In high school, everyone is super nice and friendly, and everyone always gets along and wishes the best for all their classmates, right?
WRONG! HIGH SCHOOL IS DRAMATIC AF! With that in mind, we asked people to share their most dramatic high school moments:
1. The Love Heist
"One of my best friends had a habit of always going after my other best friends' girlfriends. He hooked up with one guy's girlfriend, causing them to break up. Then he hooked up with that dude's next girlfriend too, while we were all on a school trip for a club we were in. Both of them were kicked out of the club (because hooking up in a hotel room on a school trip was against the rules). This became THE DRAMA to end all dramas. We basically ostracized him from the friend group for the rest of senior year. We eventually made up, and we're all good friends to this day, so it's all good!" —Sam E.
2. The Hacks Of Life
"In high school, the popular girls had a long continuous Facebook message chain they’d use to communicate, and it was hacked and emailed to almost the entire school. They divulged secrets, gossiped, talked smack, and were just generally awful. The whole school stopped that day. People talked about 'The Burn Book' for weeks. It got to the point where adjacent towns were even talking about it. Later, on the night of the Burn Book release, they had to text all the people they insulted and apologize. I think their parents made them do it. And years later, we found out that the person who hacked their message and sent it to everyone was one of their own friends! Good times." —Grace S.
3. The Librarian
"Our librarian was a horrible human being. She literally tried to forbid me from reading a book once. Toward my last day of senior year, I absolutely had to check out a specific book. She smiled maliciously and told me I'd have to open an account, which required my parents signing a form and would delay my very urgent book check out by a day. She thought she had me. SHE DIDN'T HAVE ME. I reached across her desk and took her pen in a blatant act of disrespect. I brashly signed the form on her desk. And in my sweetest, snarkiest voice I said, 'I just turned 18. I can sign my own forms.' She turned to dust before my very eyes. That summer, two middle-schoolers tried to burn the library to the ground. I'm not even kidding." —Jo S.
4. For Goodness Snakes
"There was a biology teacher at my high school who had a bunch of cool reptiles in his classroom — turtles, iguanas, and one giant boa constrictor that was about 10 feet long. The snake was very friendly, and he would often let it meander around the room during lessons. For some reason, the school was totally OK with this, like, 'Yeah, he's a biology teacher, so of course he can have giant snakes freely wandering around his classroom!' Anyway, one morning during first period, the principal came over the intercom and announced that the boa had escaped the night before, and there was a 10-foot snake somewhere on campus. Everybody. Freaked. Out. It was like Lord Of The Flies. Even the teachers refused to climb down off their desks. They eventually found the snake when it fell out of the ceiling of another classroom, which must have been absolutely terrifying." —Allison G.
5. Drama Drama
"I was a theater kid in high school, and we did a few stage productions every year. The night after each play had run, we would do a 'joke show,' which is where all the students would add jokes into the play and do a silly, funny version of the production we'd just finished. It was mostly filled with inside jokes, friendly jabs at students and teachers, stuff like that. We did a joke show for my last play in high school. We added in a bunch of jokes, including one particularly NSFW joke involving a sword. We thought it was hilarious, but the staff did not agree. The kid who made the joke on stage was suspended. It wasn't even that bad of a joke! On the day of his suspension, almost the entire senior class ditched school in protest. SO MUCH DRAMA IN THE DRAMA DEPARTMENT!" —Abby L.
6. Got Milk?
"I went to a very conservative high school. They had no junk food or vending machines. The only drink choices at lunch were water or milk, which was served in those classic little cardboard milk cartons. Then, one day, they started serving milk in clear little plastic bags (it was kind of like a Capri Sun, but clear and filled with milk). You could see the confusion on the faces of about 200 kids as they stared at this bag of milk...and then realized that it was basically a water balloon filled with milk. Halfway through lunch, a milk fight broke out in the cafeteria. Then it spread all over campus. Kids were crying, gagging, puking in trash cans. It was mass milk-induced hysteria. The entire school smelled like sour milk for the next week until the school ran out of their milk bag supply and went back to the old cardboard cartons. It was DISGUSTING." —Elisabeth B.
7. The Little Teapot That Could
"I would often try to go home sick during math class because I didn't understand it, and I also wanted to get out of going to football practice. One time, the nurse's office was super busy, so by the time I was sent back to the room to retrieve my backpack, another class was in there. Naturally the biggest, scariest senior was sitting where I had been sitting before running off with a 'stomach ache.' I asked if he could hand me my backpack, and he said he would, but only if I sang 'I'm a Little Teapot' in front of the entire class. I looked toward the teacher, expecting him to put an end to this before it could even begin, but he was clearly pretty scared of this kid too. I don't think I killed it or anything, but I was able to get through a decent enough rendition of the famous children's song to get my backpack back. So, sort of a feel-good story?" —Alex W.
8. Second Period
"My mom taught me a lot about getting your period and becoming a woman, but she forgot to tell me it came every single month. I think she just assumed I'd know this. So when it came for the first time, I was like, 'GREAT, I'm a woman now, cool, guess that's done!!!' The following month it came again in a very dramatic way, and unfortunately I was sitting in the movies with some cool kids wearing cream-colored corduroy pants when it did. I had two hours to really do some embarrassing damage to the back of my pants, and I didn't realize until I got home from the movie. I'm still very shook about it." —Wynona D.
9. The Whodunit
"Toward the end of my senior year, some anonymous kids made a Burn Book. They typed up a huge document listing gossip on just about everyone in the school, printed out a bunch of copies, and left them in all the bathrooms on campus. The entire school went NUTS. Everyone wanted to know who had done it. I was a complete nobody in high school, and I was mentioned in the book. So it must have been one of the few kids in school who knew me (which was not a large group). Word spread like wildfire, and eventually it came out that it was written by a couple of people in my friend group. (We'd recently had a falling out, so I was fine with everyone hating them.) They had a rough few weeks until graduation. I still have my yearbook on the shelf at home, with the Burn Book tucked inside." —Zach S.
10. A Horse Is a Horse Off-Course
"During my senior year, a horse got loose in the school. This shouldn't have been too surprising, considering we were surrounded by a bunch of ranch homes and stables, but everyone still FREAKED THE F OUT over it. The principal told everyone to stay in their classrooms, but screw that. This was one of those defining moments where you found out who you truly were: someone who obeyed the rules...or someone who'd risk everything to look at a horse. Our English teacher (who was a bit of a hellraiser herself and believed in carpe-ing that diem) grandly gestured us on as we walked out of class, risking detention or suspension, because education is boring, but a horse loose in a high school is SUPER interesting. The horse ended up fine, BTW. It eventually just wandered back home." —Kirk D.
