Here’s to high school,

This is to being on the honor roll,

Or learning how to accept “most improved” feeling like a circus freak up on stage for everyone to see that we just couldn’t get there yet.

Here’s to awarding those who have figured out the system, at the sake of those who will never think that way.

This is to being taught that we’re all judged on a uniform scale, despite the things that make each of us unique

Here’s to learning how to juggle friendships, relationships, school, sports, church and extracurricular activities,

Or most likely never learning how to balance them at all

Here’s to dark blue moons tattooed under our eyes from staying up studying all night

Or the crimson stains accompanying them from crying about the fact that we just can’t remember the material no matter how hard we try.

To Walking around the kids in the hallway having panic attacks,

Or being just another one of those roadblocks for someone else.

Here’s to being voted “most dramatic” or “most talkative” for superlatives three years in a row knowing that’s just code for “annoys the hell out of me”

This is to giving fake smiles to hide the pain or recieving fake smiles to hide the hatred.

High school, where we study for As on our report cards and starve for zeros stitched in our jeans.

Where girls worry if they’ll be loved because they’ve been taught they don’t have enough fat on their chest and they have too much on their stomach and thighs.

This is to each of our struggles, from alcohol to binge eating, from pornography to starvation, from self harm to drug addition, family divorce to social anxiety.

We know how to find the area of a circle, we can recite the steps of mitosis, and we can tell you what bone our classmates had to go through to stab us in the back.

We can tell you if it is A, B, or C.

If it’s true or false,

We can match up definitions and give you synonyms to a given word on the spot.

But ask us such a simple question as “how are you” or “how was your day” and that will send us reeling

Because that wasn’t on the study guide,

We didn’t practice that on the homework

We know the possible answers, and our teachers have always taught us to give the one that’s considered most accepted or accurate

So we say “I’m fine” or “my day was good”

 Because we’ve been taught that no matter what we believe, no matter what we feel, on the test, we better be damn sure we write the right answer.

And none of us want to risk being wrong.