The Look

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I drove with three friends past a high school in a large western Canadian town recently. It was just before nine in the morning. We were heading to the crag to climb on rock on a bright blue autumn day. We slowed past the school and gawked out of the window, all of us chewing on our own school memories.

Girls rolled their bums in low-cut jeans. Goose-pimpled midriffs sent enticing signals to the noses of healthy young males, who gathered in small groups, pushing each other around in an attempt to diffuse their aching self-awareness. Most of them wore skate shoes, baggy jeans, and big belts, and shaded their eyes under baseball hats. Someone or something had convinced them that this was the look they should choose.

I imagined one boy's eye catching sight of a silvery elastic stalactite of saliva stretching between the braced teeth of a young girl who was laughing inanely -- humoring another, more popular girl -- while doing her best to hide her anxiety about the spots around her mouth. The boy plowed his hands into his jeans pockets just like many other boys, all of them projecting an air of aloofness. One boy -- who never liked to remove his hat -- stared at his friend Matt, who spent 15 minutes each morning waxing and gelling his stylized messy hair and got all the chicks because of it. There was no way he could compete, he thought, at the same time eyeing Mr. Blake heading his way.

An English teacher, Mr. Blake was only 30. He wore stylishly subversive shirts with longer and wider collars than were currently available in stores. He liked to think he was somehow communicating free and creative thinking to the sea of listless eyes that confronted him each Monday morning.

The kids -- milling around outside this school in the throes of what is the most romantic time of one's life -- ushered their bodies into the building where many of life's wares are discovered for the first time. Not only is school a churning mill for the institutionalized, it is itself an institution of provocation: a place where a child can be groomed to get a job with statutory holidays, taxes, insurance, and pensions as well as a courtyard for a young person to become exposed to elements that may thwart the very direction in which he or she is being pushed by the institution.

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