An Unschooler Takes on High School

The robotripping saga of last weekend continued into the week. Here's more of the story I didn't tell in my last post. That Saturday night one of Stevie's friends snuck out about 2:00AM with several of the guys they'd been hanging out with the night before and all day. One of the guys ODed and another guy tried to rape him. (I don't have the whole story on that!) Stevie was spending the night with a Straight Edge friend, but got a call in the middle of the night saying the guy was ODing. She didn't know what to do, but somehow they decided to give him some Benedryl. After he ended up in the hospital later that day, the guy's mom called the friend's dad and that's when I got the call.

On Wednesday, Stevie's friend who snuck out to go to the park with the 19-year-old boys--and there seems to be an endless supply of underemployed 19-year-old MEN who want to hang out with girls years younger than themselves--anyway, the friend spent Wednesday evening calling people and telling them she was going to slit her wrists. When her various friends said, "No, you aren't going to do that. That's ridiculous," she did it just to prove she was serious.  She's in the hospital now or was last I heard.

What puzzles me is that none of the kids she called tried to call her parents or even to tell their own parents to raise the alarm. This girl has a history of being treated for threatening suicide and her legs are a road map of scars from cutting herself. I'm not sure what I would have done at that age though, so it's hard for me to judge. And certainly a couple of Stevie's friends have called feeling depressed and said they had nothing to live for and I didn't have them picked up by the men in white coats. I've always talked with them until they felt better, which usually takes about five minutes. They just want somebody to agree with them that being a teenager sucks. I tell them these are not the best years of their lives and remind them of the number of weeks until summer.

Stevie wasn't one of the friends who got the suicide call so I don't know if she would have told me or not. I berated her for not calling me (or her 22-year-old brother) about the boy who was ODing last Saturday night. I know they think they can and should handle things themselves. When I asked Stevie whether she would have alerted an adult if her friend had called, she said she's not a snitch. I said there's a difference between being a snitch and being a whistle-blower. I heard that on The View and it's true. When I was a teenager though, I wasn't a snitch either and there was no such thing as whistle-blowing and still maintaining your cool. If you don't have your friends' backs, nobody will have yours.

Would you have told?

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