Pure Pines in the 90s was a small town in East Texas. The kind with a football field, a few churches and one privately owned burger joint that fed the masses on game day. There were two things different about this town that probably should have come as a warning for anybody passing through it. One, it wasn't our town. It was our grandparents' town and their grandparents before that, and two, it wasn't even a town at all. It was only an unincorporated community tucked behind a massive curtain of pine trees so tall they hid a multitude of sins. They called it Pure Pines, Texas. And that was the start of the elitism.

If you blinked, you'd miss the place and speed right past it down the interstate, but if you took the wrong turn down a dirt road, a street or two past the high school or behind one of the churches, you'd find miles of all kinds of different houses, built by the people who called it home. Pure Pines was in between two small towns north and south of it, and two somewhat larger towns each thirty miles to the east and west of it.

Those larger two towns had the shopping malls and big chain restaurants. The smaller two next to us offered grocery stores, mom-and-pop type food places and a few other small business destinations for errand running. You didn't even have to get on a major highway to get to one of them. They also had the only police and sheriff's departments. Imagine growing up in a town so pure it didn't need law enforcement of its own. Looking back, I think that's how they kept us all in line. We didn't realize we were walking the tight rope without a net.

Every Fall, come the first hint of football, hot chocolate, or what we call make-a-pot-of-chili-weather, yellow school buses from the outskirts of the surrounding towns within a fifty-mile radius pulled into our little burger joint to eat before they headed back to their own neck of the woods. They were here on Friday night for football of course, and select other days of the week for girls' volleyball, and any other sport or academic match our little 3A school competed in.

To say that everyone knew everybody in our town was a gross understatement, but the older I got I would come to know it as a mass overstatement. We knew the people on the buses too. You had the Spring Hill Panthers, White Oak Roughnecks, Pine Tree Pirates, Waskom Wild Cats, Bullard Bulldogs, Elysian Fields Lions, West Rusk Raiders, and then there was us, The Pure Pines Palominos. Even our school mascot was a blonde. A palomino is a genetic color in horses that have a gold coat and a white mane and tail.

The powers that be liked pretty things, unattainable things, things they could own. It made sense they'd choose a mascot that reflected the image they saw of themselves, thoroughbred. Only, one might call it ironic, as it actually takes horse breeders crossing two different kinds of horses, a chestnut horse with a cremello horse to guarantee one with requirements for palomino society membership. Funny, the old school saying used about someone who was different than everybody else, "a horse of a different color" was quite appropriate here and most likely coined in Pure Pines.

It was 1996, and the Fall of my junior year in high school. There were no smart phones. The beginning stages of cell phones had just been surfacing, via more portable, cordless versions of the 1980s car phone, and the internet as we know it today was an unimaginable concept called dialup that hadn't become a household necessity yet. There was no social media, no Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, and I wouldn't get an email address until my freshman year of college.

If you walked the halls of high school with me or were on one of those yellow busses that drove through Pure Pines, you were generation X, born to parents who were "baby boomers" and their parents, the ones our town belonged to, were part of "the greatest generation" that survived the depression era. Generation X, the first to be labeled instead of named. We were a letter that usually omits something, crosses it out, or is used in place of an existing signature, a sex chromosome that stood alone and determined nothing. Weird.

It was the 90s, what wasn't weird about it? No one was "woke," and they avoided diversity like the plague. I'd heard my whole life the one thing humans have in common with chickens is that when chickens come across another chicken that looks different than the rest, they peck it to death. There was definitely a pecking order to the halls of Pure Pines High School. It was one that the student body, faculty, and entire community existed by.

I remember reading the book, The Lottery, about a creepy quaint town that had an event every year where they drew a number and stoned someone to death. I thought about Pure Pines when I read it, metaphorically of course. There was no actual ceremony, no number drawn each year, but there was a whole lot of pomp and circumstance, plenty of stones thrown, and somebody's number was always up. It was more of a control thing I suppose. It had to have stemmed from the way this unincorporated little community was founded, or I should say by whom.

We heard once in our local history class that Pure Pines had the opportunity to incorporate and become a town, however, the vote was swayed to staying as is. In theory, I suppose the people in charge weren't willing to have someone in charge of them.

Pure Pines was stunningly good at compartmentalizing its functions as well as differentiating between its inhabitants. Regardless, it was often difficult to distinguish the haves from the have nots. Like anything, what's truly valuable is in the eye of the beholder. The elite founders and their descendants owned profitable businesses if not most of the businesses in town. However, the working founders, like my grandfather whose grandfather before him settled here, and owned land, always found that made for an interesting game of adult monopoly.

