I’m nearing the end of a four year career at GHHS and there’s still a lot of things here I can’t wrap my head around. Why is it so expensive to play sports? Did they really fix all of the clocks, or are they still randomly untrustworthy? Did someone actually think gold cards would motivate students to get better grades? I don’t know and I stopped caring long before senioritis seeped in. But there is one question that still haunts me: why have I been carrying all this junk on my back for four years?

I know what I told my parents freshman year – “passing time isn’t long enough, the lockers are spread out over the whole school, it’s more convenient to lug everything around like a pack animal.” They stared back at me blankly and shook their heads, while mentally I recounted leaving a class in pod one and making it to class in pod eight before the warning bell even rang. But that explanation was less likely to get me an eye-roll than “I don’t know guys, everyone just says they don’t use their lockers,” so I stuck with it, and now I’m 18 and seriously considering making an appointment with my mom’s chiropractor.

I used to assume the stragglers I saw using lockers were freshmen who’d missed the schoolwide memo, but now I think some of them might be upperclassmen who are just tired of having back problems. It’s not like they’re alone; TV lied to me about a lot (for one thing, I don’t think any of you are actually 27-year-old models), but high schoolers do use lockers in real life. I talked to my friend Tas at City High in GR, and they use their lockers all the time, even though they’re almost half the size of ours. So why are Grand Haven kids so allergic?

My first theory was that girls started carrying backpacks around all the time so people wouldn’t notice them suddenly needing to at certain monthly intervals (and then boys just unwittingly copied them). But while that idea’s too amusing for me to completely discard, I’m pretty sure it’s less complicated than that.

Remember middle school? How we were very annoyingly required to keep our backpacks in lockers? Then we found out that GHHS threw that rule out the window (because I guess high schoolers are so much less likely than middle schoolers to take weapons to school with them). My new theory is that in that moment, our collective pettiness was so intense that on the spot we decided to cart all our junk around with us and go locker-less for the rest of time.

So thank you, GHHS. It’s been a long four years and I’d be lying to you if I said I enjoyed the whole ride, but at least my fellow passengers were people I could always relate to. Because en masse, we are the most stubborn group of humans I’ve ever come across in my 18 years of life. I’d say never change, but I can think of about 15 things I want to change about this school off the top of my head, so instead I’ll say this: I’ll learn where my locker is when hell freezes over and a flying pig crashes into a blue moon.

Stay petty, GH.