Last night on my run I flashed on a random high school memory.

My senior year our football team was pretty terrible. Truth be told, it was never great the whole time I was there. But by the fourth game of the season – against Del City I believe – the entire senior class was pretty disheartened. The school was entering its tenth year and several of the things we’d spent our entire high school careers looking forward to – message squares in the yearbook, bright red t-shirts – were taken from us. We devolved into a loser class pretty much right off the bat. By that Del City game people had gone from pouring a bit of Everclear into their Sonic cups to sneaking 6-packs into Moore High stadium.

By the fourth quarter of the game things were getting ugly, both on the field and in the stands. The team was getting what in sports terminology is known as a "red-ass beat down," and the crowd – the seniors especially – were getting ugly. When the cheerleaders launched into a raucous round of a cheer, someone shouted "Shut Up!" The next thing I saw and heard, a brown bottle arced high through the air, landed and shattered at the feet of the cheerleaders, who scattered like roaches before bright light. The smell of beer rose up through the student section.

I was a terminally boring good kid – I didn’t drink. I didn’t party. I was never invited. This was fine with me; I was focused to a ridiculous and almost unhealthy degree on school and getting into a good college. I also wrote for the school paper, and I decided to vent my frustration in an opinion piece that I thought was pretty fair – if you’re going to drink, you’re going to drink, but can we maybe draw the line at chucking glass bottles at poor, helpless cheerleaders?

It didn’t go over great.

The day after the article came out I was in my weightlifting class. A few guys came up to me and started pushing me around. "You think you’re better than us?" they asked. "You think you’re better than us?"

Knowing me at the time I probably said something brilliant, like, "Right now, yeah, I kinda do." But to be honest, I don’t remember.

They backed off, went over to a bin full of footballs, and began hucking them at me. Suddenly I knew what it was like to be stoned to death; great. There was a lull when they ran out of footballs and went to gather them up so they could begin again. I walked over to the gym teacher, a tall, humorless woman who couldn’t stand me because I’d rather have been in Calculus.

"Can I please leave?" I asked. "This is ridiculous. If you’re not going to do anything about this, then at least let me leave."

She looked down at me. "You wrote that article," she said. "So you have to stand by what you said."

"I wasn’t aware that included having footballs hucked at my face."

"If you want to take a stand, then take a stand."

She didn’t let me leave. I spent the rest of that period barely bothering to dodge the footballs and the mean glares of my classmates.

I still stand by that article. And if my teacher wasn’t going to do anything to protect a student who took an unpopular – and yet ultimately a right – position in front of his classmates, that’s between her and whatever higher power she believes in. I hope God brings it up in her end-of-life performance review, but I know I have no control over those things. Of course I’d have rather spent the rest of the class period in the library, by myself, ignoring the scorn I’d already grown pretty accustomed to from people. But I had to stand there and take it, and I did, and I’m proud of it, still, to this day.

Hm. I don’t know what made me think of that.

Note: I’m turning comments off on this post. I have reasons; don’t worry about it.