I was watching Stranger Things — well, before it got too teen angsty for me — and noticed the popular girl had a geeky friend. I suddenly realized popular-girl’s-geeky-friend was a trope.
See, I had a rough adolescence. But one of the saving graces of it was that from ninth to twelfth grade, there were various popular girls for whom I was the Velma to their Daphne. One was even a cheerleader, which is really not how it’s supposed to be if you believe the stereotypes. Someone like me was supposed to be bullied by cheerleaders. But that wasn’t my experience.
It especially wasn’t my experience at New Trier High School, which I transferred to as a junior, like Cady Heron in Mean Girls. Especially ironic because New Trier was the school North Shore High, the setting for that story, was based on.
I did actually experience some Mean Girls. But only in eighth grade. What happened was I attended the seventh grade assembly on the first day of school and waited for one of the seventh grade teachers to read out my name on their class roll. But no one did. I asked one of the teachers what I should do, and he said he’d ask in the office. He came back and said, “You’re in eighth grade, and told me whose class I was in.”
They skipped me a grade, and nobody told me. So I showed up at my eighth grade class an hour late. If the school had told me ahead of time, I could have slipped in under the radar, but no. I had to make a grand entrance, the short girl who wasn’t wearing a bra yet. Who was good at math and science. It was the middle schooler version of leprosy. Nothing physically harmful happened, just teasing and the thrill of being the only girl none of the other girls wanted to sit with on the eighth-grade field trip,
The next year I moved to another state and two years later back to Chicago. I went to four schools in four years, and by the time I got to New Trier, I was this introverted mouse. I felt like a number instead of a person, and I didn’t really come out of my shell (okay mixed metaphor, that’s a turtle not a mouse) until I got to college.
But a lot of that was me being an angsty teen (like in Stranger Things) and only noticing the bad parts.
I discovered something better when I participated in my 50th high school reunion. People were actually excited to see me, remembered me from orchestra or a social club. I also reconnected with several women I’d been in homeroom with (or Advisory as New Trier calls it.) One was, like me, the daughter of Eastern European immigrants. Our names back then even sounded so much alike, that my mother once got mistaken for hers when gettng me out of class for a doctor’s appointment. And there was another girl in our homeroom who emigrated to Chicago from Poland.
One woman from my homeroom was especially special to see again. We ended up attending the same university. And my senior year at New Trier, she made me a collage for my birthday. It’s the graphic at the top of the homepage of this website. It’s a perfect picture of my fantasy and science fiction cluttered mind. She and I learned something new about each other at the reunion: we had both skipped a grade. We decided maybe that’s why we’ve gradually come to feel like birds of a feather.
I also took a tour led by the assistant principal. New Trier is still what I used to call a vocational training school for Yuppies. Like, it has two coffee shops inside, so you can take a latte to class.
But I also learned that the assistant principal used to be a member of the Advisory Council. Learning there was an Advisory Council made me realize something important. Because I’m not an angsty teen anymore. I’ve taught at a medical school and raised two kids and served as PTA and Orchestra Booster Presidents. I know the drill when it comes to educational institutions. An Advisory Council meant that there was discussion and decisions about how New Trier’s homerooms were run. It was clearly no accident that three daughters of Eastern European WWII immigrants ended up in the same homeroom. New Trier back then had tried to make me feel like I wasn’t alone. That I was part of a community.
They tried, they really tried. They really cared. And it took me just 50 years to realize it.
And I’m thankful.
And rough adolescence? For many years I carried that as a wound in my psyche. But life didn’t let me get away with that either. Covid happened, and I discovered high schoolers all over the country were having a way worse adolescence than I ever did or imagined.
I’ve let it go.
Good riddance.
Ada Milenkovic Brown 