The High School Caste System
[A One Shot]
Love is only real when it is freely given, accepting both the joys and the pains. I learned this the hard way.
She giggled and shushed him to be quiet as he continued to kiss her neck. "Shh, Taylor we can't!" she pushed him away. "If we get caught, we're dead!"
She said, "We're dead." At the time, I didn't realize how true her statement was. Well, half true.
"I have to go," Heather insisted. "I have rehearsal." Heather is a highly competitive dancer, but only her family, her closest friends, and Taylor know this. Each year since freshman year, Heather would sign up to try out for the dance team, but each year she would show up, and they would tell her that her name was not on the list, leave. She signed up, though; her name was on the list. She wrote it there herself. It didn't matter; in high school it's all about social status. It didn't matter that she wrote it on the sign up sheet—well, maybe she didn't sign up. Yeah, that's it, she didn't sign up, she forgot. That must be it.
No one knew we were together. If they did know, our lives would be worse. This is what the conceited minds of high schoolers have created—a psychological mindset in teenagers who believe their social status... rules their entire life.
Heather clasped her hand with Taylor's and gave him one last kiss on the lips before walking away. Taylor let her walk away so as not to be seen in public with her. After a minute or so, he walked out from behind the brick wall at the back of the school next to the faculty parking lot.
"Hey Taylor!" Eric yelled from the side of the building. "What are you doing over here?"
He didn't know what to say, how to respond, so he replied, "I don't know."
"Okaaayyy." Eric thought Taylor's response weird, but brushed it off quickly. "Well, hurry up! We have practice." Football practice. Yeah, that's right. Taylor is on the varsity football team. Stereotypical, right? All he needed was for his girlfriend to be captain of the cheerleading squad, and he'd be the prime stereotype. Well, too bad because his girlfriend is in the bottom rung of the high school caste system.
When most of you heard I would be speaking today, you probably thought, "What connection does HE have to HER? What connection does a football player have to that loser?"
That afternoon, there was a car accident just a few blocks away from the high school. Two students were injured. One was killed. One of the students who was injured is captain of the cheerleading squad. The other is on the varsity football team. Stereotypical.
The day after the accident, the school immediately jumped into action, creating get-well cards for the two students who were injured. There were whispers here and there, though. Whispers of "the girl who was killed."
"Stacy and John got hurt, but did you hear of the girl who was killed?" a girl asked her friend ask they walked to chemistry.
A perplexed look washed over the friend's face. "A girl was killed?"
Some didn't even know a girl had been killed in this accident, but everyone knew about the minor injuries of Stacy and John.
How many of you knew she was a student here? Not many.
The death of Heather barely mattered to the student body.
Pay attention. Pay attention to those around you. Heather was a dancer, a phenomenal dancer. She was in all AP courses. She volunteered on the weekends at the soup kitchen downtown across from the day care she worked at. To most of you, Heather was just a face in our student body, no name, no identity. But she knew everyone's names because she paid attention to everyone no matter how cruel they were to her.
A few days after the accident that caused the death of Taylor's girlfriend, Heather, there was an all school assembly to commemorate her.
Heather changed my life. Before I started dating her I was the stuck up jock that only cared about what party I was going to on the weekend and whom I was going with. But she made me realize that every member of our school is equal. It doesn't matter where you shop, what kind of house you live in, what clubs you're in, what sports you play, or who your friends are. What matters is the person, what makes up that person, not what obstructs our view of the person.
Taylor finished his speech and made his way back to his seat. The auditorium was silent, dead silent.