The Illiterates.” To easily identify fellow gang members, we all wore letterman jackets.

Arkadia wrapped her arms around his waist and laid her head upon the muscular cliff face he called his chest.

I reached down and picked up a baseball bat at my feet and I flung it as hard as it could. It circled and arced high in the air until it slammed against the side...

High school sucked. It was a universal truth and whoever said these were supposed to be the best years of your life was probably drunk or delusional.

A lot of kids think high school represents the best years of their lives, but others recognize that it’s mostly irrelevant bullshit, and that life doesn’t even begin until afterward.

Hell to the yeah!”Like, Alex Pettyfer hot?”Dude, he puts Alex Pettyfer to shame!

I’m a man without a country. Or I’m a man with too many countries-you pick. Ultimately, in both global politics and the high school power hierarchy, they amount to the same thing.

The families of graduating seniors emptied out of cars, sheepish in uncommon splendor, like milling clans at the origin of a parade. There is something spent about the families of teenagers; possibly it’s the look...

Dad.

All Julie has to do is explain to her friends that she’s using it to individually seal each item that she throws out.””Then they’d think she was a geek,” I said.”She will thank me later,”...

Go to the Winter Dance with me.

Matteo lived inside her like a memory that paradoxically stopped the pain and which she could never get enough of… because there was, and never would be, anything that was like him. Wherever she went,...

This was a factory, a sorting house. We were no different from dogs and pigs and cows: all of us were allowed to play when we were small, but then, just before reaching maturity, we...

When I left high school with my diploma, it felt like I was holding a key that would unlock the door to a better world. Every teacher I passed on my way down to the...

There is no force in high school more powerful than one person’s blunt disagreement.

…pretty much everyone hates high school. It’s a measure of your humanity, I suspect. If you enjoyed high school, you were probably a psychopath or a cheerleader. Or possibly both. Those things aren’t mutually exclusive,...

I’d studied Latin for five years now, which meant that I could, on rare occasions, actually translate something.

Silence has always been my default mode—my best defense against the rest of the world.

Be careful who you call crazy. Some of us think it’s a compliment.

Yeah, and shit floats.” Lesa took her seat, yanking out last night’s English homework.

High school isn’t a very important place. When you’re going you think it’s a big deal, but when it’s over nobody really thinks it was great unless they’re beered up.

According to Sarah, who had gone two years ago, prom was famous for being an overpriced disappointment where most people had no fun.

In all four years of high school, not once did I make the football team. The other part of the story is that I never even tried out. Just raw talent, I guess.

Maybe they notice me wincing whenever I hear them say it, but I don’t know: there are all sorts of reasons I could be wincing. Life is a wince-a-thon.

It was about how men walk into a forest afraid because they know all the things that can happen. They might wake the noisy birds and cause chaos. But kids come into the trees and...

This just didn’t happen to girls like me. This just didn’t happen to anyone.

Problem is, the bathroom pass can’t help you escape life. It’s still there when you come out. Problems and crap don’t go away hiding in the can.

the instant she made a point of telling me I was just as good as them, I saw that the whole question was open to debate and she was cheering me on because I was...

None of you got laid in high school, did you?

We could love and not be suckers. We could dream and not be losers. It was such a beautiful time. Everything was possible because we didn’t know anything yet.

And it wasn’t just us. It wasn’t just that we were high school, me a junior and you a senior, with our clothes all wrong for restaurants like this, too bright and too rumpled and...

High school is neither a democracy nor a dictatorship – nor, contrary to popular belief, an anarchic state. High school is a divine-right monarchy. And when the queen goes on vacation, things change.

Yeah, let’s go to the hotel. Grab your purse and I’ll find your coat.

High School is like a spork: it’s a crappy spoon and a crappy fork, so in the end it’s just plain useless.

Education is every day and everywhere, the only thing you have to pay is attention.

I grin back and breathe in the sweet smell of sweat, whiteboard marker and fear. The smells of high school.

In high school I barely made the rodeo team. But I wasn’t good enough to start, so I just rode the bench.

You ought to go to a boy’s school sometime. Try it sometime,” I said. “It’s full of phonies, and all you do is study so that you can learn enough to be smart enough to...

I’m not sure about all the particulars that led to this moment. Do I believe life is a series of dots to be connected…or that no one can outrun destiny…or that all roads lead to...

And I understood why he didn’t need friends or to be accepted at our shitty racist high school, because he had his music, and that was so much better than anything we had to offer.

It is a universally acknowledged truth that high school sucks. In fact, high school is where we are first introduced to the basic existential question of life: How is it possible to exist in a...

This is followed by laughter because we’re in high school, which means we’re predictable and almost everything is funny, especially if it’s someone else’s public humiliation.

They had become a fixed star in the shifting firmament of the high school’s relationships, the acknowledged Romeo and Juliet. And she knew with sudden hatefulness that there was one couple like them in every...

THERE WAS ALWAYS a boy in your life that common sense and the prayers of parents told you to stay away from: fast talker, fast car, and fast hands. He was the boy your father...

I’ve never had any summer lovin’. And I’ve never had any school year lovin’, either. I’ve never had a boyfriend. I’ve never hooked up with a guy. And this morning, on my Internet browser, an...

In high school I attended a magnet school—for refrigerators.

There’s always a bit of suspense about the particular way in which a given school year will get off to a bad start.

No. No, you can’t.