I attended Roseville high school, which sits in a suburb between Minneapolis and St. Paul, and also on a latitude line, which is why our newspaper was unfortunately titled The Latitude. Our unique location meant that we had just enough inner city drama for the other high schools in the deep suburbs to believe we were “ghetto” and refer to us as “Hoesville.”

These rival schools were pretty suburban. If you don’t live in Minnesota, you might not know that once you get about 30 miles away from the city, everything becomes Cabin Town. Houses have block-long driveways and are surrounded by thin pine trees for acres. Kids hang out at Culvers. And for some reason, the snow is way more prominent there. Last time I visited my parents’ house, after it had mostly melted in Minneapolis, I was shocked to find their lawn covered in about 4 feet of dirty snow. Going to the deep burbs feels like entering some kind of soiled Christmas train set.

Our main rival school was Moundsview. (It was located in Shoreview, which I tried to label “Whoreview.” It never caught on.) This school was so white that their newspaper published an article, featuring quotes from white kids, stating that racism simply did not exist there. I once drove there to take an AP test and was shocked at how out of place my parents’ 1989 Dodge Caravan looked. Why did all these high school kids have such nice cars? The parking lot at Roseville felt decidedly different. More hatchbacks, possibly.

While Moundsview was famous for, I don’t know, having lots of people with the last name Larson, my high school was gaining quite the reputation for tasering. Our Sadie Hawkin’s dance ended in a bout of tasering. I wasn’t there, but I imagine that security guards were having trouble enforcing our brand new No Gyrating, Dry Humping or Pregnancy Inducing on the Dancefloor rule, and things went from sexy and sweaty to violent and pants-pissed in a matter of minutes. This was one of many tasering incidents, but the one that will probably go down in history is when a girl got tasered after kicking a pregnant girl … in the stomach. Go raiders!

As you can tell from the last example, girl fights were a common form of self-expression. Once I was sitting in biology class, zoning out and my lab partner – a curvy, somewhat popular brunette – ran into the room, excitingly breathing, “Becky!” I remember thinking, confused, “Why is she so excited to see me? We’re not friends and she’s cooler than I am.” Turned out she was elated after pushing her best friend down the stairs and had to tell someone about it.

The kids at Moundsview might have been awesome at AP History, but our student body was perfecting the art of purse snatching. Recently, I was at a museum and I put my purse on the floor of a bathroom stall while using the rest room. I kept one foot on it the whole time lest some one come along and snatch it while I was peeing. I had to stop and tell myself, “Becky, you’re at a cultural institution. You’re not at Roseville high school anymore.” Godspeed, the hundreds of fake Coach purses that got lost from their rightful owners.

As you can see, most of the issues that made us so “ghetto” were decidedly girl-centric. That’s why they called it Hoesville. We’ve come full circle here and I haven’t needed to add anything about our staff-related sexual PR blunders. Now that’s a win for the raiders.

–Becky Lang