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Authors: Luke Donovan
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H IGH S CHOOL, T HOSE W EREN’T THE D AYS
If you a hater, I got a full-time job for you.
—Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino
A s an adult, I dread waiting in a check-out line with a group of teenagers or sitting on a train or an airplane with them. Many seem very happy and laugh at nonsensical things. I’m glad that they’re happy, but most of them time I can never understand how they can think their teenage drama is as important as the situation in Afghanistan or how to fix Social Security.
Even some of my adult friends who work in grocery stores or at Starbucks tell me they remember being as obsessed as those kids are with their social lives. I tell them that I remember high school, too, although I wish I didn’t. First, I was a very awkward teen. I was a late bloomer, and I didn’t start showing any signs of puberty until I was fifteen. I was scared of girls, and I was often very shy with groups of people until I felt comfortable. The worst part of my adolescence experience was that my testicles didn’t descend and my left testicle hung lower than my right one, which was so embarrassing that I was afraid to tell my mother to make a doctor’s appointment.
During the summer of 1999, before I transferred back to public high school, I mainly worked my part-time job, forty hours a week or more, at McDonald’s. I really didn’t have any expectations of school; I was more concerned about taking AP U.S. History and AP English than meeting girls or finding a relationship or a clique of friends.
When I was at McDonald’s, I enjoyed working with Sam, who just started working there a few months after I did. I had known Sam since third grade. Sam was smart, athletic, and had a good sense of humor. He played golf and baseball and had great grades, too. He actually made the time working with all that grease bearable. We used to talk about the girls who would come in or just make fun of our co-workers or the customers. He was easy to talk to.
Just before school began that summer, I was walking home from McDonald’s and heard a car horn and someone yell, “Hey, Donovan!” It was one of the kids from Saint John’s who I remembered—and didn’t like—from the bus freshman year, so I politely yelled back, “Shut the fuck up, asshole.” A few minutes later, he stopped his car, got out, and asked me to repeat what I was yelling. I told him that he had a nice car, and then he started laughing and got back in his car. His name was Mike, and I absolutely hated him. Once he got back in his car, I asked if he was still going to Saint John’s or if he’d been kicked out and had to go Colonie High School, since he only lived a few streets away from me. Mike said, “No, I’m still at Saint John’s, lucky for you.” He didn’t know that I had transferred, and I felt a smile come over my face. I then told him, “You don’t know how happy I am to hear that.”
I was very nervous my first day as a junior in a new school. The way that South Colonie worked was there were two middle schools and one high school. So of the 450 students in my class, I went to middle school with half of them. The school at the time had over eighteen hundred students. This was very different from Saint John’s, with only seventy-two students in my class and four hundred students in the entire school. In fact, I wasn’t the only student in my class to depart from Saint John’s after my sophomore year. The class went from seventy-two students to graduating fifty-five.
I remember seeing some people I hadn’t seen in two years. I just wanted to go up to them and yell their names, but then I realized that would be socially inappropriate, so I just walked to my locker. Even though I was a junior, I didn’t really have any typical junior classes. I took AP English and AP U.S. History. Colonie offered biology for freshmen students, chemistry for sophomores and physics for juniors. At Saint John’s, I had to take Earth science as a freshman,
H IGH S CHOOL, T HOSE W EREN’T THE D AYS
If you a hater, I got a full-time job for you.
—Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino
A s an adult, I dread waiting in a check-out line with a group of teenagers or sitting on a train or an airplane with them. Many seem very happy and laugh at nonsensical things. I’m glad that they’re happy, but most of them time I can never understand how they can think their teenage drama is as important as the situation in Afghanistan or how to fix Social Security.
Even some of my adult friends who work in grocery stores or at Starbucks tell me they remember being as obsessed as those kids are with their social lives. I tell them that I remember high school, too, although I wish I didn’t. First, I was a very awkward teen. I was a late bloomer, and I didn’t start showing any signs of puberty until I was fifteen. I was scared of girls, and I was often very shy with groups of people until I felt comfortable. The worst part of my adolescence experience was that my testicles didn’t descend and my left testicle hung lower than my right one, which was so embarrassing that I was afraid to tell my mother to make a doctor’s appointment.
During the summer of 1999, before I transferred back to public high school, I mainly worked my part-time job, forty hours a week or more, at McDonald’s. I really didn’t have any expectations of school; I was more concerned about taking AP U.S. History and AP English than meeting girls or finding a relationship or a clique of friends.
When I was at McDonald’s, I enjoyed working with Sam, who just started working there a few months after I did. I had known Sam since third grade. Sam was smart, athletic, and had a good sense of humor. He played golf and baseball and had great grades, too. He actually made the time working with all that grease bearable. We used to talk about the girls who would come in or just make fun of our co-workers or the customers. He was easy to talk to.
Just before school began that summer, I was walking home from McDonald’s and heard a car horn and someone yell, “Hey, Donovan!” It was one of the kids from Saint John’s who I remembered—and didn’t like—from the bus freshman year, so I politely yelled back, “Shut the fuck up, asshole.” A few minutes later, he stopped his car, got out, and asked me to repeat what I was yelling. I told him that he had a nice car, and then he started laughing and got back in his car. His name was Mike, and I absolutely hated him. Once he got back in his car, I asked if he was still going to Saint John’s or if he’d been kicked out and had to go Colonie High School, since he only lived a few streets away from me. Mike said, “No, I’m still at Saint John’s, lucky for you.” He didn’t know that I had transferred, and I felt a smile come over my face. I then told him, “You don’t know how happy I am to hear that.”
I was very nervous my first day as a junior in a new school. The way that South Colonie worked was there were two middle schools and one high school. So of the 450 students in my class, I went to middle school with half of them. The school at the time had over eighteen hundred students. This was very different from Saint John’s, with only seventy-two students in my class and four hundred students in the entire school. In fact, I wasn’t the only student in my class to depart from Saint John’s after my sophomore year. The class went from seventy-two students to graduating fifty-five.
I remember seeing some people I hadn’t seen in two years. I just wanted to go up to them and yell their names, but then I realized that would be socially inappropriate, so I just walked to my locker. Even though I was a junior, I didn’t really have any typical junior classes. I took AP English and AP U.S. History. Colonie offered biology for freshmen students, chemistry for sophomores and physics for juniors. At Saint John’s, I had to take Earth science as a freshman,
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