They had a pep rally for the homecoming game, which I was at (the pep rally). There were probably 400 kids in the gym for it, or that was my average count for an entire grade. 9th grade was 100 kids, 10th grade was 100 kids, 11th grade was 100 kids, 12th grade was 100 kids. That made up the entire high school student body. So my that rationale, and my calculations, that is exactly 400 kids. But give or take a few.

They, the teachers, I guess, brought us all out, mid-pep-rally, into the parking lot, in a corner of the parking lot that’s so far away from the actual building that nobody ever parks there. Probably 100 kids of the 400 in high school even had cars anyways. There were two cars smashed on top of each other. It looked completely crazy. It looked like a really bad car crash happened in our 200-car-capacity parking lot. It looked like a bad car crash, but it actually wasn’t. The pep rally turned out to be a distraction for all us kids while they got guys to drop off two totaled cars onto one another in our precious parking lot. None of us believed it, it seemed. One of the main reasons nobody believed it is because they did this every year during class hours on homecoming day. And all of us knew about it, cause there were only like 400 of us anyways, not including the teachers, who were surely in on it.

The teachers lined us up around it in this weird circle. If a helicopter flew above it, they’d probably not know what to think. We were all circled around it in this big crowd. If I were a pilot, with the knowledge I had on these kinds of matters, I’d probably think about helicopters that fly too close to islands with those cannibal types, and the cannibals down on the shore of the island start throwing bows and arrows at the chopper above. I’d relate that to the anarchic tone of the scene I was looking down at, a bunch of steel wreckage and a huge crowd of teenagers around it. And then I’d think fuck this, and keep flying to Chicago or wherever.

The football coach, who was also the health teacher, got in the center of the circle. Well, the carnage was in the center of it, and there was like a ten-foot gap between the cars and the circle of children around it. The teachers couldn’t have the students be too close to it, I figure, cause what if somebody stepped on glass. But anyway, the football coach waited for the voices and murmurs to die out in the crowd before holding his hands together near his dick, with his clipboard in his hand. Which is going to be hysterical if he ends up not needing it for this drunk driving thing.

So he explained that this is what happens when you drive drunk, and how if you drink a lot before you drive, then this could happen to you, and you could crash into somebody else. Or maybe you’re the one who hasn’t drank a lot, or you drank some, but not enough to fail one of those straw things that the cops have. And so you are sober. Or at least, not drunk. And then a drunk person was driving, probably opposite direction to you. And then they actually hit YOU. And so that gives you more of a reason to be empathetic to the situation, by being the victim. Because when they tell you that driving drunk is wrong, you think, probably, Damn, I Don’t Care, It Sounds Fun. But when they tell you that you will have your windshield crushed in by the front tire of some asshole who got faded, you think, wow, I do not want to be killed by some asshole. So when you see drunk drivers, you always think how much that guy is a jerk. But when it’s you, it’s funny. Probably? I’m only fifteen. I don’t even have my permit. Never have driven, even. So this whole thing is pointless.

A lady who isn’t a teacher but looks like one says she’s with the company that puts this together. Maybe company isn’t the word, but more like a committee. She was standing near the football coach the whole time, not saying anything, waiting for her turn. And she goes around telling us kids that having fun isn’t can actually be really dangerous, and then this can happen. She handed out highlighter-yellow shirts out to every kid, that said ARRIVE ALIVE! on the front. And she said to anybody wearing the shirt that goes to the homecoming game tonight will get in for entirely free (the student admission being 2.00 dollars). Well there goes like a giant chunk of profit for the school board.

And then the football coach jumped back into the thing, and was like, just remember to bring your school spirit tonight, folks, we’re gonna need it from you guys. And there was a light cheer. And he dismissed us, said we could go back into high school now. I walked with the other several hundred kids into the school, and I could her him go “Arrive alive, guys! Come on!” He sounded like Joe from Family Guy when he said that.

I went home after school to put my backpack on the floor and just sit for awhile. My house was across the street from school, so I figured since I had nothing else going on, I’d go to the game, later in the evening. I lived on the opposite side of the school where the parking lot was. I wish I lived on that side, so I could see how they ended up getting all of that glass and metal and rubber out from that parking lot. I bet it was a real pain in their asses. But anyways. Then it got dark so I went over there, and it was all gone.

I walked over to the booth where you pay, and there was this woman working at the booth. There was glass between us. I lifted up my arms to indicate that I was wearing the shirt that gets you in the game for free if you wear it. She could have seen the shirt hanging off of my shoulders, surely, but I just wanted to make sure. She let me in by marking the top of my hand with a marker. I immediately thought how convenient that is, that maybe if I needed to use the bathroom or something I could just head back over to the house for a minute and just come back. I always thought that. When I first got to high school, I thought it sounded so cool just to leave during lunch and spend thirty minutes at home sitting and playing on the computer and then just coming back. But I never actually did that.

The game had already started when I arrived. I walked towards the bleachers. They weren’t filled to maximum capacity, but damn near. I was looking up at the bleachers and trying to find an empty seat, thinking, out of these bunch of kids sitting here, some of them have noticed that I’m here. And I wonder if any of them are saying anything about me. If there were 400 guys up there, and 200 noticed that I showed up, I’m sure a small percentage of them pointed me out to a friend they were sitting next to, going, Look.

Our school colors were black and gold. You can imagine how much black and gold you’d see on the student body throughout the home team bleachers on the night of homecoming. Or that’s from my own memory of football games past. Every person cheering on for our football team would be wearing a black shirt, a gold shirt, a gold hat. This night brought us the opposite. There was instead an endless wave of neon green pulsing through the bleachers. I felt backwards, like I went to the wrong football game. I turned my head towards the opposing side of the football field, where the much smaller set of bleachers were reserved for the away team, which only looked to be seating one hundred people or so. They also were wearing highlighter-green tones, but in this case because their team colors were highlighter-green and black. So it looked like the enemies of our homecoming game were monopolizing both sides of the football field, in some weird psychological deal. But no, it was just the shirts that that lady was giving us earlier.

At half time that lady came back out, actually. I was sitting with the rest of the 400 kids in the shirts. She stood in the middle of the field with a microphone and said (with her back facing the away team) that she hoped that we would all be safe and careful after the game tonight, and the alleged ensuing partying to come. It would be funny if she was actually some sort of double agent hired by the away team, and they had her come waste all of our time just to force us into all of these highlighter-green shirts, just so we’d look like their team. Like, maybe it’d confuse the football players, and they’d play worse?

After her stupid speech, she had a man come out with a huge rocket launcher looking thing, and he shot more of those ARRIVE ALIVE shirts into the audience, which was me and the rest of the students. I’m a student of this high school, by the way. So a lot of us actually had more than one shirt.