More from my book

They carried love letters, threatening letters, pencils, pens.  They carried bagged lunches, money for lunches, cards for free lunches, gum even though it was technically illegal at school, pictures of girlfriends, naked girlfriends, ex-girlfriends, journals, schoolbooks, steroids, drugs, numbers of drug dealers, numbers of colleges, a slip with an appointment for the career counselor, pamphlets for parties or scholarships or STD awareness.  They carried water bottles filled with water, some with vodka.  They carried Gatorade or Powerade.  They could only carry soda if they bought it off campus, since it had been determined too unhealthy to sell.  Joey Graziano carried Wu-Tang CDs.  Louisa Alvarez carried the results of her HIV test, which she hadn’t opened yet.  Alyshia LaFlamme carried around the wedding ring she’d bought herself on-line, which her boyfriend would give her at the end of May.   

Many things they had in common.  They carried the desire to fit in, to gain friends, to be well-liked, to be somebody.  They shared the stress of success, forced onto them by parents, peers, teachers.  Often they carried each other, the wounded, the weak, the beaten and bruised, the mentally-exhausted.  They carried Spanish-English dictionaries, guitars, yearbooks.  They carried diseases, herpes and Chlamydia.  They carried athlete’s foot, crabs, mono, staph infections.  They carried the school itself—Manteca High, the cement, the brick buildings—the red façade that had been erected nearly one hundred years earlier, when the town had been small and the school equipped to hold 1/10 the amount of students it now housed.  They carried the future.  The whole atmosphere was designed to send them off into the great blue abyss, and they carried the hopes and dreams and gravitas of those who would depend on them soon enough. 

They moved like sheep.  They would move from class to class, herding themselves down the long, skinny hallways, into stale classrooms, into seats that did not fit their bodies.  They moved like zombies.  In the morning, they would sit at their desks, dead, their achy, tired attitudes seeping out through the slits of their eyes.  After school, they would eat a second lunch, go drink with their friends, play football or baseball or soccer, start six hours of homework, baby-sit their younger siblings, work a six- or eight-hour shift.  Each day seemed the same—they got up, some at 5 a.m., some at 7:15 a.m., and rolled into school.  They went through the same seven periods.  They listened to the same jokes, the same lectures.  They saw the same people.  They wore the same clothes.  They drove the same cars.  They went to the same houses after school, hung out with the same friends.  It was a cycle, and they just plodded along, unthinking, watching their lives go by and waiting for them to finally get started.  They had no sense of accomplishment or purpose.  They sat in their desks, not knowing what to listen for, not knowing what to write down.  They read words they didn’t understand, and nodded mutely, dumbly at the teacher when asked if they understood.  They took tests on material they hadn’t learned, they filled in bubbles to determine their future.  The world was a big rush and a huge letdown, and the pressures were enormous and sometimes made it hard to breathe, made it hard to live, made it hard to be a teenager and find the time to enjoy the life they were waiting to start.  The teachers handed out worksheets and packets, the school received workbooks and pamphlets, and it just seemed like so much learning was happening and should happen, and they would look at the blank white pages and then turn around and throw them in the trash—for they certainly didn’t need anything extra to carry.