Where Do All The Cool Guys Go To Smoke?

A big thanks to the Buzz girls for inviting me on board! I’m thrilled to be “visiting” here on Sundays, and to be part of this terrific group.

Since my nose is so often in a book, people tend to think I was a top student. Not true. Especially in high school. The action, as far as I was concerned, was in the halls, bathrooms, and out in the courtyard. The guys, the girls, the break-ups, the make-ups, the tears, the smirks. THIS was my idea of career prep, and I couldn’t get enough, whether I was living it or just watching from the sidelines.

So when my high school daughter handed me my Back-to-School Night schedule, and mentioned I’d have third period “free” because that teacher would be away, the teen in me elbowed the mother aside.

“Cool,” I told her. “That’s like ditching class. So tell me, where do the cool guys go to smoke?”

She rolled her eyes. “What, you want to meet their dads?”

At this, my teenaged son actually looked away from his computer game and deadpanned, “Mom, you’re married, remember?”

Sure I am. Happily. But put me back on a high school campus, and my inner teen is reborn. (Hmmm....would it be too geeky to bring a laptop and take notes?)

With warnings to behave myself, a campus map, and a schedule that dictated me changing teacher presentations every ten minutes, my kids sent me off to Back-to-School Night. Soon I was sitting in my daughter's AP classes, wondering how any kid of mine could be good in math and science. Then third period came, and I was free!

But since I didn’t really want to meet guys (and especially guys who smoked--I quit years ago), I decided to use the time for a bathroom break. Minutes later, I was attempting to find my way downstairs to my fourth period classroom. Only to wind through a labyrinth of hallways, corridors and overpasses, but for the life of me, I could not find a staircase.

Finally--voila. A heavy, unmarked door at the end of the hall. I opened it (thinking if some alarm went off, I was SO blaming the lady leaning by that locker over there) and I instantly heard shrieks. Then I saw the relieved faces of four teen girls.

“Omigod, we were like, locked in here.”

“Forever!” another agreed.

I put on my mental Mom hat and realized that it was an emergency exit stairwell that only opened out, and whisked the girls to safety (realizing they’d actually saved ME from a similar fate). As they scampered down the hallway, I was tempted to yell after them, to say, “Hey, girls, you must GO to this school, you have to know better. What in the world were you doing in the emergency exit stairwell, anyway?”

But I didn’t ask. I might be a generation older, but some things don’t change, do they? They were looking for where the cool guys go to smoke.