DEANNA FLEYSHER

REMEDIAL SOCIOLOGY

Remedial Sociology is a last-ditch effort on the part of Peatport High School to instill some uptight morality and passion for the service industry into the soon-to-be graduates who are most likely to enter said fields. The class is nineteen ripped, frayed, chained, beaded and acid-washed adolescents whose once-shimmering, gorgeously-suicidal life energies have been simmered down through heavy drugs, rank sex and rehab, resulting in a soupy, rusty stew of teenage debris.

We are a holy bunch of humanity, but we are in decline.  Our razor welts have faded to wrist and jugular character lines. The permanent marker “anarchy” tattoos on the backs of our jeans jackets have washed out to fond, peace-loving grays. Our daunting collections of metal LP’s have been relegated to boxes in the garage—wounded with deep slashes and illegal grooves—the price they paid for playing backwards. We have almost all enjoyed at least one week-long holiday in a Crotchfester General psychiatric ward or a Poughkeepsie detox camp. We’d once slapped our mothers right on their overly rouged-up cheeks, but nowadays there are sedated silences in our kitchens. We’d once made our fathers cry and shake, those of us who had them, but now they are remarried and living with much easier children in Ohio.

We march on. Our town is not proud of us. It walks by us very quickly because it knows we may not graduate, or if we do, we may just go on to work at Wegman’s, slicing deli meats with a big slicing machine and wearing paper aprons. Among ourselves we don’t talk about that—the Wegman’s people are still decent people to take drugs with on weekends, and they’ll always have better fake i.d.s. It’s no crime to live at home for a while, we reason at the occasional 4 a.m, on a drunken pilgrimage to our own basements, batting cobwebs away from potential future living areas with sloppy, tragic paws. We know we may not make it out of Peatport as quickly as our classmates will. We have long since made vows with the same old places to drink and smoke that we’ve been using since we were thirteen—the square of abandoned railroad track called the trussels, the cement tunnel underpass near Lock 43, the stark, tall woods at the edge of the school parking lot (surely several of us lost our cherries in those woods while a pile of leaves crept up our butts)—the spots just a few yards down from where the rest of the senior class now go to drink and smoke and bond as if they had discovered these places themselves. Idiots. As if Peatport was yours, you posers-of-nothing, climbing stairways-to-nothing. You live in big, beige houses in lawnless developments called Surrey Fringe and Manor Court. You get felt up at the parties of that Indian dude whose parents are always out of town. You drive the LeBaron Coups of your fathers. You never wake the neighbors. And in your tepid graduation orgies, you’ll play The Joshua Tree, breathe deep and say to one another This is the best time of our lives, all the while knowing that your lives will have to get better than this because, at the very least, you won’t be drinking and smoking and listening to U2 in these exact spots this time next year. These moments are precious for you because they are temporary. This time next year, you gloat, we’ll be drinking and smoking in Europe or California or some AWESOME summer internship. Life is a highway because it’s in the Top 10 and it’s fun and it’s quaint and it’s about to end.

Such nostalgia-soaked transience can not be the case for my brothers and sisters and me, sweating it out in Remedial Sociology while the rest of you assholes leave school to eat lunch at Myra’s Morsels in the Village and try on skirts at Talbot’s before Astronomy. We will not be doing our drugs in exotic locales come this time next year. We will still be in Peatport. We are ready for that. Europe can fuck our asses for all we care, right up there with the leaves.

Deanna Fleysher is a kale-lover and corrupter of today's youth. This piece is from the first chapter of Swathcutters, a novel.