It’s still a bit surreal that I am actually the parent of high school daughter. Wasn’t it just yesterday that I was shuffling through the halls of my Catholic high school adorned in a sassy plaid skirt while hiding from the Dean of Discipline for wearing cool suede Minnetonka moccasins instead of my quite unfashionable (but regulation) maroon shoes?

In between worrying about getting caught for uniform violations and whether the cute guy in my Latin class liked me back, I managed to learn a few things. I learned about sine, cosine, tangent and all of that trigonometry stuff. I discovered that I didn’t really like Shakespeare much, but that I loved Statistics. (I know, pretty bizarre?)

I also learned who my friends were. The real friends who had my back.

When I started high school, I hung with a bunch of girls from my middle-school crowd. We were all from the same “poor sending district” and we kinda stuck together surrounded by the “rich kids from the fancy towns”. Until I found out that they were stealing money from my purse when I got up to get my lunch.

Random aside – I can still remember in great detail the little moments spent purchasing my favorite lunchtime treats. First I would get french fries with ketchup from the ladies in the lunch line, then hit the row of vending machines for either a 10-pack of Caramel Creams or an ice cream sandwich from the 3-door freezer. (Sometimes the machine would be loaded wrong and you’d end up with the strawberry eclair bar instead. Ick).

All of this yummy goodness would be washed down with a cup of Sprite from the machine that first spit out a clear plastic cup, then the crushed ice (no ice if you wanted more soda), followed by syrup from one side and seltzer from the other. As this video demonstrates, you always had to make sure the cup landed squarely in the proper place or you would stand there helplessly watching your 35 cents go to waste.

Make sure your cup is in the right place!

It’s kinda blowing my mind how retro these vending machines look. I know it’s been over thirty years since I plunked my change into them, but these look like something out of the 50’s (although I’m sure my typography nerds will inform me exactly what era these fonts date back to). Who knows, my school always looked (and acted) a bit stuck in the post-war decade of its founding, so maybe these things were original to the cafeteria…

But I digress. A trip down memory lane can do that to me.

Back to friends.

After the lunch money stealing discovery, I relocated to a new lunch table and became part of a different friend group. I’m not really sure how we all connected in the first place but we ebbed and flowed as a group for our remaining three years together. Activities, boys and other influences tested our bonds, but we somehow managed to survive the turbulent high school years as a fairly cohesive bunch.

Although we did have a a few break-ups in the group. And they were definitely not pretty.

But sometimes you have to stand up for what you believe in and let the collateral damage fall around you as it will.

Like the time when I finally got fed up with a friend who would not pick me up on the way to Great Adventure* even though it required driving right by my house. It was so frustrating to constantly find a way to get to her house 15 minutes in the opposite direction from mine, only for us to then drive right past my house. Her reason – “my parents say that I can’t drive to your town because it is not safe”. Was that code for “there are black people who live there”? I’m still not entirely sure, but I have my suspicions. All I know is that I had finally had enough of the crap. Unfortunately all of the years of fun times we shared together (and we definitely shared a lot of them!) just fizzled out. Potential fun times were not worth putting up with coded racial undertones any longer.

So yeah. A big part of the journey is determining who your friends truly are as you navigate the daily grind; pushing through to the other side where college and brighter futures beckon.

But an even bigger part is figuring out who you are and what kind of person you’re going to be when you grow up. Not what you’re going to “be” based on your occupation or what kind of car you drive. No – this part goes much, much deeper. And not everyone is willing to look into their mirror and ask themselves these tough questions.

Who are you going to be when it comes to things like integrity? What are the things on the inside that make you who you are? What things are you going to stand up for? What parts of yourself are you not willing to compromise in the name of “friendship”?

Whether it’s lunch-money stealing or racist behavior, it’s important to take a stand for things you believe in. Even if it means losing friends.

Because as Joan Jett sang back in my high school days –

“Ya got nothin’ to lose
Ya don’t lose when you lose fake friends”

Truer words have never been spoken.

High School can definitely suck at times. You’re all growing up and finding your way through this thing called life. And in my case, while wearing a daily dose of maroon and grey – colors that I still can’t bring myself to wear today.

That’s me at the end of freshman year with some of my friends. I’m the one in the dorky glasses.

* Yes, that’s what it’s called in Jersey. If you’re from somewhere else you probably (incorrectly) refer to it as Six Flags.