There's Nothing More Damaging Than School

Perhaps the best thing about drinking is that it allows you to regress to a time far before your current years. A time where you can openly throw up in public, do sickeningly irresponsible things, then totally get away with it the next day by claiming it was all down to that ninth shot of absinthe. And that hot girl forced it on you, so you had absolutely no choice but to do it. School was a lot like being drunk, in that you could blame all the mistakes you made on being young and stupid, only—kind of unfairly—that never really worked as well as blaming errors on alcohol does nowadays. Here are a few stories about horrible or funny things that happened to people at school.

Illustrations by Sam Taylor. Follow him on Twitter @sptsam or visit his website at samtaylorillustrator.com.

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RULE THE SCHOOL

My friend and I started a website when we were younger that literally took over our school within four hours of going online. It had a map of all the best smoking spots on school grounds, parody accounts of all the teachers, an anonymous message board where people started rumors about each other and launched with a thing we called “The Forage.” People got into teams of four or five, paid $10 to enter, and were given a list of 100 tasks they had to do—like drop their tray in the lunch room and fake cry for ten points, spank the physics teacher for 15 points, have a psychotic breakdown in class and get sent to the school nurse for 25 points, etc., etc.—and get photo or video evidence of everything.

The Forage turned the school into complete mayhem for a whole day and the teachers had no idea what was going on. We felt like Commodus in Gladiator, only we were 15 and weren’t killing anyone. Task 100 was a freestyle section and because competition was tough—the majority of teams had completed about 75 of the tasks—people were really going for it. It was the end of the day, everyone was sitting in class with 25 minutes left of the competition. Cutting through the monotonous drawl of my maths teacher, I heard screeching and whooping coming from outside the window.

The whole class sprang up and rushed towards the window, where we saw a whole team of four guys and one girl running naked across the car park, being chased by the caretaker and his dog.They won, hands down. The teachers ended up working out it was my friend and I behind everything—he got suspended and I got expelled, owing to previous drug and porn-related offenses—but it was totally worth it.

YOU’VE GOT SOME NERVE

Back in the early 90s, pyrotechnics and anti-personnel weaponry held as much intrigue to teenagers as Ivory Wave and Benzo Fury do now. This trend all came to a dramatic conclusion one day at my school when a young chap determined to recreate some kind of non-lethal Columbine decided to let off a tear gas canister (and I don’t mean the smoke bombs you buy at paintball, I’m talking some Gaza Strip shit). This being not long after Columbine, people were rightly shit-scared.

Tough kids and teachers ran out coughing and spluttering, ambulances were called, then a Police helicopter, then BBC London News. I saw scores of vomiting boys and crying girls. Not knowing quite what had happened, I ran up to one of the ambulances, only to see an arch-prankster named Perry in the back of one of them with an oxygen mask on. I wondered if his antics had finally gotten the better of him—if he had finally fallen foul of his own exploits.

These fears were quickly assuaged when the paramedic went to pick something up and Perry rose from his bed, thumbs aloft like some kind of truanting vampire. He had faked being seriously ill with possible nerve gas poisoning just to get out of a science lesson. I never did find out what happened to the gasser, though. I assume he’s either a brostep producer or a marine now.

WORLD EXPLORATION

Back when I was 15, like every other boy of the same age since the day those gross little fish crawled out the sea and grew legs, I was obsessed with anything relating to girls, their vaginas and their boobs. I was a virgin with a fast internet connection and a lust that forced me to keep multiple packets of tissues on me at all times. The girls in my school were pretty hot, which made matters worse, but lucky for my friends and I, they were also mostly very easy.

There was one particular girl in geography class who took my eye. We were allowed to choose our own seats in class and I always made sure we sat together. She was extremely flirty—as in, taking my hand and placing it on her crotch in the middle of class flirty. So I obviously loved sitting next to her and spurring out an average of eight gallons of pre-cum every single time. Anyway, we started to get more adventurous. I’d cover my crotch with a jumper, she’d play around; she’d drop a pencil on the floor, I’d have a grope when she was crawling around under me, and we’d basically jam in as much restricted depravity as was possible without giving ourselves away.

One hazy summer afternoon, while the teacher was drawling on about coastal erosion or something equally dull, she grabbed my hand and slipped it up her skirt. The initial shock of that got me past the unusually wet feel, until my brain caught up with my fingers and I pulled my hand away. Either this girl had come on as soon as she put my hand in, or she just had a thing about bleeding on people, but whatever the reason, I was disgusted and angry. I rose my arms rapidly, sending a stream of period blood up the face of the guy next to me and all over a graph about fault lines.

Sitting in the principal’s office with the girl, my parents, and her parents was single-handedly the worst moment of my young life so far.

BABY DRAC

In the last year of elementary school—when I was still super young—my friends and I used to be into every stereotypical little boy thing you can think of. We’d go on proper, full-on missions at break time, involving stealing shit from classrooms and crossing an active train track at the end of the school field. God knows why that wasn’t fenced off, in retrospect. One day, someone suggested playing with the girls. I can’t remember why, because we were at the age where we’d heard rumors about this sex thing, but all thought it sounded way too gross to ever conceivably want to do.

I came up with a plan that drew on the best of both sexes: army vampire kiss chase. The girls would run around, then we’d have to catch them, pretend to bite them on the neck, then take them back to our base. Whoever had the most in their base won. Writing that down, it sounds kind of like junior people trafficking, but it was all very innocent at the time. That’s until one of my friends—who, it turns out, is a complete psychopath—actually bit a girl on the neck.

When I say bit, I mean BIT. There was blood spurting all over the place, kids were screaming, the girl was wailing and teachers were shouting stuff about jugulars and arteries. All of a sudden, the girl’s face went sheet white and she slumped to the floor. There was a second of violence, then the whole playground erupted into hysteria.

It was fine, it turned out she was just anaemic, but if an 11-year-old bleeding profusely on the playground floor isn’t enough proof that little boys shouldn’t play with little girls, then I don’t know what is.

MR WATERING CAN

A friend of mine, Jake, was texting this girl in the year above him—a real nasty, sadistic ice queen; like if Nurse Ratched was in Mean Girls rather than One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—but he got off on the fact that she was such a bitch. She’d been stringing him along for weeks and kept promising they could hook up at some point. Anyway, he had Thursday evening detention one week, so had to stay late after school, which he saw as the perfect opportunity. Excitedly, Jake called her up and told her to meet somewhere in school when he was done because the whole building would be empty.

To Jake’s surprise, she said yes and suggested a walk-in cupboard off one of the school’s corridors, but told him he had to be ready because she couldn’t stick around for long. Sweating his whole way through detention—maniacally checking his phone—Jake was finally set free to rush to the cupboard and undress all the way down to his boxers, where he proudly tent-poled with his hands on his hips, waiting for the girl to arrive. About a minute later, the door swung open—Jake still with his hands on his hips; stoic, erect—and revealed the girl he’d been so eagerly anticipating. And about 40 other people from her year.

He said it was like that bit in Notting Hill where that skanky Welsh guy opens the door and there’s just a wall of camera flashes, only he had a boner and the cameras were on mobile phones, allowing everyone there to instantly post them and tag him on Facebook. All things considered, he dealt with it incredibly well, but it still hasn’t stopped literally every single person from school referring to him as Mr. Watering Can.

Illustrations by Sam Taylor. Follow him on Twitter @sptsam or visit his website at samtaylorillustrator.com.