Prologue

PROLOGUE

THEY’LL TELL YOU high school was the best time of your life.
They’ll also tell you it was the worst.
Both are kind of right.
Mostly, it was weird.

It was four years of walking around like you had somewhere to be, when really, you just didn’t want to get yelled at. It was pretending you understood the math while mentally drafting a tweet. It was the bus rides, the bathroom stalls, the lunch table politics, the girl you almost told, the friend group that imploded for no reason, and the hoodie you wore every day because it felt like armor. It was boredom so loud it echoed. It was joy so quiet you didn’t notice it until years later.

This isn’t a guidebook or a lecture.
This is a memory dump. A confession. A scrapbook with loose pages and gum wrappers still stuck to the back. This is me trying to remember what it felt like to exist in a building where you were supposed to figure out who you are while still asking for permission to pee.

I’m not here to teach you anything. I’m not wise. I’m not your counselor. I’m just a guy who went through it too. Some days I still feel seventeen. Some nights I still have dreams I’m late for class. Sometimes I hear a bell ring in a movie and my stomach drops.

This is for the quiet kids, the class clowns, the tryhards, the floaters, the weirdos, the almost-populars, and the ones who kept their heads down and their playlists loud.

If you were there, you get it.

If you weren’t, well…

You had to be there.