Teenage Angst, Introduction

Boarding School.

I'm sure it's a term you're all familiar with.

Boarding School.

Maybe it's been tossed around as an option by your parents, maybe you've only gotten an idea of the horrors that lurk within it from reading Catcher in the Rye,or maybe you actually attended one, in which case, God help you.

Boarding School.

It's kind of a terrible idea, isn't it? Shlepping off your unruly children to a convent for the Rich and White for forty grand a year, hoping the environment somehow shapes them into reasonable adults despite the fact that boarding school encourages all the elements of modern society that most sane people find detestable.

Maybe I'm generalizing. Maybe you're one of the few who made it through all right. Maybe you're the soldier who galloped through the minefield with nary a scratch and have gone on to a respectable career with a loving family.

Maybe I'm just bitter because it was my decision to go.

Woodberry Fucking Forest Fucking School for Fucking Boys Fuck. I'll let you guess which parts of the name I made up. It's a higher learning institution based snugly in central Virginia, around forty minutes from Charlottesville, the nearest landmark on your map. It's not the middle of nowhere, no. There's stuff, just not a whole lot of it.

The small town of Orange is around ten minutes from Woodberry, the town proudly boasts four stoplights, and the youth of the snug little hamlet flock to El Vaquero, the local Mexican place for after-school gatherings. Despite the size of Orange, the town is fairly homey, with a good public library and citizens that are, for the most part, well-behaved and friendly. There's the occasional ill-tempered and unruly redneck, sure, but that's true of any town. Orange is where I spent my first year of high school.

My father works at Woodberry Forest as an English and speech teacher, and while I was given the option to attend it my freshman year, I opted instead for Blue Ridge Virtual Governors School at Orange County High. BRVGS was a class of fifteen so-called "gifted and talented" students from the middle schools around the county that filtered into Orange High. To be accepted was a pretty big deal, and the fifteen of us lucky enough to be accepted were pretty damn psyched.

So I did it for a year. It was fun. But it was easy.

Excepting the actual BRVGS class, the courses were ridiculously easy. I apologize if this sounds like bragging, I don't mean to come off all "I am so much smarter than these peasants, when will an institution of higher learning accept me mnyah mnyah mnyah". Everyone I spoke to seemed to agree that yeah, this was a little too easy.

So my friends and I sailed through the first year of Orange High, and I decided that, while I enjoyed BRVGS, the rest of the classes provided no real challenge. So, I reasoned, there's no real reason to stick around OCHS, why not go to Woodberry for the rest of my high school career? They accept incoming sophomores, why not give it a shot?

Yeah, I really fucked the dog on that decision.

So I applied. I got in. I was happy. I spent the summer leading up to the first day at Woodberry in gleeful anticipation of my future boarding school career.

And thusly, we enter the book.

"His Parents Must Be Funny People", part one.

John Smith. It's a name everyone knows, because everyone's named John Smith, and because everyone thinks everyone's named John Smith, no one is really named John Smith. Those parents unlucky enough to be saddled with the surname "Smith" were generally benevolent enough to not stick whatever male offspring they may have produced with the first name "John". Unless they were, of course, Mr. and Mrs. J. Smith Sr., who saw no problems with bestowing this title on their firstandonlyborn. In Mr. Smith's words, it was "the most goddamn simple and goddamn American name you could give a boy, goddammit".

John Smith Jr. quite reasonably hated his parents. No matter how they spoiled him, J. Smith Jr. could never forgive Mr. and Mrs. J. Smith Sr. for the name. The name was vanilla ice cream with beige chunklets. The name was pain. The name was misery. The name was people only remembering it because whenever he introduced himself to someone that someone would turn to his buddies the second John left and say something about how crazy that guy's parents must have been to actually name a child fucking John Smith fucking junior fuck. The "junior" only added insult to his grotesque injury. Yes, he hated his parents, he hated the college, he hated his roommate who'd been his bestonly friend since sixth grade, he hated his ex girlfriend, who, in a twist of fate worthy of Rod Serling, broke up with him because he was too boring.

God was clearly out to fuck with John Smith Jr.