Teen World

Such a Pleasant Place

By Rick Horowitz

Tell me again about the golden days of youth, those carefree teenage years when it's all just as perfect as it can possibly be, as long as you fit in.

Tell me how your high school times are the ones you'll always remember, the times you'll talk about for years to come -- if you're popular.

Tell me once more about those warm and wondrous moments when your future knows no limits, when your options stretch out before you like so many

Lifeless bodies.

Their classmates laughed at them. No one's laughing now.

Bullets.

Bombs.

Shrapnel.

Bloodstained floors. Crumpled lives.

Their classmates laughed at them.

It's such a pleasant place, everyone says. A happy place. This sort of thing doesn't happen in this sort of place. This sort of thing happens in other places -- unpleasant, unhappy places. Not here.

Never here.

Is there anything crueler than a high school hallway?

"Nerds," says one of their classmates of the sort of people who come to class in trench coats, long black trench coats. "Nerds, geeks and dweebs trying to find someplace to fit in."

"Mostly," says the manager of the nearby restaurant, "it was just kids who nobody wanted to have anything to do with."

They had one another. When the jocks teased them and the preps dismissed them, they had one another and the deep, dark places. Who needed to fit in in the real world when they could build a world of their own? A world where they were on top. Where they were the cool ones.

Everyone wants to be the cool ones.

This world they built -- this world with the deep, dark places -- did they know how far from reality they'd traveled? Did they care? They'd march down corridors, compose death poems, speak in almost-German, shout praises for the Fuhrer.

There was safety in this world, and also fury. Share the lyrics. Build the bombs.

And before the bombs? Back when the bombs were merely fever dreams? How did it begin?

Which came first? When it all started sliding toward the horror, which was the first pebble to come unstuck? The marching or the teasing? The salutes or the giggles?

Can you come to school dressed like Hitler's Bike Club and not expect to get comments? Can you paint your face deathly white, your fingernails dark as doom, and not expect to hear about it? Your classmates are teenagers, after all; they don't take kindly to the unconventional.

Weirdos. Losers.

Or did the comments come long before the costumes did? Perhaps there was only a tiny oddness there, something that would have passed nearly unnoticed in the adult world. Something that blossomed (festered?) instead under the nonstop heat of teenage scrutiny.

Which came first? Or doesn't it matter anymore?

They could have kept trying to fit in, these boys in black. They could have kept slamming their heads, their fragile teen egos, against a door they knew would never yield to them. That's not what they did.

This is what they did, before the final, irretrievable thing they did: They made it clear to one and all -- by what they wore, by how they moved and what they said -- that the jocks and the preps and the rest could just throw themselves off the nearest cliff for all they cared, that they didn't need anyone's acceptance.

Which was almost certainly a lie. Which is almost always a lie.

Open the door just a crack and they'd have raced inside, glad to be part of the in crowd. They'd have thanked their lucky stars for sanctuary in a hard, hard world.

And they'd have looked for someone else to laugh at.

Posted 4/24/99. Reliably unpredictable -- come back soon for more!

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