I happened to run into a gal who graduated from high school a couple of years behind me. We were catching each other up on the news about various people we know. Who’s married, who’s divorced, who’s having a(nother) kid, etc. Mundane shit that women like to talk about and that I suppose greases the social wheels. It filled the time.
We got to talking about the various girls from her class that got pregnant while in high school. Several of these girls had their babies and gave them up for adoption. This friend was telling me about one guy in her class who claimed he was sterile, and yet he got 3 different girls at our high school pregnant in the short span of a couple of years.
Now many of you may think big deal, so what, girls get pregnant all the time in high school. While I don’t disagree with you, I will point out that growing up in Edinabutwe’renotrich (H/T Sestamibi), we were all expected to go on to college. Roughly 90% of my class at least started college. What typically didn’t happen, or at least wasn’t made common knowledge, was teenage pregnancy.
I commented to this gal that I didn’t remember any of the girls in my class being pregnant while we were in high school. She laughed and told me that it happened. A lot. She said the abortion clinic was kept quite busy. I actually laughed, not at what she said, but at myself. Even after having many of my illusions stripped away, I still have this idealized view of my time in high school.
My particular class was one of the most entitled, self-centered classes to ever come through that school. My one strong memory of our senior party after graduation was the immense quantities of Bolivian marching powder disappearing up noses. That and about $3,000 worth of booze also disappearing.
