The Book of Jenn and Jamie

In high school I made a very good friend named Jenn. She and I had a lot of shared interests: we both skipped a year of English, were thespians, and knew the same people. But this wasn't what we bonded over- it was our disdain for the same people in our class that made us such good friends.

We developed a note exchanging system comprised of a spiral notebook that we would write in and hand off when we saw each other in the halls. We titled it The Book of Jenn and Jamie. It was filled with the usual: complaints about teachers, gossip about boys, etc. There was also a list. It was titled Hit List and it was pages and pages of people we didn't like. There was one girl we disliked so much we kept repeating her name in there every few spaces.

I was a little worried about the notebook if someone found it, but it was more of a Harriet the Spy worried, as in everyone-will-hate-me-if-they-found-out-what-I-wrote-about-them-in-this-notebook. We never considered getting into any real trouble over it.

Eventually the notebook thing phased out. One of us would forget to bring it to school, etc. I think I still have it in my bookshelf at my mother's house. Our senior year, Columbine happened. Jenn sat in front of me in Economics. She turned around and mouthed to me, "Thank God we don't have that book anymore." I knew what she was talking about. Right after Columbine, students couldn't wear long coats anymore, FCA was canceled because of bomb threats, school became optional several days that year because of threats. My mom was also a teacher in the same county and called me a few times, telling me not to go to school that day because she heard something I didn't. One day we actually had to stand in the parking lot of our school for over 3 hours because an art student wrote, "Don't touch, bomb inside!" so no one would damage/take it. The GBI and bomb squad showed up. I got out of a cum test in calculus.

School became really unbearable after that point, but Columbine transpired in late April and we were graduated early June, so the seniors didn't have to deal with it that long. I heard that the threats didn't occur on college campuses because people paid to go there, ergo they didn't entertain ideas of killing everybody. And that's the way it was in college: the most tragic thing that hit our campus was September 11th.

We've both thought back about that notebook. We were both socially accepted honor students with plenty of friends, but we shared a bit of a dark side. For the record, we didn't even do so much as pull that girl's hair that we really didn't like. It was both entertainment as well as a coping mechanism. We're not bad people. If that notebook surfaced today, we'd be suspended in the very least and be interviewed by both psychiatrists and police. It's things like this that piss me off today.