I didn't have a lot of friends growing up. There were a lot of reasons for that, some of them having to do with my neurodivergent nature, my cultural disconnect from everyone around me, and just generally some bad luck. I was a lonely kid, spending most of my time with videogames and toys, dreading school and ultimately becoming a bit of a misanthrope by the time I was a teenager.

I had grown up with a reputation for being a bit of a troublemaker. I would break rules constantly, and they told me it was for attention but it didn't feel that way. Mostly it just felt like I was somehow always doing the wrong thing no matter what I thought I was doing. There's a lot of evidence to suggest I was singled out for one reason or another, but generally I never ever tried to hurt anyone's feelings or destroy anything.

When I moved to a more urban environment, my behavior changed not at all, but suddenly I was deemed "well behaved" and considered one of the good eggs. Compared to the gang bangers and the kids who constantly chose violence as a solution to their problems, I seemed lively but harmless. It was a gigantic shock.

So around this time I cut class for the first time. I didn't really like openly bucking authority despite my past behavior. Like I said, I mostly just found myself having done something wrong and it was often difficult to understand exactly how I got there. But one day, I was invited by someone to skip class and go to In-School-Suspension.

To clarify, my high school had a population of roughly three thousand students, and was located on the south side of the city in a particularly dangerous neighborhood. High schools all over the country at the time were transitioning to being less open, not allowing lockers or anyone to wander off campus or the halls between classes. So in order to enforce this paradigm, the security folks would wander the campus and order anyone found to ISS. This was originally to be held in a classroom and the students given work for the day, and I was caught up in the very first sweep when I arrived late for school as I often did when I was dropped off by my Dad.

About two minutes into being there, the flood of students into the classroom who had been caught in the halls had spilled to well over the room's capacity of a few dozen kids. So someone made a snap decision to move everyone to the cafeteria. I overheard that there simply was not enough class material for everyone and it would cost a lot to print more, so they just had everyone sit. Nobody would quiet down, so they stopped bothering to try. The powers that be then released us at the end of the period to go to the next class.

And so the entire institution became a bit of a joke. Anyone in the hallways would be sent to ISS for the period, where they would be free to do whatever. You would have to sign in when showing up, but the underpaid staff didn't even bother looking so you could write anything and I suspect they never even looked at it themselves. So as a result, if you weren't feeling a class, you could just go take a breather over in ISS without any consequence, and many people did. Some would even spend the whole day there.

And so on November 1st of the year 2000, I cut class for the first time and met a bunch of other harmless if rambunctious teens who started to phone the day in around 4th period.

It definitely became a habit.

And it helped with stress a lot. It felt good to have an out when it felt like I would pop. And it turned out that a lot of security folks thought it was a joke too, so I would often just walk around campus with a friend talking about videogames and the like.

My new troupe of ne'er-do-alrights all had nicknames, and mine was Stake since it rhymed with Jake. And I took to it rather well. I later added the surname "Teriyake" [sic] and thus became Stake Teriyake. I even gave myself a neat symbol in the form of a cyclops devil. And I would draw it and other weird cartoons all over my assignments and journals. And somehow my grades were as good as they ever got in high school. I would of course sign Stake Teriyake when going to ISS.

I found myself leaving campus often to take advantage of 39 cent cheeseburgers down at the McDonalds nearby, and sometimes just wandering off with my friends to hang out at the park or even a local pizzaria. They were good days, some of the most free I've ever been. I started to forget that I ever had anxiety over authority, especially since my teachers generally would just shake their heads and laugh at my antics.

By my sophomore year the school had begun adopting slightly saner policies against classcutting, though I did occasionally wander into a random classroom with a cool teacher (yeah, f'reals) but stress wasn't so heavy on me by those days. So over time my classcutting stopped altogether. Indeed, I kinda liked being in school once I had a lot of friends with teachers who treated me with kindness.

I think of those days often, how most of the folks I run with nowadays just can't even comprehend such a breakdown of authority or how little you need to push just to subvert it. It's funny to me, how funny it is to them. But it is still a precious memory, my days as Stake, and all that time I didn't stay in school.