I’m really not sure.
I was the star of the drama class, it was a general concensus that I could go pro if I wanted to. However, I had disagreements with the drama teacher because, I liked to do things well and she didn’t.
I got marks in the high 80s and 90s and I was generally thought to be one of the smart people. I enjoyed the company of the intellectual crowd and got along with most of them, except the ones that felt that they were superior to everyone else due to their grades.
I had a long standing friendship with a couple of guys who started a band and became the gods of the punk scene. To spite being punkers they were some of the nicest guys in the high school and I usually hung out with them at lunch.
I was athletic enough to play on the teams if I wanted to, but I hated sports. I was friends with most of the people who did play on the teams, but I found that most of the girls that hung with them were very stuck up with a few exceptions.
I had few close friends because I didn’t relate to anyone completely. Days when I felt bored I went and played with the jocks, when I was understimulated I went and sparred with the nerds, and when I needed a friend I went to the punks. An odd, yet satisfying arrangement.
I’m not sure whether to completely disagree with you or to take it as a sign of the times.
Our HS was 8-12 and the first two years I was constantly bullied by a group of boys from a poor section. They ganged up on me and generally made lunch period hell. The rest of the time I could avoid them. It was better in the 9th grade and then in the 10th grade it stopped altogether. The reason was that they had all dropped out of school to go to work. I realized that they had bullied me because I represented much of what they did not have. By my senior year, I was definitely part of the “in” crowd. I was a captain of the football team and won an award for the graduating senior athelete with the highest grade average. Our group did not bully or steal and would have considered those traits as disqualifers. Like they say YMMV 
One of a small group of friends who hung out together playing poker in the career center during lunch every day.
Never did find out why the career councelor didn’t mind.
–Patch
Those guys were cool, man. When I was a sophomore I wanted into the AV room onetime, which was right by the library, and a couple of those guys were there chilling with popcorn and soda watching an SNL rerun on Comedy Central. You know the one where Chris Farley tries out for Chippendales? His fat ass mega-sized on one of the AV TVs for your slacker enjoyment.
I was never picked on. I may have looked a bit nerdy early start of freshman year (86-90) but it didn’t last because I hung out with a LOT of popular Seniors and Juniors. So I had a lot of people to provide style and culturally positive influence. My best friend and I were in Student council so our older classmates came to our defense, invited us to hang at their meetings and spoke to us in the halls which gave us instant coolness credibility. Luckily we were smart to make nice with all the kids in our AP and Honors classes who would eventually come into their own. I had the same boyfriend from 10th through graduation who was identical to Michael Hutchence of INXS (who just happened to be big those years)
My senior year was overkill in my mind. Honor Choir, Performance Choir, Newspaper, Yearbook, Senior Class Historian, Spanish Club President, Quiz Bowl team captain, Orchestra first chair cello, Homecoming Queen nominee, Prom Queen Nominee, Sadie Hawkins Princess amd graduation speaker. OMG If I see her face on another page of the yearbook Im going to scream!!! And so it the immortal words of my first husband who used to mock me mercilessly, I almost peaked in High School. I had friends, I had great grades and I do not have any emotional scarring from my high school experiance- that happend later after I left my first husband, LOL.
Middle School was hell. Often times I would walk through the mud to school on rainy days instead of taking the bus, because everyone on the bus was always tripping me, stabbing me in the leg with compases, etc.
The few times I did take the bus on the way home, I’d have to sprint back to my house just to avoid the shower of rocks, pencils, and bricks (yes bricks) hurled at me. My classmates were like viscious predatory pack animals who took pride in targeting me.
High School was a little bit better, I learned to avoid talking/interacting with anyone if I could avoid it, and this made relatively invisible. However, when the whole Columbine incedent happened, all hell broke loose because the students who had been tormenting me for years suddenly had the fearful though that I might kill them, so they and their parents demanded they be protected from me. I had cops following me around all the time. Through High School I wore a trench coat and also had long hair, I suppose I fit the profile of “disaffected student on the verge of killing his classmates”. I suppose I could have sued somebody over the fact that I was suspended for the way I looked and nearly didn’t graduate on time as a result, but the whole situation is so upsetting that I just wanted to put it behind me and try not to think about it, lest I feel even more bitter about it.
I really wonder what my 10 year reunion is going to be like. A few people who teased me when I was young came around when they matured, and were sorry they treated me so badly when they found out what I was really like. Maybe it will be a moment of mutual reconiliation, but I doubt it 
I’m a senior in High School.
I hang out with everybody. My school has about 600 people. If I had to pick one group to be my main “clique” I would have to say the hicks. We’re the ones with the big parties, and all the beer drinking and the duck hunting good times! It’s probably the biggest social group out of them all. And oh yeah, I’m a girl.
