Arrivals...There Goes the Neighborhood

       Academic Center kids at Whitney Young are sheltered.

       Yes, they spend passing periods with about two thousand high school students (who are sometimes literally twice their height) and attend elective classes with same said two thousand high school students and take mostly honors classes as middle schoolers. Yes, their middle school years are much more similar to that of scary, intimidating high school than most other seventh or eighth graders in the country.

        Yet, they also all take the exact same classes (with exception of electives) with the exact same teachers. This allows for the comparing of homework answers with just about any one of the other one hundred and ten people in the grade. This allows for group test cramming at lunch and general complaints about the difficulty of Mr. Moran's Geometry course. Friendships are quickly created and easily kept because two years of forty weeks of five days of six fifty-minute periods of no one but ackies can do that. The teachers purposefully plan out their assignments together so as to not overwhelm them. (They also get to see all the major school productions. For free.)

And that is why freshman year usually hits them so hard. Suddenly, everybody has different classes, different teachers, different schedules. The teachers aren't aware of the rest of a student's schedule, so they all simply make due with giving them assignments every single night. The masochistic ones who joined a sport discover that no matter what they do, they cannot get more than six or seven hours of sleep at night. Once the realization that they have to actually pay to see the Company or AAC show this year hits, that's when the full weight of frackie depression drops down onto their shoulders.

           But amidst all that, there’s still another change. Seeing their frackie friends in or out of classes is suddenly a rarity in itself, but at the same time, it's too much work and also several shades too awkward to try to befriend the abrupt abundance of sophomores in their classes...or the new freshmen who have already separated into cliques.

The arrival of the rest of their high school graduation grade is something significant, and it’s debatable as to whether or not it’s a bad thing. It symbolizes all the other aforementioned problems and uncomfortableness that suddenly arose. It symbolizes that the ackies are officially freshmen and no longer middle schoolers even if they did complete their freshman course load in eighth grade. It symbolizes the threads of their old social webs unweaving. It symbolizes new relationships just around the corner. It symbolizes change—a lot of unsure, hesitant change—because in the blink of an eye, the Academic Center kids who were the class of 2013 in just June are suddenly a class of 2017 that is five times larger and so much more intimidating and a spontaneous melding of the “cultures” that belong to frackies and non-frackies.

I don’t even know seventy percent of my grade's names anymore. All I do know is that with the new freshmen's arrival, our small, close-knit neighborhood has suddenly become a village. (Of course, who said that, "Arrivals...there goes the neighborhood," necessarily has to be about the neighborhood in question "going" for the worst? Sometimes, things simply have to make way for better things.)