The students cannot leave campus without permission. They can't even go out to their cars without prior approval, which, once given, is then broadcast via walkie-talkie to the security guards. We Break Anyway. Nothing grates on them more. After all, some of them are old enough to vote.
Most kids eat downstairs in the long, sunlit canyon of the cafeteria.
And it is here that the social law of the school is most obvious. Around the edges and up front sit almost everyone else, the students in choir or theater, the younger kids. Just outside the cafeteria, at another bank of tables and sprawled on the floor are the punks and a collection of students usually called the skaters. No, he says, the kids who hang out by the soda machines, who wear oversized blue jeans and tiny T-shirts and adorn themselves with pacifiers and piercings, are not skaters. She is tiny, perhaps five feet tall, in huge blue jeans held up by a seat belt.