d been kicked off more basketball teams than he’d been on. It was true, but I had an excuse: I really really cared about the game, it’s just that I kept doing stupid stuff, like buying black low-cut Converse All-Stars instead of white, as one coach required. Or throwing a lob pass to our tall center after the coach told me . . . to stop throwing lob passes to our tall center. Or–well, I’d better stop there, I’ve got two more to go, and you’re probably bored already.
But my point is, if I’d been able to stay out of trouble I might have realized my dream of scoring in double figures. I vaguely remember scoring 2, 4 and maybe 6 points in a game, but I never made it to 8, much less ten. If I could go back now–I said to myself–I’d show ’em. “That guy scored in double figures once,” I’d hear them whisper as I walked into the dressing room at an away game. “Double-figures” is a remarkably elastic notion, as it covers both 10 and 99 points–and everything in between.
If I went back to high school at my current age of three score years and <never mind> there are other errors of omission and commission I could remedy. I would study harder in French, for example, and geometry too. I wouldn’t take LSD before the final layout of the yearbook, which resulted in a sports section that looked like it was put together by a schizophrenic who’d escaped from his straitjacket and been given a jar of glue.
But I’ve got to play it cool. My only previous trips back to my old school were two reunions (20th and 50th) and frequent dreams in which I find myself entering the old brick building to take a French test I haven’t studied for–in my pajamas. So I’m not sure how I’ll be received by the teens who–just like before–are milling around the exits, crossing the street to be off school grounds when they want to smoke.
I’ve done a little research to get “hep” to current teenage slang. Unfortunately, TIME–formerly a weekly newsmagazine–has gone to a bi-weekly publication schedule, so I can’t depend on the “How to Understand Your Teenager” glossaries they used to run in order to be up-to-the-minute. Instead, I’m forced to turn to the World Wide Web to “bone up” on how the cool kids talk these days. Apparently “wassup” is le dernier cri (the latest cry–I learned something in two years of French class). After checking to make sure I’m not wearing pajamas, I greet one of my fellow kids.
“Wassup man?” I say as I approach a younger incarnation of my old buddy Jim, a Stevie Winwood look-alike and an All-District Horndog. He had red hair and freckles, a sly smile, a quick sense of humor. Jim was very open-minded about women. His only rule was . . . he wouldn’t date a redhead.
“But . . . you’re redheaded,” I replied when he told me.
“The thought of red hairs grinding against each other down there . . . it’s disgusting.”
Maybe the kid at the side entrance of the school is a grandchild of one of the many children that Jim from long ago fathered. Young Jim gives me a look like I’m out of date, but that’s nothing new–I was out-of-date before he was born.
He gives me a shrug that might pass for a greeting, then goes back to doing something we couldn’t back in the day–looking at his phone. I start to reminisce but catch myself–I’ll blow my cover if I tell him when I was his age I had to run home and wait for my two sisters to finish talking before I got a turn at the rotary phone.
“Say, uh, is Wes McGuire still basketball coach?” I ask hesitantly.
“Who?”
“He . . . he was a legend here, long ago.”
“Don’t know him.”
“He liked me–a lot. Said I always gave 110%.” I had to, since I had 10% talent.
“They brought a new guy in last year.”
“Thanks, I think I’ll try out.”
“Suit yourself, dude.” I start to tell him that the revival of the word “dude” to refer to a male friend or acquaintance started with my generation but–I get the sense he wouldn’t care.
I walk into the building and I have to say, the teachers who once looked like Egyptian mummies to me have aged gracefully. There’s Madame Clooney, my French teacher, who gives me her crooked little je ne sais quoi smile that may just possibly mean more than a B+ for once. There’s Mrs. Reisgang, the Mrs. Robinson-before-her-time who encouraged my writing while sometimes invading my personal space to ask whether I could possibly pare down that two semi-colon sentence a bit.
I give them both a smile and a wave and stick my head in my biology classroom. Unfortunately, nothing has changed here. My teacher–a taxidermist on the side–went walkabout when the chemicals went to his head. He ended up sleeping on the streets of the nearest large city and when he was finally found and rehabilitated a bit, he was returned to the classroom in the spring, having completely forgotten about the year-long leaf collection assignment he gave us the prior fall.
As I round the corner on my way to 9th grade health class where I learned the facts of life since my parents either didn’t know them, or wouldn’t reveal them to me, I stop short. There she is before me–the most beautiful girl in my class–Sheila Divine. I . . . I completely blew it with her. My friend Randy Vallejo told me once that she had a crush on me, and that all I had to do was spend some time with her, buy her a cherry Coke, take her to a Hayley Mills movie–and I’d be feeling her up before the cartoon and the public safety announcement were over.
There was just one problem. She was . . . boring. I couldn’t see spending the rest of my life–or 9th grade, whichever came first–with a woman who was beautiful but had nothing to say.
“Hey Sheila,” I call out, but she doesn’t even give me a sidewise glance. She’s walking next to . . . Randy Vallejo, the dink!
As they pass me they part when Sheila goes into biology class and I grab Randy by the shoulder and spin him around.
“Hey Vallejo,” I snap, in the time-honored high school male convention of calling each other by last name. “What gives?”
“What do you mean?”
“You told me she liked me, and that all I had to do was . . .”
“You’re a little slow on the uptake, Mr. National Honor Society.”
“Wha . . .”
“You snooze, you lose!”