Eastlake High Kids: Safe, If A Bit Scared

HIGH SCHOOL is still a safe place to be. But at a local school that looks a lot like Colorado's Columbine High, students are now asking questions about their cliques and their security.

SAMMAMISH - Kevin Sullivan pauses at the edge of the jam of teenagers clogging a main artery of Eastlake High School.

The girls giggle. They stick together like Velcro. The boys wear baseball caps and short-sleeved plaid shirts and T-shirts. Some shove one another. It's a sea of name brands, an advertiser's dream, a vision in Abercrombie & Fitch, Tommy Hilfiger and Ralph Lauren's Polo.

Sullivan sighs. He wears faded Army-surplus pants, a T-shirt from the industrial band Skinny Puppy and boots that cost about three times as much as the rest of what he's wearing. He dives in, squeezing through the bodies.

"This is the hellish part right here," Sullivan says.

You probably remember this scene from high school, the different groups, the obvious friction. High schools grow cliques like weeds. They are fertilized by fashion and nurtured by similar tastes and insecurities. The popular cliques pick on the less-popular ones.

It used to be the jocks and the greasers. Now it's the jocks and the rockers, or the preppies and the smokers, or the popular kids and the outsiders. The names may be different, but the snubs stay the same.

But cliques, at least in the media and the public mind, have now taken on a darker edge.

In Littleton, Colo., two weeks ago, two teenagers wearing trench coats and wielding weapons burst into Columbine High School during lunch. The two, who saw themselves as social outcasts, had complained about jocks for years, but they shot whomever they could. They killed 12 students, a teacher and themselves.

Last week, The Seattle Times went to Eastlake High School for two days to watch kids be kids.

PROSPERITY, PEER PRESSURE

Eastlake looks a lot like Columbine. Before Eastlake opened on the Sammamish Plateau in 1994, faculty visited Columbine to gather school-reform ideas. The two schools, built in new suburbs near mountain foothills, even look the same: palaces of tan steel and green trim.

The students look like Columbine students. More than nine of 10 are white. Their test scores are well above average. Jocks dominate social life.

School gunfire kills fewer teenagers than drunken driving, and Eastlake, in the Lake Washington school district, is one of the safest places for a kid to be. But even here, the Colorado shootings have made students wonder whether their social groups put them at risk.

It's just one more stress. Students here struggle to balance pressures from overachieving parents and college-placement officers who won't accept B's - from friends, from schoolwork and activities that keep them up until midnight. And there's the pressure to live up to a certain economic status.

Most of Eastlake's 1,200 students in grades 10 through 12 are from hulking homes above Lake Sammamish or from manicured subdivisions with names such as Heritage Hills. Houses in the area cost an average of $319,500. There are no students on the free-lunch program.

The teenagers arm themselves with CD players, pagers and sophisticated calculators. They have private phone lines and their own cars.

This wealth can be hard on students who don't have that much money.

"If you get so low, and you look at people around you, everyone's driving the fancy car, has the nice clothes," says senior Dani Smith, whose father lost his job last year. "It's hard to get back up if you look at all these people, and they have these perfect lives."

PREPS VS. `B-WINGERS'

Fashion draws the most obvious line between the students, between the Prep Squad and the "B-wingers," who take art, drama and music classes in the school's B-wing.

The jocks, cheerleaders and a lot of other kids are preppies. They play sports. They put colorful signs up, asking others to elect them for student government. They are, by far, the largest group in school.

They wear name brands, particularly Abercrombie & Fitch, an upscale version of The Gap. Students dress from their heads to their toes in the brand, which charges $49.50 for a pair of frayed shorts and $18.50 for underwear. A junior-class poll in last year's yearbook said 81 percent of the students owned something labeled Abercrombie & Fitch.

"It's like, if you're not like everyone else, you suck," says Ryan Yamaguchi, who sports an orange Abercrombie baseball cap. He says he's a prep, but he doesn't tease anyone that much. "It's just like joking around, but not to the point where they go ape on us."

Administrators are trying to get students to stop saying "B-wingers," because they want to eliminate any divisions in the school. Some B-wingers say the preppies tease them.

A lot of B-wingers wear clothing similar to the preppies', but not name brands. Some wear black.

Sullivan says he is considered a "rocker," the most visible subgroup of B-wingers. Rockers wear clothes from thrift stores, or from stores such as "Hot Topic," where a pair of hip-hugging pants cost as much as the faded jeans at Abercrombie. A lot of rockers are also smokers.

Some are pierced. Some paint their fingernails black. Some wear trench coats. These are the kids who scare some parents. These are also the kids who complain most about the treatment from jocks.

In last year's yearbook, Ryan Gillan wore a white T-shirt, a side part and a dour expression. Now he wears his black hair short and spiky, with black clothing and an upside-down cross necklace like those made fashionable by shock-rocker Marilyn Manson. He also wears a black Australian duster, which some might call a trench coat.

And he collects knives. "I have a thing for medieval weapons," says Gillan, who hangs out after school in an unofficial smoking area, right where the fence is ripped down near a strip mall. "I think guns are stupid. There's no skill involved."

After school, four girls wearing Abercrombie and ponytails walk by Gillan, Sullivan and the other smokers, through the hole in the fence, past the cigarette butts and empty cups and toward the school.

No one says hello, but everyone stops talking.

TRENCH COATS, DEATH THREATS

In the days after Columbine, two students start wearing trench coats. Principal Kathy Siddoway asks them to take them off or she'll have to call their parents.

Then, one week after Columbine, threats are made against the Abercrombie & Fitch crowd. A teacher first spots one scrawled on a door jamb. Last week, a student sees another, printed off a computer and posted in the B-wing.

