High School Confidential, Episode 2: Courtney

In episode 2 of High School Confidential, we met Courtney and her family. Courtney was a good girl who relied on her faith to help her make the right decisions. She was a cheerleader and a soccer player with hopes to play soccer in college.

As they interviewed Courtney before she entered high school they asked her what she expected and about peer pressure. Courtney said she was not planning on drinking or having sex or any of those things. Just the other day I asked my son if he was ready for high school and if he thought there would be a lot of pressure to do these things. He said, “Yep, I’m ready. I don’t think there will be that much pressure.” Kids are so naive at this age.

To start the show off, Courtney and her parents had a conversation very similar to a conversation I had with my teenage boys not to long ago. Her parents asked her if oral sex was considered sex. Courtney said, “If they have a boyfriend and they’ve been going out for a while and they both really like each other, I don’t really see anything wrong with it.” When questioned about “what’s a while?” Courtney said, “Like, well at least like a month or something. I don’t know.” A month?!? That made me shiver a little. Ok, a lot.

By 10th grade Courtney was starting to feel the pressure to drink and she began to give in to the peer pressure and experiment with drinking. She said, “I want to have fun…It’s like the whole feeling of being in high school, I guess, that makes you feel like you’re grown up enough to make decisions like that. I don’t know. I guess you just feel like being older.” She went on to say she was “sick of being the good girl” and she “was bored.”

One night, before heading in to the school for a basketball, Courtney and a couple of her fellow cheerleaders drank shots of vodka in the car. A teacher caught them and they were suspended from school for three days. Those were the first three days of soccer tryouts which ruined her chance to make the varsity team that year. That’s when she realized she needed to make better decisions because there were consequences for poor decisions.

Then Courtney found our her fifteen-year-old sister, Justine, was pregnant. Their mom was not at all happy about it and, in my opinion, did not handle it very well. So Courtney stepped up to help Justine through her pregnancy, through the birth and during the adoption as Justine gave her baby to a loving family.

By the end of her four years in high school Courtney has some very good advice for girls (and boys) about to start high school. She said, “You don’t have to follow the crowd to be liked. You don’t have to follow the crowd to be successful. Actually I found that being your own person is probably the most important thing you can do in high school.”

I really enjoyed this episode. Although she wasn’t perfect (who is), she really was a good kid just trying to navigate her way through this weird place called high school.