There really isn’t a “popular” group at our school. There are the rich girls who think they’re better than everyone else, but the only people who consider them popular are the ones who think money is the greates thing in life, and that money = status.
Like I said, I hang out with everyone. Last night I was hanging out with the punks/stoners/whatever you want to call them, the night before I was at a party out in the country drinking beer. Most people know me, and since I’m one of those “I like everybody, I’m nice to everyone” people, I have quite a few friends.
That certainly was not the case at my high school, and would be remarkably inconsistent with life in general. In my experience, the kids who were most picked on were, if anything, more likely to be slower than the average kid. As I recall, the school’s more talented students were not particularly unpopular.
Well,
I have never been popular and people did not like me. Of course, I never put up much of an effort. Let’s just say that I had a lot of acquaintences (sic) in school.
I would of liked to be liked. I will say that I did have friends with some people, one dude by the name of “Spud” who came to my school in the 10th grade from California. He was a good kid (and is a good man) but he never gave a damn about school and dropped out the senior year. His parents were permissive and somewhat allowed it (He was adopted and spoiled). Although we partied later on later on in the college years, my HS years with him were so fun because we would go bowling, or play video games or just fuck off at his house playing music and doing stupid shit (no dope or boozing then for us). He turned me on to some music, and I think he appreciated my company.
If I could go back to 1981 again, I would. I would of studied hard, made friends, got into drama and fine arts and told anybody who stood in my way to go fuck himself or fight. The sad thing was that my friend was kind of like Peter Pan and he was still 16 when the rest of us were in our twenties going to college, getting married or starting careers. I was his only friend in the bitter end because I felt young at heart, but I went thru a total destruction period (narcotics) got clean from them and left. He’s a cook now. His parents are retired and left him. I hate to think that he is a 37 year old man listening to the Cars and hanging out with 18 to 22 year old kids. But alas, he may be.
Spud, I love ya. Germantown, Tennessee.
Hey, me too!
I went to four different high schools in four different years. Went from a small school (400 students) to Suburb of Detroit then Detroit Public Schools where you went in shifts, then back to a medium school for Graduation. I was the semi-popular smart one. No real clique just got along and no true friends. Moved too much. Have to say helped me later to get along.
Me?
Class of '81 at one of two high schools in the Town of Whitby, which was on the process of metastatizing from the County Town of Ontario County (15 000 people, 1970) to a bedroom community of Toronto (90 000 people, 2000). The place has changed from being a mostly self-sufficient small town to an anonymous suburb.
In high school I was an artsie geek loner, mostly. I was in the TV club for a while in grade nine, but for some reason that didn’t last. I spent most of my spare time drawing.
I took all the art, math, and languages I could get, all the way through to grade 13, and came third in the school math competition. (I distinctly remember taking notes in physics in cartoon form, and was thrilled when we actually got to use E=mc[sup]2[/sup].) Where a lot of students ended up with spares in their last year or so, I pretty much filled my schedule.
Socally? In senior public school (grades 7 and 8) was hell, I was bullied and humiliated, and some of this lasted into grade nine, but it tailed off after that. It was not a coincidence that I didn’t have to take gym after grade nine.
What the bullying did do was ruin my self-esteem and confidence, to the extent that I never had the courage to ask anyone out on a date in high school.
I did ask a bunch of people around to a party at my place once, but most of them backed out, except for one, the girl I had a crush on during most of high school. She was smart and gorgeous: straight As, she took physics, math, and chemistry like me, AND she was a cheerleader. I ended up cancelling the thing because I knew she wouldn’t want to go there alone.
I did manange to get a lot of decent signatures in my graduation yearbook though. I wonder now whether more people liked me than I believed.
While I usually had one or two male friends at any given time, I didn’t really get along socially with women to any degree until university, and even then, I was clueless about “relationships”, body language, etc.
This continues to this day: I have to deliberately learn with great effort social things that most people just seem to pick up.
Fat 9th grader bullied by upperclassmen for the sins of obesity and intelligence.
Late in 9th grade, boys gym coach introduced me to weightlifting.
10th-12th grades- still had good grades. Had a number of violent confrontations with some of the bullies who didn’t realize I was now just big rather than big and fat. Threwone down a stairwell, Otherwise, I got on quite well with everybody and was actually reasonably popular.
I was an ugly duckling. I had no waist. I was a freak until God gave me a waist. I was tall but my shoulders were directly attached to my hips. Until my waist came in, I was a geek with glasses, long hair and good grades.
When I got my mid section, my parents were so excited that I was pretty like my sister and the rest of the family, that they bought me a cool car. It was a baby blue firebird with a little blue bird painted on it. My brother called it a pussy wagon. I became a cool kid and started getting bad grades and smoking dope but I had to quit taking drugs because they made me paranoid. Then I was a cool kid who didn’t take drugs. That was my best year of highschool and my last. I was happy my senior year.
