VACAVILLE, Calif. — Punk teens and local high school students Bri Chambers and Daniel Hernandez ditched their Zoom classes late yesterday morning to smoke cigarettes behind their laptops.
“When school was happening in person, I would typically smoke behind the gym or near the bleachers with my friends, but that’s unfortunately not an option anymore,” said Millbridge High sophomore Chambers after taking a drag and coughing for what seemed like 10 minutes. “I tried tagging the back of my laptop to try and create the look and feel of the back of the school, but it’s not the same. I’m just trying to hold on to any sense of normalcy I can.”
Hernandez, a junior, believes that the back of his laptop is the ideal smoke spot.
“The space behind my laptop is usually super chill,” said Hernandez, who recently switched from smoking cloves to Camel Filters. “Sometimes if I want to pretend like I’m in class, I’ll put a background video up of me not paying attention and doodling in my spiral notebook. Seems to work pretty well. Now instead of checking to see if the vice principal is coming, I just put a towel under the door and hope my mom doesn’t try to come into my room.”
However, AP biology teacher Marcy Wyman seemed more aware of what the students were up to than they might expect.
“I know exactly what they’re doing — sometimes they forget to log out and I can see the smoke coming from behind the screen. But what am I gonna do, write them up for truancy?” Wyman stated while lighting a cigarette of her own. “I’d say something if I wasn’t so burnt out trying to maintain the attention span of 40 horned-up teenagers through a metal cube.”
In related news, several teens who attend nearby Ryston High were caught carving penis drawings into their parents’ bathroom walls today in an attempt to remember what it felt like to “hate this place again.”