[Loser]

Your school was, I think, very different from mine, Narf.

When I was in tenth grade one of the anti-heroes, rebellious types generally of the leather-and-chains, skater, or granola crowds, wore a skirt to school. Tom Poe was a leather-jacket-wearing punk, a very intelligent and personable guy. He was suspended for three days for 'causing a distraction' or somesuch.

The next day hundreds of guys were wears skirts. Jocks, punks, hippies, goths (oh especially the goths, and fishnet too), wunderkind, hicks, everyone had some guy in their circle who wore a skirt some time in the next few weeks. Tom still had to serve out the rest of his little sentence, but the school officials sure as heck didn't do anything about any other guys wearing skirts. In fact, there were at least three guys (all straight) who continued to wear skirts with some frequency for the rest of their time at Palmer.

As an epilog, Tom Poe dropped out the next year. I ran into him a while back and he owns about a dozen houses that he maintains himself and rents out. He still dresses in the black denim, leather-and-chains style, but now he drives a Porsche.

The whole three years I was at that school, no one ever, ever got ragged on for the way they dressed or the way they kept their hair. Not even the two or three Rasta-wannabes. And no one was ever publicly called out for questionable handling of their love-lives. You can be sure the word '****' was used at some point, but it was never a big enough deal that someone got hurt.

Damn that was an incredible school, I sometimes wish life after High School was more like High School and less like Junior High. I just thought everyone grew up, I didn't know that Palmer was a special place.