I’m a high school dropout.

I graduated early and with honors.

Both of those statements are true.

When planting a tree, it’s impossible to predict exactly where each branch will grow. But looking back on a full-grown tree it’s easy to trace each branch back to the trunk and it’s roots.

It was the day before the first day of high school, a day when people reinvent themselves. I shaved my head. People noticed. New style, people noticed. New swagger, girls, uh, people noticed.

But, not like Mendonca. In only 10^th grade (for the second time, I think) he was, to a misguided ruffian, an icon. He was older, from Hawaii, had a gleaming smile and tons of friends, he did handstand pushups for fun and when he popped his shirt off all the girls noticed.

We had a similar walk home from the bus stop, our moms were friends and he always took time to talk to this stalky, prematurely balding underclassman. I don’t know if I looked up to him or envied him but when he spoke, I listened.

Then one day, I got the speech. “You want the money? You want the girls? Sell this.”

We’d spend our afternoons making pickups, spreading out bricks upon bricks on the glass patio table to pick out the cucarachas and repackage. At 160 on the elbow, and a below market price on a retail portion of a quad for a dub, I was working with a margin of about 700% and people liked this a whole lot more thank hotcakes.

Skipping the first couple periods one day we concluded our business at the nearby retirement community, blazed a couple, played a game or two of shuffleboard and headed back to campus.

The maintenance man makes a call on his radio in the distance. Moments later, the school cop comes around the corner. “Walk in front of me, keep your hands out of your pockets.”

‘Donc was holding all the weight; he did some time. I got expelled.

They didn’t let us keep any of it either, lol.

I was sent to a  disciplinary school. A place for the 50 to 60 most delinquent students in the county. White tee tucked into jeans, white shoes, no bags allowed, routine searches. We learned a lot in that school but most of it was over games of billiards in the cinder block room where we spent most of our time.

The next year, I was eligible for tele-school. That’s where you get your books and study materials and learn from home with daily calls with an absent minded instructor and random check-ins to make sure you weren’t doing what got you enrolled in this program in the first place.

I learned that outside of the slow pace of the public academic curriculum, I thrived. I could complete a course, meant to take a semester, in about three days. I casually knocked out the whole year in a few weeks. Then, all I had to do was forward my dedicated tele-school line to my friend’s or girlfriend’s house and I was free man. I could go about my business.

Terrible story, right? What a waste of education for such a bright young man in the Gifted program and all honors classes and with such a promising future, isn’t it?

Nope. Not at all.

Immediately after being re-instated to high school, I learned that just like I could edit report cards for 50 bucks a pop (100 if you had a popped collar on your Tommy shirt), just like I could trace an old disciplinary referral onto a new one and drop it in the teacher’s box to avoid punishment, I could, less than malevolently, enroll myself in self-paced courses like night school and summer school without actually having to fail a class first. I completed my recommended courses and had the credits to graduate over a year early. In order to graduate, I had to officially unenroll from my high school, drop out. And after scoring remarkably well on the SAT equivalent, I graduated with honors. Wore the gold tassel around my neck and everything.

What do I do now? Whatever the fuck I want. Most days, I live a dream life. I work for myself doing what I love. I work on my own schedule. I market my own products and services and help others to do the same. I operate at an efficiency level far greater than my peers in the field and, most days, I have my all office calls forwarded to me remotely wherever I happen to be that day.

These are the skills I learned through my tumultuously misguided youth, and they have served me well. Then, my parents were devastated, my teachers were disappointed, the principal was grinning to see me gone. But, I used what I learned to grow. I branched out.