【2016 Archives】

High school! It's an utterly insane four year slog of pressure016 Archivessocial anxiety and hormones. At some point during the high school tenures of so many, that pressure releases in the form of An Incident. And if you've ever wanted to read all of these stories, now you can.

On Monday night, Buzzfeed writer Katie Notopoulos Tweeted out a simple question:

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And oh, the responses she got (which as of this writing is 1,825, and doesn't even count manual "response" retweets).

Needless to say:

- Some of them are incredibly dark!

- Many involve teacher-student relationships!

- Drugs and booze often end up in the mix!

So let's just, in this context, consider those stories rote.

As opposed to these, which are fantastic:

- Newton South High School, Class of '02, The Lewd Crude Scavenger Hunt: When your high school's "Incident" is insane enough to make the news of a website like The Smoking Gun, you know they've done something right. So goes Lindsey Weber's high school, which had a scavenger hunt so patently ratchet that it made national news. Among the hunted items: A brick from a rival high school (10 points), a bowling ball (5 points), a Mo Vaughn baseball card (5 points), and "shit in a bag" (10 points). And those are just off of the fake list they made to throw off cops. On the real list? Stealing the golden arches off a McDonald's (120 points), take a Viagra (5 points per pill, with a max-out of four pills), a license plate from a cop car (30 points), a left-handed baseball glove (5 points), a fish (7 points), and a "Ghostbusters gun" (10 points). And those are among the more, uh, printable items on the list. According to The Smoking Gun, half of Newton's 330 seniors got in on the action. This was apparently some kind of tradition that had gone on for some time—the resulting action was so madcap that director Eli Roth almost made a movie out of it, explaining: "What started out as Cannonball Runquickly devolved into Caligula."

- Nyack High School, Class of '08,Giant Peen of Desks: When writer Sophie Kleeman went to high school, she saw an authorized senior prank go rogue when a bunch of kids were supposed to form a "2008" with desks and chairs removed from a classroom. Instead, they opted for (shocker) a giant penis shape. Said the local news: "Seventeen-year-old senior Erin Cummings says it was upsetting to see her classmates' hard work turned into a huge penis even though many other students thought it was hilarious."

- That Girl With The Stalker Who Was Her Own Stalker:

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- General HospitalHS:

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- That Time Your School's Football Team Proved More Virtuous Than Their Gross Parents, Which Never Happened Except This One Time:

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- That Kid Whose Dad Roped Him Into An Insurance Scam:

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There is so, so, so much more there, there. Or as Katie Notopoulos (who posed the original question) explained:

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If you wanted a great read today, now you've got it. High school used to be raunchy. I'm pretty sure if your high school is nothing like any of the places the aforementioned Tweets are from, you'll be okay.

[N.B. For the record, a teacher where I went to high school once claimed to have found bomb threats. She obviously wrote them herself. It was deeply scandalous. Also, depressing. High school's a trip and makes everyone go deeply batshit.]