Entering High School

New beginnings, another reset, as it were.

We all meet a new batch of people when we enter high school, I imagine, as kids change school systems, kids move from other towns, and groups of kids from other middle schools are destined for the same high school but had yet to meet one another. I’m not sure if that last bit applied to TH&VS or RMSS, then; they may have already been set back at the beginning of middle school. Not so in O’Gorman’s case, where St. Theresa met Sacred Heart.

Once again, I found myself in an odd place. I suppose I may have always been a loner at heart, or maybe just an ambivert, but I found my attention split between two, and sometimes three, clusters of friends, and this not counting what would become my core friends, those who I worked with and hung out with, we lifeguards from the Archie Dillon Sportsplex. I still had those friends from St. Theresa: Garry Martin, Chris Cooper, John Lavric, a group that had been rather depleted at the end of Grade 7, when many of our friends and acquaintances had transferred to the public system (when suddenly their parents discovered that they would have had to pay extra for their kids to continue on in the separate system). A few more transferred at the end of Grade 8, too, not many, but a few. No matter, at the beginning of Grade 9 our numbers swelled again. Not by a lot; O’Gorman was not a big school, by any stretch of the imagination, just two single story L-shaped buildings, and at that time, a single portable. Back then, there was only one, just a short frigid skip from the warmth of the main building, years before O’Gorman gained its former nickname, Portable High, after it finally gained full funding from the government and its populace exploded and its athletic field disappeared under the weight of those scattered ranks of prefab buildings.

Groups of friends shuffled, congealed anew. There were new athletic groups (track, cross-country, basketball, hockey), new geeks (drama, public speaking), new populars, new freaks. Smokers, snowmobilers, gearheads, muscle heads, and potheads. Hard to believe, considering the size of the place.

Where did I fit in? Somewhere between the geeks and freaks, the track, and the musicians. Not that I played. But I had begun to develop an enormous record collection, remarkable considering how little I made working at the pool, in comparison with those who worked for their fathers in construction, and those working at the grocery stores. But that was later. Initially, we all survived on allowances. And there was a divide there, too. Rich, affluent, middle class, working class, working poor.

Where was I most comfortable? The pool, amongst the fishes. In basements, turntables spinning. At the video arcades. Everyone else, everywhere else, was irrelevant.