High school can be forgotten, but not gone

Everyone tells incoming freshmen to Leave High School Behind.

But not everyone tells them… Everyone tells incoming freshmen to Leave High School Behind.

But not everyone tells them exactly what that means. That’s largely because we don’t know. We’re so focused on the terrible things that happened when we got to college and we didn’t leave high school strewn across the road in our rearview mirrors — or the wonderful things that happened when we did — that we just sort of assume the drawbacks couldn’t possibly measure up to the rewards of Moving On.

I’m included in the “everyone” that tells people to Leave High School Behind, because I, like just about everyone else in the “everyone,” had some problems when I failed to completely follow that advice myself.

One of the things no one told me, though, was how quickly that Leaving Behind turns into Left Behind, and how soon the distant becomes the alien.

I went to a small prep high school in eastern Pennsylvania. I knew everyone, and I knew everyone well enough to know that there were people in my high school I would never think about once I left. There were friends I’d lose touch with, and there were enemies I’d laugh at. But there was also a bunch of people that were in that vague group of people so large and amorphous that there’s no word with which to aptly name it. “Acquaintances” gets close, but really it’s “extras,” like the massive casts of movies that go un-credited.

I just assumed I’d never run into those un-credited people again, and that they’d never enter my thoughts once I left the circle of safety around Moravian Academy. (It’s OK; I can’t say it with a straight face, either.) Or maybe they would, many years later, when I saw them after their sex-change operations at our 25-year reunion, but never as serious subjects for contemplation.

But I never exactly thought I’d forget them. Or, rather, I never made the connection between not thinking about something and it not being there. The people in my high school who were destined to have no role in my adult life — aside from saying, when buying my best-seller, “I knew him when” — would always, in my mind, still be there, standing aimlessly in the halls or striding across the lacrosse fields, patiently waiting to not be thought about.

So, freshmen, leave high school behind. But here’s at least one drawback: Some day, you’re going to wonder how a huge backdrop became a tiny footnote.

You’re going to get a solemn letter from your alumni association saying, “Dear member of the Class of ’04,” and you’re going to wonder how it could be that ’04 seems so far away, when it isn’t that many years ago. And you might wonder how it was that you forgot about the class member the letter is about, who springs to your mind in a freeze frame, every bit as vivid and alive and integral to the backdrop as he was just a few years ago.

It simply never occurred to me that the extras from my high school movie might have lives beyond me, as well — lives where they had their own dramas, fell in love and could get hurt.

Leaving high school behind is still a good idea, and people who claim to have grown up claim that it’s an important part of your growing up, even if they can’t say exactly why. And when you leave it behind, you can’t really consider that you might some day pray for people you vowed never to think about, or that you might feel bad for the obscure part you’ve written them in your own life story.

After all, in some former acquaintance’s dream, you’re still an extra too.

Greg Heller-LaBelle is the editor in chief of The Pitt News. His thoughts are with Dan Unger, who once led to a championship a lacrosse team on which Greg was proud to be an extra.