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‘Degrassi’ Saved Me in High School
I was a city girl stuck in a white, upper-middle class suburb — and these kids were my lifeline
Nothing’s worse than being a teenager in Long Island in the early ’90s. Or so I thought, on the first day of junior high school when everyone in a five-mile radius laughed at my outfit and my kinky hair. In Brooklyn, I was cool. Wise. In Valley Stream, I was the city girl who spoke funny and listened to hip-hop. I was surrounded by blondes named Brett and Lea who swanned the halls in their kick-team outfits and Liz Claiborne handbags. Girls who had a penchant for dropping the word “like” five times in one sentence, and spent the greater part of their adolescence at the mall.
To me, home was where my best friends were Puerto Rican, black, and Italian. We were homegirls who jumped subway turnstiles and pumped swings in the park while junkies overdosed in broad daylight. We wore shirts from the Dollar Store on Fourth Avenue and smashed Gatorade bottles on the pavement and bought “loosies” at the bodega. Every other word was “fuck.” At 12, we’d seen it all and talked about it. Casual. No big deal. Knives in the neck and babies in the belly, the clink of vials on the sidewalk, and the addicts quaking on the corner, everyone watching from the stoop. Home was everyone knowing everyone else’s business, even…
