How Do You Write About High School When Your Experience Was So Weird?

The main character in my novel will most likely be high school aged at the beginning of the story. Writing from the perspective of a typical high school student will be a challenge for me.  My high school experience was more like what I imagine it would have been like if my parents were in the military - moving around from place to place, never being anywhere for too long.

Most people start high school in 9th grade. My junior high school provided high-achieving seventh graders with the opportunity to skip the 8th grade and go to 9th grade at the same school. My "freshman" year was really my last year in junior high. I didn't test for admission into exam schools, and I didn't get into any of the high schools I really wanted to attend. I was hoping to go to Midwood or John Jay High Schools, but the lottery dictated that I could go to George Westinghouse or the High School of Graphic Communication Arts. GCA had a creative writing program, and that appealed to me, but it was also a pretty long train ride from home. When my mom and I went to the orientation, the administrator talked about how overcrowded the classes would be (~400 more students than expected, if I remember correctly), how many beer cans they found, and the weed that was smelled in the halls the previous year. I was also aware that there was a significant Decepticon gang presence at the school. I was a 13-year-old 10th grader (a very young 13), and I was terrified.

My mom and I left the orientation, and my parents enrolled me in Boro Hall Academy. The school was located in a former office building on Smith Street downtown Brooklyn near the Hoyt Street train station.  My mom worked in Brooklyn Criminal Court, which was only a few blocks from my school, so we'd ride into work/school together each morning. We got on the 2 train at the Church Avenue stop. Sometimes, we'd ride back to the Flatbush Avenue stop (only three stops) so we would have seats.  BHA was a small school with no gym, cafeteria or auditorium, so we got to go out for lunch every day, and our gym class (if I could call it that - we mostly played dodgeball) was a six-block walk to and from the local YWCA each time.

I made some wonderful friends there, some of whom I'm still in touch with, and some I haven't been able to find. Unfortunately, Boro Hall Academy went bankrupt after my junior year, and my parents had to find a school for me for my final year in high school. Interestingly enough, I ended up going to Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School in Fort Greene, which was the school from which my church rented space for our Saturday services (we were sabbath observers, and the church didn't believe in owning property so we'd be ready to go when it was time for rapture).

Senior Picture

I loved Bishop Loughlin. Although it was a little strange being a student at a Catholic school while attending a church that taught that everyone outside of the church was deceived (each morning, the whole school prayed to St. John Baptist de La Salle, and as a cult kid, I wasn't sure how to feel about it), that year was my best high school year by far. Again, I made great friends who I'm still in touch with and I wish I could have been a student there the whole time.  It was very different than my other schools. I had Death and Dying class in which we watched On Golden Pond to learn about aging, and we wrote our own obituaries (Brother Dennis Cronin was my Death and Dying teacher, and in his obituary, he wrote that he'd die when he was 67. He's now the President of the school, and I'm glad things didn't turn out the way his obituary stated). 

The eight-block walk from the Atlantic Avenue train station to the school was a bit much sometimes, especially because I took that walk to and from the school every day alone, but I loved my friends, and developed a significant crush on the guy who was one of my student teachers in the sophomore saxophone class where I learned to play the clarinet (nothing came of it though, because my parents told me I couldn't date until I was 18, and the church taught that we shouldn't spend too much time with people outside the church, and that interracial dating was wrong [he was Puerto Rican]). I took classes like Marriage and the Family, French, Public Speaking, Creative Writing, Economics and Law, Minority Studies, and I worked in the office during my free period.

Because I skipped both kindergarten and eighth grade, I was just turning 16 when I graduated from high school.  I don't have any pictures from my high school graduation, except this one that a friend tagged me on through Facebook years later. I remember being really sad that night. My high school graduation was on a Saturday night, and we celebrated Old Testament holy days back then. That night just so happened to be the night before Pentecost, which was one of our high holy days, so after my graduation, while other kids went to special dinners and parties, I went home, mourned in my diary and went to sleep. 

I only applied to go to two colleges - one was Ambassador College, which was the college my church sponsored in California, and the other was Brooklyn College. I wasn't admitted to Ambassador because they felt I was a bit too young to be so far away from home. They were right about that. I enrolled in Brooklyn College and did very well that year.  I enjoyed my classes, especially Intro to Music and Women in the Arts. It was a weird time socially because I was told that I could no longer be in the church youth group since I had graduated from high school. I had to join the church single's club (creepy!). So, I was considered a single woman, but I didn't have permission to date. Can you say confusing?

I met a guy named Mark at Brooklyn College, and I really liked him. Nothing much came of that either, but I started to learn my lesson about saying too much about my feelings. Not being able to go to the prom with Axel broke my heart, and trying to explain why ended our friendship. He was a really sweet guy . . . an absolute gentleman, and I think we would have had a wonderful time. I kept my study sessions and lunches with Mark to myself. I wish I had learned to keep more to myself. Instead of being encouraged to help one another, church members were encouraged to expose the struggles of other members. When a member's struggles were made public, they'd be suspended from the church, and not allowed to talk with the other members so they could be "buffeted by Satan." It was a spiritually caustic environment, and I was too young to understand that even sharing something with the best of intentions, I would cause tremendous pain someone very close to me . . . but that's a story for another day. 

Anyway, although my school experience in my teenage years was atypical - a public junior high school, a private school, a parochial school, and a community college - I can absolutely use some of my experiences to craft the narration for my novel. I'm looking forward to developing this story, not only through memories, but by wondering about how things could have been.