I’m not really sure how I fit in. I didn’t do a lot of hanging out and I had to work after school.
I got absolutly atrocious grades, but I hung out with the nerds. I was just too lazy to do more than I needed in high school. We had a big population of rich kids at our school, and I think they were pretty much the “popular” ones, but we could get away with ignoring them.
My friends were all in band and chorus, debate teams, etc. Real geeks. I didn’t get picked on because I was smart enough to hang with them, yet I was known for having an explosive temper, so nobody would screw with me.
Since graduation, I’ve seen some of my classmates and they usually want to chat and see how I’m doing, so I suppose I couldn’t have been hated all around.
My high school years were…interesting. As a freshman, I was a big dork. But my sister decided that, since she was popular, I had to at least look cool, because she didn’t want to be associated with a dork. I went to a small high school in Indiana - my graduating class was 24 people, so everyone knew who was related to whom. Anyway, she prettied me up and sophomore year, I was fairly popular because I looked better than during Freshman year and had a boyfriend. But I was still on the dork/normal edge. I could hang out with popular people, but didn’t really on the weekends.
Junior year, I was more popular than sophomore year. I was on varsity volleyball and still going out with this guy who would later prove to be a major asshole. Now here comes the bad part - the summer between junior and senior years, my boyfriend had gone to Mexico on an exchange student program. He was miserable. Soon he was mailing me these horrible letters telling me that he wanted to die and would kill himself. I was really worried, but things got even worse. I was working on a summer musical and became good friends with a guy. I mentioned him in a letter to my boyfriend, who decided that when he got back, he’d hunt this friend of mine down and kill him. My guy friend apparently had feelings for me, and began following me around and when the school year started would sit in the parking lot of the school in his car, waiting for me.
Because of this behavior, my boyfriend decided that of course we must have slept together, and did not hesitate a moment when he returned from Mexico to tell most members of our senior class what a whore I was. Then he started beating the crap out of me and forcing me to have sex with him afterwards. There was really no one to complain to - I had no friends because they all had heard that I was a whore, and there was no way in hell I would tell my mom or any teachers. I was absolutely reviled, yet my boyfriend was still “kind” enough to date me. Then he fucked my best friend during a school dance. She came back with a huge smile on her face and he had lipstick smeared on the crotch of his pants. So ended my senior year. I didn’t break up with the guy until three years later, and was convinced for two more years that he would find me and kill me. Thank god the asshole moved to Bolivia.
Anyway, I enjoyed high school until my senior year. I’ll say that for it - I had a blast for 3/4 of my time in high school. But the last year was a living hell.
I was your basic fat kid who answered the taunting of bullies with witty, sarcastic remarks until they got fed up and beat the crap out of me.
However, by senior year everyone had mellowed enough that while I wasn’t exactly a cool kid, I was at least an accepted member of the student body. I even got invited to some of the cool kids’ parties and had a girlfriend and everything.
I was pretty quiet at a large high school in Dallas, tending to just have a few close friends and preferred to be active only in sports, certainly not academics.
But when we moved to South Texas I really opened up and had a large number of friends in just about every social group. I was voted Most Popular and Most Macho (I did say South Texas) and carried that gregariousness into college and my 20s.
Since then though I’ve pretty much slipped back into my earlier low key, laid back persona.
I liked high school.
I hung out with people from all walks. I was in honors/AP classes so I knew the smart people. I was on the Scholar’s Bowl.
I was the editor of the school weekly paper so I knew a lot of people through that.
I was in the choir and in the drama group.
I never played sports but I knew most of the jocks/cheerleaders.
I dated the same boy all through high school and about 90% of my friends were all guys.
Most guys treated me like their little sister and were always looking out for me. Most girls thought I was after their boyfriends and ignored me. Suited me just fine.
I always tried to be kind to everyone and I constantly stood up for the underdog.
The only thing I would have changed would have been to not been with the same boyfriend because after graduation I had a group of different guys all tell me that if I had been single they would have asked me out. 
I was considered a freak in my small town. I got made fun of daily, and I hated every day of school. I wore Doc Martens before they were “cool” and I had to hear about it every day.
Then, sophomore year, my dad took a job in Florida. It was the best thing that could have happened to me. For the first time in my life I finally found people who I could identify with. I dated guys, and participated in drama and choir. It was pretty good.
Then we moved back to our small town when I was a senior. It was the same as when I left, but the difference was I didn’t care what anyone thought anymore.
The ten year reunion was great fun. They all married each other and got fat, and a couple of the guys who used to make fun of me tried to ask me out. Hilarious.
I think if your best time of life is in high school, that’s pretty sad.