Your comment about carrying all those books and how far your locker was reminds me of just how horribly designed lockers are.  They don't make any sense to me, they're too skinny or too small, there's not enough shelf space... I just feel like there's a better way to do that.

I really don't have anything against cliques in general, I just think they become an easy excuse to avoid complex side characters or motivations... it makes it easier for the writer to think they can get away with stock characters.  "Oh, they're the mean girls because they're rich" or something.  A little more exploring can give you not just interesting motivations but interesting actions and reactions.

I almost never went to parties, never went to my prom or anything like that.  I went to a few side concerts but that wasn't much.  One thing that I'd definitely want to see more of is the splinters that any gatherings like this create: everyone breaks into small groups (not cliques) and have their own things going on, which are usually more interesting.  I think when it's prom or something like that, it's easy to get trapped in the structure of it, and I think the elements on the side are where the magic can happen.

You know, thinking of hooky, it's confession time, I used to sneak off campus in high school and go to the comic shop, it was a couple blocks away and definitely beyond where we were allowed to go, and I'm sure everyone knew but I never got in trouble for it.  I'm sure that was one of those karmic rewards I got for being an overlooked loser in those days.

Maybe this is one of those things where... I think that the reason people write HS stories is they want to address and "fix" their own experiences, get some sort of closure on all that, but at the same time, they're fearful of opening those old wounds (which would actually HELP if they wanted closure), so they fall back on the standards instead of really going in (I'm sure that the assignment work is also on a strict timetable, so there's no time to really dive into all of that).  That's just my guess.