The whispers tickled her ears as if carried on the wind. She’d turn around, looking for the source, but everyone would be facing lockers or huddled in small groups. Whoever it was, he wanted her to suffer.

It is this kind of insidious behavior that makes ghosts so frightening.

The conversation was polite, she’s Canadian after all, but surface. Her interest seemed genuine when I mentioned I wanted to be a writer, the way a mother is interested in her five-year-old’s finger painting. I needed to flaunt my understanding, to let her know that I get it, and hated to think I was being patronized. She tolerated my high school English critiques with all the grace that you’d expect, but as the food dwindled, my desperation grew. I felt like I was missing my chance, that somehow if I won her approval, everything would be okay. I would matter.

Another submission to Every Day A Century, which will be posted soon.

Bill and Greg had worked as gravediggers for the New Horizons Cemetery for more than twenty years, but their feelings about the job couldn’t have been more different.

“Well, it beats digging ditches.”

George and Kristen were counselors at the Lake Wakona Christian Retreat. They’d met there several years before as campers and were eager to become reacquainted now that they were in high school.

Fortunately, George and Kristen would spend the rest of their lives together. Unfortunately, they were both killed that summer by the Lake Wakona chainsaw butcher.

Yesterday was election day. I went to the local high school to vote, but I was denied by one of the polling volunteers. I’d remembered to bring two forms of ID as well as a copy of my voter registration card, just in case the new voting laws made it necessary. When she still said no, I started to get slightly upset.

She claimed it had something to do with the string of severed ears I was wearing around my neck, but I’m pretty sure America stills allows for freedom of religion, so I don’t know what her deal was.

Calamity followed him everywhere. His primary school was destroyed in a tornado. His middle school suffered an earthquake. His high school burned down in an electrical fire.

Ralph Warner was officially the luckiest man to ever live.

Socrates Johnson hated almost everything about high school. The long winded teachers more interested in test scores than true knowledge. The jocks who would bully him for being too smart. Graduation could not come fast enough.

In the end, Socrates and Alcibiades found themselves with broken hearts. The hottest love, as they say, has the coldest end.

The quarterback, blonde, drives a corvette, announced, “We’re going to decimate Bayside High at Homecoming.” All the girls swooned.

At the dance, the cheerleader realized that the nerd was actually the man of her dreams. They lived happily ever after, at least until college.

Genre: High School