Since it was harder to point the finger at who had more power, the people who wanted it most made up their own rules to the game. It started with church. This was the Bible belt of East Texas after all. The old adage about the two things you could count on more than anything being church and football was a stereotype we absolutely represented. THE church to go to was determined, and after that, all schoolboard members, or anybody who wanted to be one, the chamber of commerce, local teachers, small business owners, and all of the popular kids attended that church.

My family didn't get the memo. We had gone to the same church my entire life, and my mother's life before that. It was full of laughter, love, and kind older ladies who baked cookies for vacation Bible school every summer. We sang old fashioned hymns, prayed on Sunday, and shook our neighbors' hands. Every second Sunday of the month we had a potluck in the fellowship hall after church. It was always a big deal to my grandmother to make sure we "fixed something good to take." That was usually her pineapple upside down cake, a homemade marble cake with chocolate fudge icing, or fresh baked yeast rolls. I can't imagine it was much different than any other church that offered a food pantry to those in need. It never even crossed my grandparents' mind to change churches or find their religion with the masses.

That's one social club we were automatically left out of. I don't think I was even truly aware until I got to Jr. high and realized that for all those informative years, the people I thought I was friends with were better friends with each other via going to that Sunday school and church together all those years.

There were a few things I didn't know that factored into whether you were popular or not. Funny, I always thought it was just me, that I wasn't good enough or thin enough or pretty enough, or I didn't know how to pick out the right clothes. It was more than that though. As I mentioned before, it started with our grandparents, possibly even their parents. It mattered who they were, who knew them and what they did or did not have to offer Pure Pines.

Then your parents, it mattered who they were when they roamed the halls of Pure Pines High. My parents were divorced, and my dad...just not in the picture. I never knew back then that mattered. I heard the expression "broken home" all the time but somehow never associated it with myself. I didn't know others were applying it to me. It was just me and my mom in our house, three houses down from my grandparents' house. Other than my cousins and a few close friends, I thought I was the only one who knew my dad wasn't present. My grandad more than made up for it. I never noticed the guy was missing, or there again, I really didn't think it mattered.

In today's world, people grow up wanting to matter, wanting to get noticed, or be seen. In Pure Pines, everyone mattered. It mattered what you did, what you said, who you did it with, and who you said it to. You couldn't be invisible if you tried. Sometimes that was truly unfortunate.

Don't let the Friday night lights and pom poms fool you, they mattered all right, and were expected, but at Pure Pines, our generation had a little more on our plate. Academics.

Something happened in grade school with an over ambitious female principal who wouldn't accept less than the best. We were the top elementary school in the state before we ever brought report cards home to mommy and daddy with smiley faces for behavior on them. She set the precedence with our class, and it stuck. It would follow and shape us until we left the institution, and wherever we went after.

My junior year had been an odd year already. Sophomore year had been pretty great, still reaping the benefits of being a Junior Varsity Cheerleader, but when I didn't make varsity this year, it changed everything. I knew it would. I just didn't know how much it all would change. This year already felt so intense and had so many layers of added pressure.

We hadn't even begun to talk about the prep for senior year, but already I was maxed out on AP classes, bonus assignments, and the counselor was already grilling us all about scholarships. I had heard once that this was the actual year of accountability. That they sneak everything in on your junior year, so it's all pretty much done by your senior year. You really just have that Fall semester. Spring semester is all prom and cut day, and graduation and annual photos, etc.

I guess it did make sense that this would be the year of reckoning. I could have handled that academically, but all this other bull shit on top of it... It seemed like all my extra curriculars were proving conflictual. If I wasn't late for one, I had missed a practice entirely for another one. If AP English was a breeze, Biology 2 was in a foreign language and my lab was during debate team.

Everything was chaos, not to mention my friends. I'm sorry, how did me not making varsity cheerleader affect you? At least that's what it felt like I needed to write on a tee shirt for those who cared, and why did they? Did they just want to stick it to me. As in, it doesn't suck enough that you went for something and failed, instead we need to hold you accountable for that failure. If I had just not tried out, and left the cheerleader squad by default, the optics would have fared far better for me this year. Pure Pines was great about pushing and insisting you try and strive for everything possible, but they had no use for you if you failed at it. Failure was not any part of the curriculum.