I was anti-popularity but was a total nerd with a wide range of interests and fascination with people, so I maintained some close friends but then also floated among the other cliques to learn what I could from them.
I was really into photography, so I spent a lot of time doing yearbook and hanging out in the darkroom. On one end, I had a lot of male friends who were hardcore D&Ders. On the other was a close male friend (who ultimately had reassigment surgery) who I used to listen to tons of music with. We’d write and act out our own homegrown plays, and then we’d practice our runway walk in full GLAM.
My closest friends were the weird girls with artistic talent. We had sophisticated tastes, alcoholic parents, horrible family lives and learned early on how to work the transportation system. We were professional school skippers. We’d bail on our PEG and AP classes to take a bus to Vermont and bum around old antique stores and book shops. Or, we’d just take off and go the city for the day and hit some museums. We were suspended a few times but we always pulled through with good grades at the last minute. My random antics and penchant for pulling large-scale pranks earned me the Class Clown honor when I graduated.
The rest of my high school ‘clique’ activity was with the octogenarians at the local hospital. I worked there as a patient observer and would spend hours sitting with them and talking about life. Ultimately, I’m happy with who I was in high school, and even now as I look around at how I interact socially, not much has changed.