Once upon a time, when I was in high school, before the infamous 4-20 1999 massacre at Columbine High School, I was the female leader of a group of about fifteen or so of my school's misfits.
My school is not unique in that it had a band of misfits who clubbed together to become the coolest, if most bizarre, and certainly loudest, group in the school. What made the Library Monkeys unique was that no one was rejected. It was the most universally despised group, but it was our safety valve. Few people realized that it was a place where the potentially dangerous kids could go to blow off steam about the administration, the students, anything that was irking them.
Nearly all of the young men in that crowd wore black trench coats. Ivan was the dangerous one, the loudest, and publicly acknowledged leader, though most people hated him. He wore a heavy wool trench coat no matter the weather, and a flat cap to hide the haircut his mother had given him. He hid his illicit engineering and chemistry projects in his backpack and locker, and blew off the sole of Abgi's boot in English class with a small homemade bomb he'd constructed "just to see if it would work." Ivan dressed in imitation of the beatnik poets he admired, and sold hallucinogens he'd harvested at his summer home in the Southwest to the more chemically adventurous preps. Ivan was not a safe friend. He was a brilliant actor, who let his mother see the sweet, innocent, brilliant son she'd always wanted to have. Seeing him now, a drugged-out father at the age of twenty, I wish I'd told his mother the truth he did such a good job of showing everyone but her.
For all Ivan's harebrained projects, drug-induced brainstorms, and anarchistic bravado, Ivan was not truly lethal. He had better things to expend his energy on than sheer wide-scale destruction. He did discuss it on the theoretical level, as in how a band of terrorists could concievably hold the entire school hostage, but his interest in that was tactical foresight, how he would defeat the theoretical terrorists if that should happen. As long as Ivan was talking and scheming, we knew he was all right, and if he ever got out of control, we would know it and if I could not handle it, we would bring down the authorities starting with his mother and then the men in white coats. Ivan would be all right if he didn't fry his brain on peyote.
Del wore a black trench coat. Del was perhaps a step up from Ivan in the asshole department. Ivan was an asshole, with a +10 charisma. Del was just an asshole who had video games and let people borrow them, and borrow money too. Del also had a car, which let people momentarily forgive a lot.
In some ways, Del was the best-adjusted of the group. He had a regular girlfriend, which even Ivan didn't manage to have, although he didn't score half as frequently as Ivan. Del was the butt of jokes and insults, the older brother of a nice smart kid who was two years younger and an awful lot more popular. Del had few permanent friends who were friends with him for himself. He may have realized this, and this may have been part of what made him so bitter.
Few though they were, Del did have friends, and though they bitched and moaned about his attitude, they were there when he needed them, and listened to him bitch and moan about his life and his problems. Since he was a privelaged brat by comparison to most of his friends, most of them wished that they had some of the things that were causing him so many problems. Del's family loved him, even though it didn't seem like any of them got along, and he had friends. If his family rejected him, if his friends stopped listening, then Del would have had dangerous problems. But that never happened.
There was Brett, a clean-cut blond kid who wore a black trench coat possibly because his favorite anime character did, and it looked cool. Brett was in the Monkeys primarily because most of his friends were. He interacted with the programmer-geeks, the Gifted and Talented crew, the Drama freaks, the jocks, anyone who was friendly and would talk to him. Of all the misfits, he was perhaps the least well fitting, because the Monkeys were the scum of the scum, the rejects of the rejects, and he could fit in anywhere he wanted. Brett had use of a car that broke down every twenty miles, friends he knew he had and friends he was friends with whether he realized it or not, a mother he was on good terms with, a younger brother who was able to hang out in the same social group, and the good-will of any decent teacher in the school. To imagine Brett plotting a nefarious scheme would send the entire staff of the school and the whole social group into falling on the floor laughter. A nefarious scheme to get himself laid, perhaps. A nefarious scheme to kill people -- if it were one of his video games. And everyone would still laugh.
Brett's little brother was known solely by his last name, Pruett. He was a little computer geek too young to be a freshman, too obnoxious to be ignored, too innocent and resiliant to be successfully smacked down. Ivan tried to smack him down, by grasping him by the shoulders and driving a knee into his stomach every time they met. Pruett never learned that this was what Ivan was going to do to him.
Pruett did not wear a black trench coat. He wore shorts or sweat pants and baggy T-shirts. Pruett was a programmer and spent more of his time in the programming lab than he did with the Monkeys. Pruett had too much inherent cheerfulness to dream of destruction, although of all the Monkeys he suffered enough humiliation and abuse to warrant vengance.
Peter the Red was one of the Monkeys. He wore a black trench coat and as much red clothing as he could find. He had an obsession with the color red. He was friends with Ivan and hung with Ivan and did serious drugs. He was the most passive of the Monkeys, letting anyone else dictate what was going on, never making waves, always wearing red.