"People wearing Abercrombie & Fitch will die 4-30-99," the piece of paper says. The date is a Friday. It's the anniversary of Adolf Hitler's suicide. The Columbine shootings happened on the anniversary of the Nazi leader's birth.

Schools nationwide field threats of bombs or shootings. The Bainbridge Island School District shuts down for a day. Eastlake officials call the Sheriff's Office but decide to stay open. Students call one another.

"I don't like it at all," says Josh Noon, a senior who has put on a Polo T-shirt and ball cap instead of Abercrombie. "I don't think I should have to change what I wear."

A lot less Abercrombie walks the halls that Friday. According to the administration, fewer students are in school, whether those gone are band students on a trip to Disneyland or scared students, or students who just wanted an excuse to ditch classes.

Just before 7:30 a.m., an emergency announcement calls students into their advisory classes to talk about the threat.

Advisory classes are the '90s version of home room, and Eastlake officials say it connects the students to the school and one another. Students say advisory classes are like family, the one place where cliques don't matter.

Joan Freiheit asks her advisory students what they've heard. She tells them what happened.

"I know it's very real to you," she says. "I know it's hard to understand. You have to realize, you're in as safe an environment as you can be."

The students are quiet and angry. Some have been crying. One boy wearing an Abercrombie cap takes it off, then puts it back on his head, then puts his head on his desk.

"It's scary," a girl whispers. "I have a friend who's like, `We're gonna die, we're gonna die.' "

Some students cling to the drama. Sullivan calls his girlfriend, sick at home, to tell her he loves her, just in case. Others don't think the threat is serious. But they talk about the possibility this could happen.

This also sets Eastlake, and schools like it, apart from the high schools of the past. No previous generation has had to think about this: The idea of being killed in school - the one place kids are supposed to feel safe, especially in communities such as the one surrounding Eastlake.

And Eastlake is a safe school. No one has been caught with a weapon at school this year. There has been only one fistfight.

Teacher Kathy Ainsworth and her students talk about what they would do if someone came in with a gun. The nearby computer lab has no locks.

A boy wearing an "I Killed Kenny!" T-shirt from the cartoon "South Park" says he'd just stay in the room.

"They can't shoot through the door there," he says. "It's solid wood."

THEN IT'S BACK TO ROUTINE

Soon enough, the jokes start. Someone throws a pink Super Ball in the hall between classes, and a boy yells, "It's a bomb!" Another boy blows up a bag and pops it loudly during lunch.

Student-government candidates breeze over cliques and B-wingers during their speeches. They talk about school spirit. The male section claps and whoops for certain candidates. Some boys make sounds like seals. This is new: The week before, they growled like pirates.

Nothing happens. The students worry more about their weekends than weapons. Boys carry baseball bats before practice. Girls dress for softball. The boys and girls flirt. They say things like, "Call me tonight?" or "Did you tell her?"

Students talk about the things that still matter most to most teenagers. A new summer job. Sex. Social stuff. Looming senior projects. They juggle so many stresses that a one-page threat doesn't hold their attention for long.

College looms like a curfew. Many students are expected to qualify for prestigious universities. At least six in 10 Eastlake students will go to four-year colleges, one of the highest rates in the area.

Junior Julia Pizzi wants to study performing arts and biology at Northwestern University. But she worries she won't be accepted, even though she's in the top 5 percent of her class.

Senior Derek Moulton is planning to go to Brigham Young University. He starts his days studying Scripture at 6:10 a.m. Then he goes to school, works on articles for the school newspaper and runs to track practice. Moulton says he falls asleep doing his homework. He sleeps about six hours a night.

His brother dropped out of Eastlake because it didn't offer many hands-on vocational classes. He had to drive across town to take an auto-mechanics class.

"They don't make it easy for people who aren't going to college," Moulton says.

Sullivan is also a senior. He carries his life with him in a fraying Army bag: a book of compact discs that would singe Tipper Gore's hair, a CD player, textbooks and a notebook, which he takes out maybe once a day. He plans to go to a community college, or maybe art school.

In art class, he works on his children's book. His hero is a green monster with a spike in his head, a monster who just wants to make friends but eventually moves to the attic because he scares everyone.

Sullivan jokes that he and his friends, because of the way they dress, are probably seen by some as Eastlake's version of Columbine's Trenchcoat Mafia.

But they've managed to carve out a spot of their own, whether in front of the school's espresso stand or in the smoking area. Sullivan is building a guitar in his independent-study class and splicing footage from World War II documentaries to make a music video for his senior project.

He can see coming back to Eastlake next year, after he graduates, to visit his girlfriend. The two are together quite often in the halls.

He says the cliques are a lot better at Eastlake than where he used to go, Mount Si High School a few miles to the east.

"The football team hated me" at Mount Si, Sullivan says. "I was different, someone to make fun of. Got called `faggot' a lot, but that's about it.

"A lot of people bitch about Eastlake. But I really think it's OK."

Kim Barker's phone message number is 206-464-2255. Her e-mail address is: kbarker@seattletimes.com

Mike Lindblom's phone message number is 206-515-5631. His e-mail address is: mlindblom@seattletimes.com

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An outsiders' guide to Eastlake High labels.

Eastlake High School has about 1,200 students. Some fit in. Some don't. Some are loners. Many kids don't belong to any identifiable groups. Whatever.

Teenagers love to label one another.

Here's a glossary of the groups kids identify at Eastlake:

Preppies: Wear name brands, most often Abercrombie & Fitch, Tommy Hilfiger and Ralph Lauren's Polo. Also many of the kids who run for student government.

Jocks: Preppies who play sports.

B-wingers: Take most of their classes in the B-wing, which offers drama, art and music.

Rockers: B-wingers who dress like punks and ravers, in black clothes and thrift-store wear. They advertise bands, not brands.