it comes in pints?

Could it also be gender difference? In my experience, the best people at being ratty to other people are females.

Guys, not so much. Guys - in high school at least - either ignored the guys who bugged them, or if there was a big issue, they 'took it outside' and usually after the fight, they were cool about it.

Women, on the other hand, seemed to have longer memories, and be better at holding grudges.

It's easy to explain in your case, Ken. At the dawn of time cliques were just beginning to manifest.

I actually loved my tenth reunion, and this is from someone who completely HATED high school. I really wasn't part of any group: the few friends I had, I had known from grade school. My tenth reunion wasn't cliquish or same-selecting at all. It was like re-meeting people you knew, but now as adults without the high school bullshit. I am still DESPERATELY searching for a picture I know someone took of me with two absolutely stunning ladies on my arms...each of whom I'd known since kindergarten.

I went to a smallish rural high school, so we didn't have enough people to populate all the standard cliques. We had the popular kids/jocks (which was one clique) and the stoners, and then there was everyone else. We sure didn't have enough geeks for a geek club (though in my senior year we did have enough people to get a science fiction and fantasy club started).

Has anyone else read Frank Portman's novel King Dork? It's a "young adult" novel, about a boy's freshman year in high school.

While it's amusing in many ways, I didn't like it because it presented a high school experience pretty much completely unlike mine. For one thing, the kids are much more sex-obsessed than I remember. This just may be the difference between a large suburban California high school in the early nineties (I think) and a small rural Missouri high school in the late seventies.

But the reason I ask is because the young protagonist is under a constant threat of a beating from the other boys in the school, whereas the girls (as ricki says) content themselves with snarky remarks. I got the snarky remarks, but few threats (even the thuggish boys would consider it beneath their dignity to beat a girl). On the other hand, I don't remember most girls going out of their way to humiliate even the most unpopular boy, either. So I was wondering what other people's experiences were.

Angie,
I loved King Dork for the same reasons you didn't...like you noticed, it's probably because I went to a large, urban, California high school.

Am I the only person in America who hardly ever thinks about her high school years? Just about everyone else seems to obsess about their high school memories. Of course, I was an anti-social loner then as now, so that probably helped.

I went to a smallish Midwestern high school, too. It's hard to be clique-ish in that enviroment, especially since 85+% of the people were ones I'd known since kindergarten.

Were there geeks? Sure. But the ones I remember who were SUPER geeky, Revenge-of-the-Nerds geeky, were also very very funny, which kinda buffered their geekiness. Plus smart people were very lauded at our school, so that helped.

And since it was the 80s, there was no stoner v. jocks. Our jocks were some of the hardest partiers in school. Almost all of the "popular" crowd were hard drinkers and smoked weed.

And how was it at your 50th, Ken?

Bingley! Don't be rude!

(We don't expect Ken to remember things back that far.)

Oh come now, Mr. B. Ken's 50th reunion was so long ago you can't possibly expect him to remember that.

Dave,
Hahahaha. We piled it on at exactly the same time...

Hahaha!

Yeah yeah yeah. Pile on. It's okay.

I will share a short anecdote about my cousin Edna, about whom I have written before (she's the gal with the horse pistol on her hip in the Bellicose Women post).

At the 50th reunion of her college class, more than half the class showed up. That's pretty damned impressive.

That is. I bet more than half of my graduating class from Humboldt is too stoned to remember that they even went to college in the first place.

My high school was absolutely minuscule. There were 11 people in my graduating class. But we still had cliques. They were strange. My senior year I was somehow: homecoming queen, valedictorian, voted most athletic and student body president. I hung out with the other nerds and jocks... very strange.

I don't know how much all that changes over time. I just graduated 3 1/2 years ago. We'll see if any of that really changes over time.

I can't even imagine a graduating class with only 11 people. My high school had somewhere near 1000. We had to hold the graduation ceremony on the football field.

The school was Preschool thru Senior in high school and had less than 250 people total. Strange, huh?

My graduating class was a little over 300, smallest of the four public high schools in town.

Now my dad's class: I don't know how many were in the class itself but the student body that year, four grades, was 56.

A high school near my hometown had a graduating class of three the same year I graduated. Can you imagine the kid who WASN'T either validictorian or salutorian? What'd they call him/her, "Other?"

"waiter"