Coop Goes to High School Part 4 – The Play’s the Thing
September 22nd, 2013 at 16:19
I returned from my summer in England just a week before school was to start for my junior year of high school, having missed my normal summer activities and been disconnected from my neighborhood friends for those ten weeks I had been gone, but also having undergone a personal transformation from my summer odyssey. I was still a shy kid, but I had a heightened sense of agency from partnering with my mom on our summer adventure in England. I was ready in this school year ahead to play a more active role charting my own course rather than just going with the flow of my school classes and current neighborhood social circle.The first new opportunity presented itself Labor Day weekend. I was friends with Chris who lived across the street and his older sister Laura, who was actually a schoolmate at Pioneer High, though we had not had any classes together. Laura had invited her new friend Judy, who I had not met before, over to spend that last holiday weekend before school started and so Chris invited me as well. Doing a sort of camp out/slumber party thing we all ended up sleeping together in sleeping bags on their screened in porch. Judy and I ended up next to each other and started talking, and kept talking, late into the night about everything, finally falling asleep and waking up in the morning bleary but newly found buddies. Judy and Laura were both 16 and soon to be high school juniors like me. I was 15 (I’d skipped kindergarten so was generally a year younger than my classmates). Chris was 14, headed into ninth grade now at Pioneer High