Danny was one of the cool kids in our year. You know how there are those "Top Five" kids that are on all the sports teams, popular, smart, funny? Yeah, Danny was one of those guys. Nice guy too, though, which was even more maddening. We got along okay, and might have been better friends if he hadn't been one of the Popular Kids while I was one of the Artistic Kids. We both had our circles of friends but didn't ever really intersect. He got a buzz-cut before it was cool, and made it cool. He was that kind of kid.

Danny died in a car accident in Grade Twelve, when he ran into the back of a truck late at night driving back from the closest major city near us, Oshawa. The big rumour at the time was that there was drinking involved, and that he was (gasp) decapitated. I strongly doubt the second and am iffy about the first.

Anyway, he was a good guy and the only Grade Nine Homeroom member on the team (or at all, to my knowledge) to be dead. So he gets to be the Big Guy. Hope you appreciate this, Danny, wherever you may be. Get out there and kick some ass.

Mark Shepherd was the bane of my existence, mainly because he stood right in front of me year after year, class after class, which left me having to explain that no, we weren't related. He was also a bit of a dick. Not a terrible human being or anything, but just a big, overconfident guy from a well-to-do family. I was an insecure nerd, so we didn't really mix well.

His dad was a politician, Conservative, if I recall, or a Blue Liberal. I ran into him a while back and he seemed genuinely glad to see me -- still a bit big-success condescending, but it was nice to see him anyway. Nostalgia makes the heart grow slightly fonder.

Troy Rivers kind of scared me. I guess I'm showing my age when I say the Bad Kid in our class SMOKED and DRANK ALCOHOL. Whoooooo. But yeah. Troy was the Tough Kid in our Grade Nine homeroom. He talked back to teachers, drank, and had that air of I-don't-care-and-I-might-snap menace to him.

So he's a blitzer. Which makes sense, because I figure Troy'd be good in a scrap. Like most of my old classmates, I have no idea what Troy's up to now.

Ron was my best friend through high school and still remains one of my best friends today. We don't talk enough these days... maybe once every two years. But it's one of those things where after a few seconds, it's like we were on the phone yesterday. He lives a fair ways away from me now, and has a kid. Whoa. We're all growing older, I guess.

Best friend means he gets to be one of the "stars" of the team. Hopefully not its first dead one. :-O

Sam was a fun guy. Blistering red hair, freckles, and a laid-back attitude. He played sax in music class, but hung out with the artsy kids and the smokers and the stoners. That's the kind of guy he was. Never tied the laces on his Converse high-tops.

He moved to California the year after Grade Nine. I remember hanging out with Sam at Jay Sparling's Christmas party in Grade Nine and he was playing a bunch of Seven Seconds tapes. I'd never heard of them before, but they did a kick-ass cover of Nena's 99 Red Balloons.

I also remember one day in homeroom when he passed out for no reason and came to with a nosebleed about ten seconds later. We didn't think much of it at the time. Now I wonder what the hell was up with that. Huh.

Jay Sparling was a guy I shouldn't have been friends with but was friends with anyway. He was a cool kid with kind of a mean sense of humour sometimes, but straddled the two worlds between the smokers and the artsy kids effortlessly. He was the first real drug user I ever knew -- just pot, but lots of it. Jay used to claim that he got stoned so he could understand what the hell I was talking about.

Looking back, Jay was a really great guy. He was more Ron's friend than my friend, though, and we didn't "get" each other a lot of the time. He moved to a town called Tweed a long time ago and we totally lost track of each other. I think he works as a male nurse or something now. We had a lot of great times in high school, most involving Jay getting pretty high. Heh.

Jesus Murphy, did I ever have a crush on Claire Radford. One of those can't eat, can't sleep crushes. I thought she was the greatest thing on two legs. And at that point in my life, she was. There was Claire Radford and Lysa Toye, both of whom I was deliriously gaga over. I'm still friends with Lysa. Haven't seen Claire since I ran into her on the street in Toronto about fourteen years ago, when I was at university and she was just transferring there. We exchanged phone numbers, but I never called her.

I also tried to make a pass at her younger sister Daphne once, but made such a flub of that that I still flinch and weep a bit internally when I think about it. God, I was such a dork in high school. Holy cow.

Anyway, Claire was nice and beautiful and still kind of has this magic glow in my memory. Claire Radford. Boy oh boy. It's probably a mercy that I haven't seen her since we were both teenagers, because if the bloom came off the rose it would kill a little of the 15-year-old inside of me.

Rob Raines. The son of a farmer (and one of my dad's parishoners), Rob was, and probably still is, literally the salt of the earth. He lived on a dairy farm outside of town, and as far as I know took over the farm from his dad a while back. I stayed at Rob's place for a while the first summer after we moved to town, because my parents had to ... send me ahead or something. I can't remember. I had a hard time connecting to Rob, who was a stolid, solid, country-music conservative strong-silent guy who didn't really have a good handle on weird comic-book industrial-music science-fiction commie-sympathizing guys.

Which was fine. We got along okay in a live-and-let-live sort of way.

Shawn was a kid that straddled two worlds -- he was a cool kid at school when the cool kids were around, but he was also a closet geek that gamed with me and the other artsy kids in the evenings. Bit of a powergamer, though, which even then I wasn't all that into.

He also went out with Lisa Toye for years, which pissed me off a bit inside because I was crazy about her for most of my high school career. Not that I ever would have had a chance to go out with her, but even so. Grrrr.

A few years down the road, Shawn would cut a few toes off in a lawnmower accident. He didn't find his path immediately after high school, and didn't finish university. He discovered a deep-set love for golf, though, and works on a golf course somewhere now.

He'll always remain the greatest example I know of somebody that wanted to just geek out, but wanted to be cool at the same time. We nerds were committed, but poor Shawn just couldn't decide which side of that fence to land on.

Brett Puckrin is now a real estate salesman. And he has always been a real estate salesman. Charming young gentlemen, and one of the first in our circle to try to grow a moustache -- six months or so with that embarrasing black fuzz stuff that teens get on the upper lip. He also really worked that mullet look to perfection -- not in a NASCAR way, in a Corey Haim way. If you know what I mean. Wore his collars flipped up until it was no longer cool. Thin leather tie.

The thing I remember most about Brett was he coined the phrase "Poor" to replace "bad." And for about six months, everything in school was "poor." "You can't give me a lift? Man, that's poor." Brett always had an angle on stuff. He started his own tree farm at age 16 or something, and I'm sure he's a multi-millionaire and on some sort of comittee right now.

My friend Ian Smith (who was a year ahead of me, and was therefore not in my Grade Nine homeroom) went out with Val for a while and when they broke up, he was devastated. I mean, devastated. He listened to Depeche Mode's "Somebody" for about three weeks straight and wouldn't stop talking about her. It was sad for a while, but then it got kind of tiresome.

Val was a fun girl with a good sense of humour. Not the fastest swimmer on the beach, but always ready to laugh. Man, was she a talker. You'd set her off on some topic and she'd be ripping along twenty minutes later. She played clarinet in music class, I think. Maybe flute. I'm pretty sure it was clarinet.