Forty years ago I was a 15-year-old high school junior at Robert E. Lee High School in Jacksonville, Florida. I do not have fond memories of high school. I certainly didn’t go to football games or participate in any extracurricular activities. I wasn’t in drama club, if they even had one, or band. I wasn’t on the debate team. My only friends were like me: druggies. In a fit of insanity, I ran for class president when I was a senior. Of course, I didn’t win. Good thing as I quit going to school for all practical purposes for my last semester. I graduated but didn’t bother to go to the ceremony. 

I’d like to say I was on my way to better things but the truth is I was on my way to six years of addiction-hell. When I emerged from that, I stayed far away from anything that reminded me of the failures of my youth. I was sure that anyone who knew me from those days had nothing but contempt for me. I was embarrassed to have been me. It seemed better to erase the past and create a new “better” me. I went to my college and when it came time for graduation, I happily donned my cap and gown. I became a person who accomplished things -- as opposed to the fuck up smoking a reefer in the parking lot.

But while I may have let go of my past, the past didn’t really let go of me. A couple of years ago, a man who had been a year younger than me at high school found one of my books in the library. He recognized my name, read the book and contacted me through my website. He told me he remembered a time when I’d been crying because my boyfriend had been a jerk to me (no surprise there). He said he felt so bad for me because I seemed like a really “cool” girl (now, that was a surprise). 

Then just a few months ago on Facebook I was invited to join a FB group of women graduates of the school. I’m sure I didn’t hang around with them back then but now I am happy to get to know them even if only virtually.  

And then my daughter’s best friend got a job teaching English at my old high school as part of Teach for America. So on my way home to North Carolina from the Miami Book Fair, I offered to stop in Jacksonville and take Emily out for lunch. Instead I wound up visiting the school to talk to two of her reading classes about my books, about writing, about college, and about what it was like at Lee High School “back in the day.”

“We didn’t have air conditioning,” I told them. 

“What??” they were shocked. 

“Yep, and this football field wasn’t covered with portable classrooms. It was a football field. And that building over there didn’t even exist. And the chemistry teacher was the scariest person on earth.”

There were other differences. My high school which catered to a lot of middle and upper middle class kids forty years ago now has a much more mixed population. Emily’s classes are filled with kids who weren’t able to pass the standardized tests and so they are in a special reading class. The school has no money for books so Emily supplies most of the books herself. (Lee is the antithesis of the private school Emily attended.) 

When I was in high school, the only book we read was The Scarlett Letter. Not a bad book by any means, but Emily had managed to infect some of them with a love of reading by giving them books that were closer to their own frames of reference. She had turned them on to poetry, to Alice Sebold, and to a host of other books. When I read to them from my novel Picara about a high school girl in 1970, they listened to every word. When I was finished, they wanted more! They asked me about what it was like to be a writer. They asked where they could get my books. They wanted to know what Jacksonville was like after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. They wanted to know how much money I made as a writer. (Not a lot, I told them, but I got to do what I loved.) I encouraged them to read more and explained they would do well in college if they did. I told them they would love college. 

The reading was a little tricky because my characters (from the 1970s) sometimes take drugs, and I didn’t want them to think I thought taking drugs was in any way “cool.” So I mentioned that many of my friends were dead and not from old age. I think they got it. I told them that education saved me, and I hoped it would be a lifeline for them, too. 

As I was leaving Emily said she wanted to get twenty copies of my novel for the class to read. I said I’d give her all the ones I had. She’s home for Thanksgiving and she’s coming over today. I have only 13 copies. She needs 7 more. The high school has no money to pay for them because well, education isn’t a high priority in our society right now. But we’ll get the rest of them somehow. I want those kids to have the opportunity to read a book by someone who sat where they are sitting. I’d like to give them something because that day they surely gave me something. They helped me see that whatever I thought was broken inside me wasn’t broken after all. 

High school is just a place where you do a lot of your growing up. It’s not always pretty, but it’s necessary. The unhappy girl that I was managed to grow up and spin stories out of the dull wool that was my life. And a group of kids forty years later smiled and nodded their heads and said in their own way, “good job.” I feel like Dorothy when she realizes she had the answer all along. I went home, and it was fine.