Breaking Bad: The Local Version

My high school was weird, one of the students turned in the kid that was trying to peddle cocaine. We were a snitch school,we had guys in the hallways selling candy and energy drinks out of their backpacks. There might’ve been like five people who smoked weed on a regular basis. It was a charter school and we were project based, at least that’s what it said on the brochure. Honestly, we took more tests than projects and we lost one sport every year. It was a terrible school, full of snitches. I once chewed gum during a test and someone turned me in. I kept tabs on everyone after that. You wanna turn someone in for selling cocaine, that’s fine it wasn’t even Colombian. But you want to sell me out for double bubble? Bitch.

We did have a rival high school and they weren’t bad. At least they were consistent, and they had a football team. We didn’t. We had basketball team that ranked third (from last place) in the state and cross country. That was pretty much it. Oh and we were the bull frogs for about three years and then we didn’t have a mascot. Our logo was just the schools initials, and they tried to make a mascot costume from the initials but to be honest they were all kind of terrifying in a Slender-man kind of way.

This rival school was amazing. I never set foot in it’s campus but I read about them in the paper a lot. They were the top football team in the county and several students went on to pretty prominent colleges with sports teams. Several of their students went to Harvard and Yale. Their community service record was incredible, other schools begged to be apart of their programs.

The year I graduated I read about a senior who was going there and she had fled to Mexico and the cops were trying to track her down. She apparently had been managing an entire distribution of cooking and selling meth and had locations from San Diego to Georgia. She was making a million dollars at least, they honestly didn't know the extent of how much she made or trafficked.

My first thought was “fuck why didn’t I think of that?” I had dinner with extended family that night and one of my aunts was in shock that a drug lord was in our backyard. She didn’t appreciate my comment of “why didn’t you introduce me if she was in the backyard? I could’ve been working for her.” They wanted me to get a job, I honestly would have made more as a drug dealer than a receptionist at an auto garage.

She was 18 and already set up a national corporation within other high schools. I was so fascinated. Was there some high school drug convention I missed? I never learned about that in business class. I had zero opportunity to sell drugs at my high school and I will always resent them for that. I mean damn, I'm 26 and I can barely balance my checkbook and there she was at like 16 creating a national business from scratch. Sure, we had drugs at my school to sell but honestly those guys that did sell a joint or two, usually begged to smoke half of it with you when you bought it. The one kid that did sell cocaine was expelled after his third day because he tried to sell to a TA.

Of course it wasn’t my dream to be a national drug lord when I was a kid. I wanted to be a firefighter and a cop and a teacher and a world famous singer, I thought about also adding mother to the list but I wanted to focus on my careers first. When I first started college I wanted to be a journalist and that fell through when I realized they get paid next to nothing and also live next to nothing. I’m now studying graphic design, which means I can still make next to nothing but my work would get published more often.

Sometimes I find myself wondering, where is this female Walter White? Where's her movie/Netflix series deal? If you can watch a show like Narcos, why would you not watch a show about a teenager struggling to figure out how to pay to go to Stanford to earn her busines degree. It's like that episode of South Park where Butters kisses a girl and then becomes a pimp and creates and semi-successful enterprise, AND gets approved business loans.