Privately, Peter expressed dissatisfaction with Ivan's leadership and complained about how Ivan abused the trust others put in him, but was publicly the cheerful, laid-back neo-hippie pothead. Peter might royally screw himself up on a drug trip and stupid things done on that, or accidentally hurt someone else, but never on purpose. He might, while stoned, plot the overthrow of Ivan, but probably not follow through on it seriously unless Ivan was going to hurt someone.
The most dangerous by far of the Monkeys was Mary. If you were smart, you didn't have anything to do with her. If you were smart, you treated her with the same deference and care you'd treat a badly traumatized Vietnam veteran. Mary wrote poems about death and destruction. Mary had stalkers who violated the court order to stay the hell away from her. Mary hurt people for fun. Mary wore a black trench coat, or a black leather jacket, and wore black jeans all the time, and black shirts. Mary looked half dead from lack of sleep and lack of smile. Mary had had too many friends raped, too many friends in fatal car accidents, too many tragedies for a freshman in high school. Mary had other things to worry about than blowing up the school just because a few people had pissed her off. If they pissed her off one more time, she had friends who might take exception to that off school property, but she had friends in the school, friends she didn't care to lose like she'd lost so many before, friends who she needed to keep her stalkers away from at all costs. She was no longer innocent of violence, but she'd do her best or die trying to keep the psychos away from her friends.
River was the token black guy in the Monkeys, but unless you were hyper-aware of racial issues, or he chose to be hyper-aware of racial issues that day, it wasn't the sort of thing you'd use in a description of him. If anything, River was Japanese. He lived, breathed, ate, and slept Japanese. He'd started the obsession with anime, learned to speak Japanese by reading the subtitles, learned to read Japanese by constant study and signing up for a class at the rival high school. River wore a black trench coat when it suited him. River was too busy with anime, video games, his rich social life, to have time to contemplate vengance. He had no use for vengance anyway. Sure, some people picked on him. He had a few learning disabilities; everyone with visible learning disabilites got picked on. He had friends, though, and in the end, only his opinion of himself, his mother's opinion, and the opinions of his friends counted. Somehow, River ended up with a whole hell of a lot of friends, though he was arrogant as hell. If there was someone who didn't like River in the Monkeys, somehow that person didn't stay in the Monkeys for long; the Monkeys was a haven for the insulted and rejected, and people who insulted and rejected right back got bounced out because no one listened to them.
Toby always wore jeans and some Bible camp T-shirt. Toby was somewhat of an unknown factor, brought in by his orbit around Ivan, and later, Azz. Toby was happy and outgoing to everyone, baby-sat Ivan even more than the devoted Azure did, and tried to convert some of his friends, namely Azure, to Christianity.
Hardly any one of Toby's school friends knew that Toby was a Satanist and generally unhappy with his home life, and carried several illegally large and very sharp knives because he had to with his home life, and because of a general dissatisfaction with his life in general. Toby could have cheerfully blown up the school if more people had been mean to him. Fortunately, the only person who dissed him on a regular basis was Azure; the rest of the school deemed him either Normal, One Of Us, or Beneath Their Notice. Azure only shut him up when his continual chatter got on her nerves, or when he tried to convince her to attend his church.
Azz said no the first time politely; she had a perfectly good, and safe, religion of her own. She said no slightly less patiently the next five or so times, or ignored him.
The tenth or so time Toby asked Azz to come to his church, because they welcomed "people like her" (ie, bisexuals, not witches) and she really ought to try it, Azure was having a particularly bad day. She was sick of society's bullshit, and Abgi was just the icing on the cake.
"I am sick of your god-damned religion," she told him, and swung. She pulled her slap at the last minute, so it only hit his glasses, which went flying. She stomped off, retrieved all three pieces, handed them back to him, gave a perfunctory apology for breaking his glasses, and stomped off.
"What did I do?" Toby wanted to know, as he snapped his lenses back into the frames.
Fortunately for all concerned, especially Toby, he became in fact as well as appearance Christian, and realized that he had been inappropriate in his zealous pursuit of Azure's immortal soul.
Then there was Azz, Azure Lunatic. Azz wore all black to remind herself that if she didn't watch it she'd kill herself or something. Azz missed her friends from camp. Azz was in love with Ivan, who refused to acknowledge her existance as a woman. People said of Azz that she would go absolutely nuts, and when she did, she would take out a whole lot of people with her.
Azz plotted complex revenge, but the revenge usually involved love-lives and sports careers and large buckets of ice and paint. The revenge was generally abandoned when Azz's mood changed for the better. The only damage ever actually done was to Abgi's glasses and Ivan's potential love life when Azz told the hot girl he had a crush on some essential truths about him.
