Part 1 is here.

The lineup changed pretty quickly. We lost Tiffany Horsely, Steve Bryson and Penny Egbert before the first term ended. To this day, I am friends with Penny. I have never asked her if she regretted leaving GT. I have always assumed that she never regrets anything she ever does, but that could be wrong. Sometime, I should ask her.

Before losing Tiffany, Steve and Penny, Chuck Perkins joined the class. Matt Strebe was adamant about getting him to GT with us. It was like he knew that we weren’t complete until Chuck joined us. Chuck had attended Kennedy Junior High, but he moved to Idaho. He came back to West Valley for sophomore year at Kearns High and just in time to sign up for our class. Chuck was the kind of guy who never answered the phone. If you called his house, one of his younger siblings would answer the phone.

“Hello?”

“Hi, is Chuck there?”

“Ummm?”

“Is Chuck there?”

“Yes.” Dead silence for twenty seconds.

“Could you go get him for me?”

“Ummm? yeah?”

The child wasn’t trying to be funny, he was only three years old and barely understood English. This is the reason children should not be allowed to answer the telephone. It’s not cute, it’s frustrating for the people on the other line. More importantly, it gives you a picture of what life was like at the Perkins Home: too many unsupervised children.

After all the shuffling and class changing, our core group included Matt, Chuck, Dylan, Mike, Dawni and me. I knew the guys from grade school or junior high and this new girl seemed ok with me. She knew what she liked and she was the type of girl to define her own sense of cool. Me, I got my cool straight out of the pages of Seventeen magazine, never straying from its edicts.