The New Cool

The Vice Principal wasn't in, so the lady at the desk let me go back to class. The hair hat, for now, had done its job. What to do, though? If I wore the wig today, I would have to wear it all the time. Better, I thought, to take it off. Coach's class was over, and I wouldn't see him until the next day. Perhaps he would have forgotten about it by then. Or I might wear the damn thing only to his class. I wasn't sure yet.

I walked in late to my Marine Biology class and handed the teacher my note and she told me what the class was doing. She was youngish and didn't care about the hair policy. She wouldn't rat me out.

Most of the teachers were that way. There were only a virulent few who were invested in the old ways enough to make a kid's life miserable. Coaches, of course, and a few of the math teachers. I had one who particularly hated me, I knew, because she told me. I don't know what set her off. I didn't even know she thought about me let alone hated me, but one day as we were leaving class, she told me that I was the most immature person she had ever seen, that she hated seeing me walk into her class. She looked around to some other students with mad eyes as if she had done something heroic for which they would thank her. One of my friends looked at me with a smirk. He rather enjoyed that, I thought. But my mind was racing. Why would she say that to me? What had I done? I was a pretty bright kid and didn't think I ever caused her trouble. I certainly didn't go out of my way to. When I looked at her eyes, though, they were filled with bitterness and loathing, and I knew she would have had me turned into a lamp shade if she could. Her face right then became the symbol of ineffectual rage for the rest of my life. I would try to steer clear of her as much as possible for the remainder of the term.

My favorite class that year was Theater. Our teacher was pretty and young. She had just graduated from college the year before, so she was closer in age to us than to most of the people she worked with. She was thin and quick and excited and every boy was half in love with her. Everyone wanted to be in her class.

Theater class wasn't much. We'd read parts of plays and g0t into groups and talk about it and were supposed to act them out but usually we did little more than read the parts aloud. It was a good time of the day, though, sitting in groups, relaxed, not hassled or harangued at all. Her name was Jill. That is what we called her. And for some reason, I wanted her to understand me. She wasn't the girl in the songs I listened to, not that holy grail I drove my car to find. But she was closer to it than anything else around me and she often filled my thoughts.

My big break came when Coach quit teaching history. He was promoted to Assistant Vice Principal over the sophomore class, and another teacher took his place, a woman who had helped teach Americanism vs. Communism. She was actually a history teacher, so our days were filled with that, but she never hassled me at all. It seemed the year would just go by.

For the first time, though, there were kids who were thinking about the world outside, kids who were going to concerts and wearing funky clothing and letting their hair grow and reading, and in a way, it bothered me. I had been alone there and had suffered for it, I thought, feeling I had discovered it all myself, and there was an ownership in that. These people were late comers and squatters. They hadn't gone through the ordeal of being an Outsider. They were only celebrating the new coolness of it. And suddenly, being different seemed competitive. It was a challenge. Even the Student Government kids, the ones on Homecoming and Prom committees, were "weekend warriors," showing up places on Fridays and Saturdays wearing things they didn't wear at school, costumes, I thought, sometimes smoking dope or drinking a beer, participating in the growing milieu of fun-seekers who were not ideologically committed. There was music, there was dope, there were festivals and head shops. People had access. It was easy to do.

One fellow in particular got to me. He was new to the school that year and wore his hair in a loose Afro. He read and wrote poetry, and his clothes were understated but hip. He was smart and he was nice and the other students liked him. He became the poster boy for cool. Nothing ever seemed to ruffle him.

And it was said that he was palling around with Jill.