Just wondering whatever became of...

I attended a private school until the 8th grade and high school at a public school. I had heard the stories, they'll beat you up because you are coming from private school etc... Since I had my first real "fist fight" (there was a fist thrown, mine, but it turned to slapping, scratching and hair pulling and profanity) in 7th grade I was no longer afraid of a fight. Still, I really wanted to continue private school elsewhere (out of town, state or a European boarding school) but yeah right....

My first day I met up with Angela, a tough girl exiled from New Jersey because her parents could not control her so they sent her to Del Rio to see if her grandmother and a small Texas town out in the sticks would help. We were in the same boat, new. Angela claimed to be from a rough hood in Jersey, gang girl, she had the extra big hair, the long nails and wore her face scars well. She had long scar across her cheek she claimed was from a knife fight. I didn't know how much of all this was true, I mean I read this 50's novel called Gang Girl in the 6th grade (our lil library was full of these early 50's teen novels), saw Westside Story, but uh, Del Rio was a long ways from urban and I had clue what living in the inner city was like. We had some tough cholas but no organized gangs that I was aware of.

Angela was cool! She came off as really level headed, however, bored, and was in a few of my Ap classes. She taught me how to do my make-up, hair and how to dress for public school. I had no clue, I had been wearing a uniform ever since I started school and had the complexion of a nun. She taught me how to tease my hair into various shapes, she sported "the claw" herself. Yeah you can imagine what I looked like.

Angela met the love of her life a few days before school started. His name was Freddy and he had been held back three years in a row. A month into their courtship Freddy was arrested because Angela's uncle called the cops when Freddy wielded a knife at him on their front porch. It was all in the name of love. We would call each other after school and discuss her "problems". Freddy was temporarily indisposed and she was falling in love with a "flyboy" on base and had several crushes on others she had met while at the mall one weekend. She had been sneaking out of her grandmother's house every night to hang out with them at a local club. "Do you think Freddy will get mad?","What do you think Freddy would do?" UGH! She became a bore pretty early on. All I could think was, this was a girl in AP math and in some of my other AP classes (I was not AP math), I figured she had to be a brain or our school system sucked. I didn't know how she kept an active social life that ran into the early morning and got her homework done. She managed great grades until November.

One day at lunch about two months into public school, I met up with this girl who, like Angela, was new to town. She was pretty cool, carried a 12 inch, black marker and an 18 inch can of hair spray in her purse, was into cool bands and the Bogies catalog. We have been friends ever since. Angela's life got more complicated and she ended up having a one night stand with a substitute teacher, got pregnant and dropped out in the middle of tenth grade. We had stopped hanging out early in the semester because she started skipping out, got a lot of detentions for being a smart ass to our Spanish teacher and tended more and more to her personal life. She had no time for hanging or phone calls. Those phone calls got boring anyway. I do wonder what became of Angela.