high school

Connetquot high school sits in the center of Bohemia, NY tucked away in one of the remaining non-residential corners of the town. Thick green forest surrounds the school grounds on three sides, when on campus you can’t see anything over the trees except for a Holiday Inn that is about a mile north of Connetquot HS. The school is isolated from the rest of the town just as the town seems to be isolated from the rest of the world. Bohemia is a very middle sized town, with a middle sized High School filled with the children of middle class adults. I could count on two hands the number of students in my graduating class that were not white Catholics, and that’s out of 573 graduates (no, it was not a catholic HS). All the cliché groups of people were represented at Connetquot High School, the jocks, the nerds, the Goths, the drama club, the drug users, the fighters and then everybody else. I was in the latter category. I had friends from each of those clicks except the goths and the drama club, not because I held anything against them that’s just the way it worked out. Although I had a few classes with one kid named Danny who was a member of the goth group.
Danny is a character I’ll never forget. He must have weighed 270 pounds and stood about 6’ 2”, his burnt orange hair matched the hundreds of freckles on his face leaving no doubt as to his Irish ancestry, but his affinity for anime and his preferred hair style (samurai bun) told a different tale. As if that wasn’t confusing enough then his attire certainly sealed the deal. The black cut off motorcycle gloves matched the cut off black jean shorts, which matched black combat boots. The combat boots always looks bigger than they actually were, but that was just an illusion caused by the matching black tube socks which reached up to his knees. The plain black cut off tshirt anchored the ensamble while chains connected nearly all his articles of clothing as if they would fall apart if not appropriately attached to one another. A strange kid, but one I developed an odd sort of relationship with granted our constant proximity to one another.
Another strange characteristic of his was his need to sprint, and I do mean SPRINT, from each class to the next. Every day I would be at my locker talking to my neighbors when we would hear the slow pounding coming from the far end of the hallway, it would grow louder and louder until he got close enough for us to here the treble of his chains compliment the sonic boom that came with each stomp of his enormous boots. Needless to say Danny was constantly tripped and ridiculed, he was infamous. Everybody knew about the ‘goth’ group but nobody seemed to know who any of the members were besides Danny. Somehow the others just existed in the background, too obscure to even attract ridicule from the most ruthless bullies. Danny is still alive today, but I bring him up because he was the only link I had to the kid who committed suicide, Danny was close to him and was the only person I saw who grieved the loss and spoke up about the way the school treated the incident.adf