We’re all back in high school

You can graduate from high school, or drop out, but some miserable part of you never leaves that period in life. And this week, that sad fraction of all of us has been called back, as if to some obnoxious assembly, by the ghosts of other lives.

All that amid puberty, powerlessness and the wanting uncertainty of what comes next in life amounted to an experience not unlike what cattle go through at livestock shows, right down to the weird glamour. And then came in bleak, backto-school September—the least auspicious of all the months—allegations that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was involved in an attempted sexual assault during a drunken high school party in the 1980s. (Kavanaugh has denied this claim.) And Wednesday, attorney Michael Avenatti released a statement from another high school acquaintance of Kavanaugh’s, who says among other things that she attended a District of Columbia-area house party in the 1980s where Kavanaugh was present while she was drugged and gang-raped. (Kavanaugh has denied the new allegation as well, saying, “This is ridiculous and from the Twilight Zone. I don’t know who this is and this never happened.”)

From the Twilight Zone, maybe, or perhaps just from some other high school. Whatever the case, we’re all back in high school now, or maybe never left.

Shortly after the first allegation, selections from Kavanaugh’s 1983 yearbook emerged, showing that he considered himself a “Renate Alumnius” [sic] (Renate being a local student at a Catholic girls’ school); that he had something or other to do with “100 kegs” (“or bust,” mind you); that he was party to all kinds of inside jokes that are potentially sinister and also potentially petty; in high school, the two intermingle.

And there we were, poring over the juvenile ephemera of a high schooler’s yearbook, trying to understand what it meant, what it means, with the same unsettled frustration of outsiders looking in on a clique’s jokes.

God, it makes me wonder about the nostalgia laced into recollections of high school. Any season in hell has to have its high points. But moral courage and reliable judgment are the differences between the high school specimen and the adult one.

High school is a stage of development that some part of us—a weak and wandering part— never leaves, and indeed a stage that some people wholly remain in. I guess the temptation to revert is always there. But for anyone who made it out, coolheadedness, careful investigation, mercy and wisdom ought to take the place of everything that came before.

The impulsive, reckless, casually brutal high school mindset isn’t even useful in high school; it’s that much less worthwhile so many years beyond.