How to boarding school au
Oh hey bc I’m sick and I don’t see this around a lot, let’s talk boarding school AUs! Because yeah, college AUs are good start, but there’s a few fun details that make boarding schools stand out:
- First of all, everything you read in fanfic about situational gayness is true. I’m serious. When you’re set up to live, work, and play at school (and usually with strict controls preventing you from leaving campus) you start to seek affection wherever you can find it. One of the reasons I didn’t realize I was bi for years was how completely normal it was for people to cuddle regardless of gender or sexual preference. Packs of completely straight-identified dudes and even dating het couples would curl up and do homework on the regular. Imagine how confusing it would be for your OTP if they first met bc they were cuddling in a puppy pile along with tons of other potential partners.
- Not all boarding schools are for the rich. Some are reform schools. Some are organized around a specific topic, like science or the arts. Some exist simply because students are spread out too far to commute back and forth. My school was sponsored by the government, so the most I had to do was pay for supplies and a train ticket up there once a quarter. (Yes, just like Hogwarts.)
- The true enemy is the staff. Not that bullying doesn’t still exist, but when you live together 24/7, a funny thing happens. You might not always like each other, but you quickly start to realize you have a common enemy - the adults in charge of this zoo. And when you have a common enemy, it’s easier to get along. 99% of our teenage spite was redirected from each other to the security guards who prevented us from innocently taking each other’s clothes off in the bushes, which meant we didn’t beat the shit out of each other so much.
- Related, everyone becomes an exhibitionist. Similar to the confusing lines around being gay/straight/whatever, when you’re trapped at school you have no place to go to get it on. So when people do become involved, they either have to find a super secret hiding place (like a jammed elevator) or get used to banging next to three or four other couples at the one makeout spot with low visibility. (Which may change weekly, given the aforementioned staff. I remember one time watching a lazy security guard mount a giant headlight assembly on a pole, stand back, and sweep the high beam back and forth over a hillside. Half-naked couples scattered like rabbits.)
- You will probably almost kill yourselves once a semester, but it will be okay as long as no one notices. Unless you’re at one of the mythical rich kid schools where idk, everyone has their own helicopter, you pretty much have to invent your own fun. My school had restrictions around tvs and video games because blah blah “being healthy”, so we also spent a lot of time outside trying to figure out what the fuck to do. Protip to staff: this is actually way less healthy than video games and computers, because bored teens can and will fucking destroy themselves by accident. Example: one trend we came up with was human versions of all board games, not just chess. This sounds kind of adorable and innocent, until the incident where we attempted Human Jenga. Protip to everyone else: DO NOT PLAY HUMAN JENGA. Even if you’re being very careful about stacking people, eventually the sheer weight of the stack will start to smother the people down below even if you thought their chest was clear. And if they can’t breathe, they can’t let you know they are dying. We almost lost the bottom row over that. (No staff ever found out.)
- Prank wars are real, and they get out of hand. Again, when well-meaning adults force you to make your own fun: fun is prone to escalate. Food fights become whole dorm events; nerds get revenge by fucking with goddamn everyone. One time some friends and I got access to a guy’s computer, put a back door in it, took control of his machine remotely and convinced him he’d created an emergent AI. Another time I got line of sight to a window in a rival dorm and took down their computer every time someone started a paper. In retrospect these are all extremely dick moves but uh I was not always aligned good in high school.
That’s all I can think of for now - go forward and sin with pride!
You learn how to sneak around really well….
Shit yeah that is also true
My roommate had a boyfriend who learned how to climb gutter pipes for illicit visits at night
Also we played Assassins a lot on campus which required both stealth and intense paranoid
You were assigned a target name and snuck around school with a plastic knife at all times ready to stab them
Jeez! I learned how to be invisible and literally hide in front of the dorm counselors faces. It was so wild. One evening after lights-out I snuck down to a friends room and was literally 3 feet away from the door when the dorm counselor came in. All they needed to do was glance to the right.
Another time I was sneaking to my girlfriend’s room after lights-out. My dorm counselor (different one from previous story) was still awake and her office was still wide open. She was sitting in a chair watching TV. Did I mention the chair was facing the door? So, I recalled all the stories about no sudden movements blend into the background etc. I creeped by pretty as you please without her even noticing that I was there.
A friend of mine became the equivalent of a mob boss. She had people who owed/did favors for her and she monopolized the ramen and soda industry within the dorms.
Also, one never stops jumping at the sound of jingling keys…..
THE KEYS ARE TOO REAL
(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)
