New Year, New Freshmen: Pre-Freshies React to SHSAT Results

We’ve all been there: in our last few months of eighth grade, opening up our digital screens to fiercely check the terrible, slow-as-hell MySchools website that, for some reason, wasn’t built to handle a large number of people logging on at once (cough, cough, Talos). Now, it is time for a new generation of kiddos to do the same and either be horrified or momentarily happy before entering high school.

Children on Reddit are pretending to be worried about which specialized school to pick so that they can flex their results. “Um… excuse me… should I go to Stuyvesant, or Brooklyn Tech (wrong answer), or Bronx Science, or…” asked a Redditor who has only ever had posts on r/SHSAT. On the other hand, there’s that mod who lurks and responds to every pre-freshie's posts and has surprisingly neither gotten banned nor accused of pedophilia (yet). 

One pre-freshie broke down into tears when she saw that the only school she got an offer from was FDR. She blubbered, boogers running down her nose and into her mouth, “B-BUT I REALLY WANTED STUY!! I REALLY SO BADLY WANTED TO GO TO THIS SCHOOL JUST BECAUSE IT LOOKS REALLY COOL AND IT’S IN MANHATTAN, AND I DON’T CARE WHAT EVERYONE ELSE SAYS ABOUT THE MASSIVE DEPRESSION THERE, I REALLY WANTED TO GO! I WOULD DO ANYTHING… CAN… c-can you take me, maybe? Sneak me in?… Maybe a fake ID of some sort…” She sniffed some of her snot back in while swallowing the rest. “Oh my god. I’m a genius. This is how people do it; I just know it. This is what I have to do… ”

I just stared at her and then blinked twice. “She’s lost her mind,” I whispered under my breath, only to be cut off by a menacing glare that scared the crap out of me. 

“You keep your mouth shut. You don’t know more than me, just because you’re two years into high school and I’m not. Always these stupid, stupid high schoolers… you’ll never get it. Shut up and quit staring at me like I’m the stupid one,” she scolded furiously. 

 I gulped. Nothing is more frightening than the naive yearning for their pain to come quicker.

There are also those who got accepted into their desired schools. “Yay! Brooklyn Tech! I can finally meet the freshman who wanted to stab their teachers!” one ecstatic eighth grader from McAuliffe said. 

“Bronx Science!! The only thing I know about that school is that Tom Holland went undercover there to play Spiderman, but other than that, it’s okay, I guess. But Tom Holland… HE is the reason I wanted to go there,” said another eighth grader from Mark Twain, who literally skipped school just to see his results as quickly as possible. Seriously, these kids are something else.

Finally, I interviewed one of the students who got accepted into Stuyvesant to see if they knew anything about the school. “Well… I mean, I’ve always wanted to join a cult, I guess. I heard there was a robotics team at Stuyvesant, and judging from its descriptions, it might just be the perfect place for me!” another eighth grader from McAuliffe said, beaming. I was mildly surprised. Only mildly, though, because the cult part wasn’t necessarily new knowledge to me. Everyone but the robotics kids know about that. I patted her on the back and praised her for having such knowledge that most kids here may not even know of. However, instead of smiling, she stared at me, perplexed. 

“What?” I asked. 

“Your face,” she said.

“What about—oh,” I paused as I realized my face was accidentally twisted in disgust for touching a pre-freshie. “Sorry… um, anything else that you particularly liked about Stuy?” I asked awkwardly.

“Well, not really… I mean, I like that the building is tall, I guess. Looks cool,” she said, smiling and pulling up a picture of the building to prove it to me as if I’m not forced to walk there Monday through Friday. I rolled my eyes and sighed.

“It’ll be even better once you have to walk all 10 flights of stairs and you find a broken escalator on your way, and a teacher is waiting for you on the 10th floor just to tell you you’re late even though you have no other choice and you’ve told them a million times that you come from the first floor, but they think you can teleport, so that’d be your fault I guess.” 

She stared at me, giving me that annoying, confused look again. 

“Don’t worry, there will be plenty of things longer than the time it takes you to walk up 10 flights of stairs… like the time it takes for you to see your schedule, for your English teacher to grade your essays, for geometry to end, for your friends to finally stop making excuses to hang out because they’re busy with their cult—I mean the robotics club… you get the gist. But, I mean, hey, don’t worry! At least the building looks cool.”

“You Stuy kids freak me out… like seriously,” she said, wrinkling her nose. 

“I’m only telling you the truth, and if that’s how it’s gonna be, I can say the same about you guys. Stop fantasizing about the building for Aristotle’s sake!” I bit back. She was really starting to piss me off.

“Aristotle is crazy stuff,” she snorted. “What, is there like a philosophy class that I don’t know of?”

“Philosophy? Nah. There’s Olive Hoyl though. And Brock Lee. Oh, there’s so much you don’t know of. So, so much,” I said, laughing nervously as I left all the eighth graders standing there, more confused than ever. My laughter quickly dissipated as I ran across the street to get as far away from McAuliffe as possible before I had to encounter another smelly pre-freshie. These pre-freshies freak me out… like seriously.