Dare The Devil

Chapter 3 - Uni High

Even with my trusty new Shield of Faith, life at University High School in Irvine California was a culture shock that challenged me daily.

Academically my private boys school in Pennsylvania had been so far accelerated that, with the exception of one analytic geometry class, the southern California public school system had nothing else to teach me.  Physics, literature, trigonometry, political theory….As a sophomore I’d already studied the material that my new school offered even in the advanced placement college prep courses.

And since nature hates a vacuum, and since I still had 2 full years of credits to accumulate in order to be considered a “graduate”, I embarked upon a new course of study: racquetball, typing, independent study (whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted), drama, and music appreciation.  Which was not exactly taxing to the cerebral cortex, if you get what I mean.

This left plenty of time for what would become my primary endeavor: socialization.  Friends, get-togethers, parties, clubs, and so on.  I had exactly 2 friends in Pittsburgh, and attended exactly that many parties in the 6 years we lived there.  This was, well, different.  Everything was one big party…Drama class was a hoot…racquetball was a game….music was a hang-out party 5 days a week…then there were the Christian meetings, and Church, and the real parties like the fall drama play cast party where, at the age of 16, I had my first taste of alcohol….

And the “cliques.”  In my previous life (for it did, indeed, feel like I had lived in a utterly different life, so complete were the changes) everyone was, more or less, the same.  The “poor” kids at Shady Side Academy were sons of car dealership owners or stock brokers like my dear ole dad.  The rich ones were sons of Senators and Congressmen.  Everyone followed essentially the same academic path, sports were required of all, dating was out and, though of course people will always exhibit individual personalities, it was a very white-upper-class-homogenous group.

Not, uh, exactly so at Uni High.  You had the jocks and the band people and the drama freaks and the stoners and the Hispanics in addition to the college bookworm preppy-types.  And whereas Shady Side had 350 in all 4 grades combined, and everyone really did know everyone else pretty much by name, Uni High had nearly 10 times that many people, and you could walk around campus for days without hardly ever seeing the same face twice.

And girls.  Have I mentioned that Shady Side was boys only?  It was.  Yup.

Now look, I don’t want to get salacious here, but puberty is challenging enough under the best of circumstances, what with the hormones and all, not to mention the confused self identity…..But to take poor Mr. Sam from the brainiac think tank and put him in Southern California party central surrounded by girls….teenage ones at that….very pretty ones at that….in the hot California sun, not wearing much at all (certainly not by Ivy League standards), and it was….Oh, I don’t know….Hemmingway would know how to find exactly the right phrase to not only capture the experience but actually implant a bit of the feeling but he’s dead and all I can say is it was weird.  I mean strange.  I started my 17^th year on the planet doing derivatives of trigonometric functions, and find myself a few months later in the school play, holding the class vixen and giving her a kiss…and practicing!  Weird.  That’s my official emotive term for it.

Figuring out who you are and what you want are tough enough during high school in even the most stable environments, and mine was hardly stable.  We had not only changed states, we had changed states of existence.  So I can be forgiven if I was a bit unsettled…And in unstable situations we become open, vulnerable….Susceptible to the winds that blow us where they will. 

That’s why I was so intrigued when I heard talk of this guy named Peter Krenic.  Everybody talks about everybody else almost all of the time, I have found, and in the clique-based drama group I was frequenting that was most certainly true.  And people talked a lot about Peter, though always in oddly hushed tones.  He had his own (very nice) sports car, one of the few in ‘75 who actually parked on campus, sang in the choir, dated (and bedded) the prettiest girl in school, was always plentifully stocked with drugs, wore designer clothes, smoked imported cigars before cigars were fashionable, and was generally the all-around-coolest-guy-on-campus.  I’d really only seen him once or twice from across the campus, or maybe driving away in his coupe.  But he was one of those people who just “had it going on” as we say today.  To the outsider at least he had everything we all thought we wanted.

But most of all was the air of intrigue about him.  As I said, people spoke about him behind his back in a partly reverential, partly jealous, partly “what a freak” way, but mainly in fear.

As a neophyte to the Uni High scene I asked, during one of the endless gab sessions, what the whole deal was with Peter. 

“Hey, man, you just don’t want to go there.  Forget about it.”

But why, I wanted to know?  What’s the big deal?

Oh something about someone who got into a fight with Peter and wound up seriously hurt, in a car crash or sickness or something, I simply cannot remember.  But he had what all “legends” need, and in Uni High Peter Krenic was a legend, one of the people you kind of watched and studied from afar, but no one except for his teenage concubine ever actually befriended.  And the legend was, the reason he had the car and clothes and money and babe and drugs and style and had it all going on and the reason that guy couldn’t even come to school any more even though no one had ever disciplined Peter, oh no, they couldn’t do that because, the rumor was, Peter was a witch.  A Warlock, actually.  Complete with the magic amulet and powers and coven and everything.  Or so they said.

So hey, I grant I was a bit unsettled in my new world, but I was intrigued, and besides, I had my impermeable Shield of Faith, didn’t I?

So, one day I was talking in the library (all of my really great conversations, it seemed, were held in the library) with this girl named Debbie McIntyre.  I was talking with her for two reasons. First, and by far most important, she was talking to me.  Being the awkward, dislocated hope-to-be-reformed-bookworm geek I was, it was very hard to find anyone of the contradictory gender who would even give me the time of day.  I mean, there were over one thousand five hundred other guys at that school, every one of whom had more experience talking (at least) to girls than I did.

Debbie was one of the hippy-type California girls…Sandals, patchouli oil perfume, braids in her hair, peasant dress to her ankles, really the whole “Going to California with an aching in my heart” style.  And of course, she was gorgeous.  Coal black hair, with eyes nearly to match, with a gentleness and….Oh well, it’s a good thing I didn’t have any schoolwork to do, because in the presence of such goddesses I couldn’t have concentrated anyway.

The second reason I was talking to her was because I had heard she was one of the few people who actually knew Peter.

I asked her if that was true. 

“Maybe.  Why?”

“Just wondering.”

“Why?”

“Well, he seems so weird.  I don’t know.  Kind of powerful.  Somebody who seems like he’d be really interesting to get to know.”

She said she’d see what she could do.

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