Tenth grade, the year my life moved onto a message board

Tenth grade ran on the same rails as ninth. Same big building, same block schedule with its odd and even days, same seminar room with Mrs. Warren, same printed schedule folded in the back of my bag. On paper it was just the next year up.

What made it different is that in October of 2003, right in the middle of it, a message board called DragonSiblings was born, and my whole life quietly moved onto it.

The board that ate my life

I have told the origin of the group and what running it taught me elsewhere, so I will not repeat the whole thing. The short version: April and Diana had a little circle called the Dragon Sisters, McKenzie made three, they pulled me in to build a website, and since I was nobody’s sister we became the Dragon Siblings. I was the Crimson Dragon, and on the board I was Maury.

The board went live at the end of October, and from the very first day I was not just a member, I was the person building and running it. Diana fired off the first real post, something gloriously dumb about being a god, and within hours I was already shipping version 1.1 of the layout and fixing bugs people reported. Then it grew. Friends joined, then friends of friends, until there were a hundred-odd members and the post count was climbing by the hundreds every week. I wrote the templates, I moderated, I settled the squabbles, I even ran a little donation drive so we could afford the good hosting features. For a sophomore, it was a part-time job I would have paid to do. Most of what I remember feeling that year, I remember feeling through that screen.

Workstation Four

The single most important class of the year, in hindsight, was computer programming. We were learning Visual Basic, laying out little windows and wiring up the code behind the buttons. The room did not have enough working machines, so the teacher had cobbled some junk computers together and assigned two students to each one. He picked the pairs. And by pure accident, he sat me down next to Diana, at a machine with a little label on it that read Workstation 4.

We loved that ugly computer. It ran something like Windows 2000 on a tiny screen, a heavy CRT sitting right on top of the case, and it was slow and it was ours. The language itself never really grabbed me, but the desk did. Every project was a team project, the two of us heads down on one keyboard, which I now know my whole industry calls pair programming, a phrase nobody in that room in 2004 had ever heard. Because DragonSiblings was the center of our lives, we turned the desktop wallpaper into a little shrine to it, stuff Diana liked and stuff I liked, which was honestly the very beginning of the site having a visual identity at all. (If I can dig up that wallpaper, I will put it here, low resolution and all.)

The class was easy. Diana was scary smart and I was good enough with computers that we would blow through the assignments and have most of the period left over, which we spent either messing with DragonSiblings or playing a little two-player artillery game called Pocket Tanks that lived on every machine in the lab. I had never played anything like it and we played it into the ground.

That label stuck in my head for twenty years. Every app I build now goes out under the name Workstation4. It started as a sticker on a shared school computer, next to a friend who, a couple of years later, would be the one to talk me into World of Warcraft.

Stanley

This is also the year Stanley became one of my best friends, and the shape of how that happened says a lot about both of us.

I met Stanley back in sixth-grade band, the two of us parked in the last clarinet chairs because that is where the rankings put us, neither of us being especially dedicated to the instrument. For three years of middle school we were band buddies in the most literal, limited sense. We sat side by side, often sharing one music stand, facing forward, playing the notes, and almost never actually talking or facing each other. We were there for band, and our friendship lived entirely inside that one room.

Then in ninth grade she turned up in my seminar class, and in tenth it really took off. With seminar giving us actual time to talk, and the rest of high school around it, we figured out that we genuinely liked hanging out. We started spending time together outside of school, trips to Six Flags, that kind of thing. I teased her constantly. She and April were always passing a notebook back and forth, and I made a running bit out of trying to swipe it, the Hamburglar of the seminar room, always lunging for it and always failing on purpose while she watched me with a flat look. I never actually read it. The whole joke depended on me respecting that I never would. Naturally, she became a DragonSiblings member too, an early one, like almost everyone I cared about that year.

The rest of the schedule

The other classes filled in around all that. My English teacher was brand new, some guy who, honestly, was not a great English teacher. But something good came out of it. I was teaching myself Italian at the time by listening to a mountain of Italian dance music, and when he found that out, he took the idea and ran, started learning Spanish by drowning himself in Spanish music. He would bring his guitar to class and play for us sometimes. Not the most rigorous year of English I ever had, but a kind one.

I had a social studies class with one of the kindest, smartest teachers I ever sat in front of. She was also a seminar teacher for our year, Diana’s as it happened, and she seemed to know everything about everything. I could just sit there and take notes and listen to her tell historical stories for the whole period. I am ashamed that I cannot summon her name right now, only her face and how good she was. I will get it from my yearbook, or from Diana, and add it, because teachers like that deserve to be named.

Science was Biology 2, with a teacher who happened to share my first name. After the drama of freshman biology, it was refreshingly normal. My last class was almost certainly driver’s education, which lines up: I had my learner’s permit by the fall of junior year, so I must have taken the class the year before. (I also have a stubborn memory of making ceramics at some point, and of being convinced I was bad at art after the still-life Coca-Cola can I drew in Art 1 freshman year, but I think the sophomore slot was driver’s ed.) And of course there was P.E. and seminar, the constants.

The teacher who would not give me one point

And then there was math.

For the second year running I had the same math teacher I had had as a freshman, and I need to be careful here, because to this day I have a real, lasting animosity for her, so I am going to leave her name off this site entirely.

Here is the thing. I worked. I never once got a failing grade in a math class in all of high school, not after what eighth grade taught me. But math was the one subject where my best landed at a B. My grade would sit at something like 89.998 percent, agonizingly close, year after year. And for a kid who had clawed his way up from straight F’s, an A in math would not have been just a grade. It would have been a trophy. Proof I had really turned it around.

So near the end of sophomore year I used seminar to go see her, which seminar was perfect for: you could get a pass and walk to another teacher’s room to ask for help. I told her the whole thing. How hard I was working, where I had come from, how much an A would mean to me. I asked if there was anything, any assignment, any extra credit, anything at all I could do to close the tiny gap. I had done the math myself, it was a couple of points.

She looked me dead in the face and asked, “Do you think you earned an A in this class?”

And I was honest. I said no, not by the numbers, I have a B, so I do not think I have earned it, I am just asking if there is anything I could do to get there. She said she does not give extra credit, that the grade on the report card is the grade you earned, and that it would not be right to hand me even one extra point. I asked again, told her I just wanted to feel proud of myself. She said there was absolutely nothing I could do. It was going to be a B.

I had her two years in a row and spent a stretch terrified I would have her all four. I got lucky and did not, junior and senior year. But she was always there, in the building, and for years just hearing her name could make me angry all over again, that someone could look at a kid trying that hard and decide the kindest available answer was no. I kept passing. I kept my grades up. But that one stuck.

What the board held

If the classrooms were the frame of the year, DragonSiblings was the picture inside it. It was where I had my opinions and inflicted them on everyone, like the time I watched a 60 Minutes segment and wrote a whole screed about Bill Gates. It was where the social life lived too, the snowball-fight chaos of Anna’s birthday party, the whole crew orbiting the boards every night after school. It was where I was a full-blown Eiffel 65 evangelist, posting Italian lyrics and losing my mind over the English release of “Follow Me.” And it was where I did my real writing, including the 5,800-word sci-fi story I banged out that January, at fifteen, because the forum gave me somewhere to put it.

That is the honest center of tenth grade. The classes happened, the good teachers and the one cruel one, the easy ones and Workstation Four. But the year itself, the part I actually lived in, was a message board I built with my friends, where I was the webmaster and the Crimson Dragon, and where Stanley and Diana and April and everyone else I loved that year were all just a refresh away.