You thought I forgot, didn't you?

I have twenty-five minutes to begin making good on this. If I don't hit "publish" by midnight . . . well, sue me. Har.

Today is May 1. Ten years ago today was my last day of high school. Well, not really. Other people had school after that, but not me. Three things conspired to not only keep me out of classrooms, but also to earn me a C in senior health.

1. The high school musical.

It was Into the Woods and I was pissed about my part, but thanks to tradition, being part of the cast scored me an extra day off. Every year, in a predictable and therefore vaguely Castro-esque ritual, my high school principal descended to the creepy, disgusting dressing rooms in the basement of Merchantville Middle School after opening night and announced that we were so good that we didn't have to come to school the next day. So we stayed up all night screaming and eating and dancing around to the Romeo + Juliet soundtrack and finally passing out in a co-ed heap on the floor. We spent the next day playing Bond and You Don't Know Jack and eating at the Cherry Hill Mall food court.

2. Peer Ministry

Like most Catholic high schools, mine required four years of theology. The way to get out of doing any work the last two years was to take Supervised Ministry and Peer Ministry instead of whatever stupid other thing they offered for juniors and seniors. They've since changed the names of those classes to something warmer and fuzzier, but I suspect they still consist mainly of tests with crosswords puzzles on them and lots of group discussions about grief and adolescence. In all honesty, lack-of-content-wise those two classes couldn't hold a candle to Christian Morality (sophomore year) where we spent the last half of the semester watching Footloose in half-hour segments ala Michael Scott. At any rate, the best part about Peer Ministry was that the "final exam" was a retreat and we had to pair off and plan parts of it. Before my time, they rented a house at the shore and everyone stayed down there; the debauchery you're imagining eventually ended that particular feature of the Best Class Ever, but sitting in a church basement in Palmyra beat the hell out of Scantron.

3. Kidney Stones

I never saw the second day of that retreat because of kidney stones. Fucking kidney stones. I was 18 and got kidney stones. I landed in the hospital throwing up M&Ms (which itself was weird as I was fully in the throes of my most serious health kick ever right around then) and writhing around and shrieking at any mention of a pelvic exam. I think I scared the shit out of my dad and scored a Vicodin prescription and a date with some radioactive dye and an X-ray machine the next day. I also earned the rare and humiliating honor (three times, in fact!) of being the only woman and the youngest person by thirty years in a urologist's office. But I admit that I was probably not the only person at the prom with a bottle of narcotic painkillers in my handbag.

It also got me out of the rest of the entire semester, the only negative effect of which was that I never took my CPR certification and got a C in senior health. I took four AP classes and the only C I ever got in high school I got because I never got a crack at the dummy. I can live with it and I can't, I guess.

That was Holiday High. I don't believe we had a full week with five full days of school in my entire four years there, and I think the place remains notorious for that; so even without my advanced class-dodging skills and my renal retardation I wouldn't have been in class much. But who gives a shit when you can for the rest of your life say that you graduated from high school on May 31, 1998, but you went to your last class on May 1. Woot.