The Graduates

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Lizette

The school dress code outlawed spaghetti strap shirts, but girls wore them anyway. They wore them because the shirts were in fashion and because they were teen girls -- rebellious and foolish and insecure. They wore them to get the attention of the boys; more often, they got the attention of the faculty, who regularly threatened them with Inner-School Suspension (ISS) if they didn't change or cover themselves with sweaters.

Lizette wore spaghetti-strap tank tops all the time. In her freshman year, she went to ISS three times for dress code violation. "I was so ghetto," she says now. She giggled loudly in the hallways with her friends, Hispanic like her, and lingered outside the classroom with her older boyfriend, waiting until the very last moment before the bell rang to sprint to her seat.

I completely misjudged her. This was before she made the highest grades in my world geography class, before she became not only someone I would like but someone I would admire. I misjudged her because I knew only a handful of things, and because she seemed entirely too pretty to be interesting. Sometimes teachers, like their students, come to the stupidest conclusions about people.

Lizette jokes about her clueless freshman year, when teachers sent her to the hallway for talking, when she bungled algebra, when she decided to go to ISS rather than wear a friend's sweater because "it didn't match my outfit." "Freshman year, I'd try to impress people," she says. "I wish I could go back now and be like, what's wrong with you?" And yet, even at her most misguided, Lizette was a good kid.

"My parents were kind of strict," she says. "And I'm kind of glad they were now." Three of her friends got pregnant. Many of the guys she hung with dropped out. One is in jail. "My freshman year, I was just trying to fit in. They used to call me a goodie-goodie. Now I've just got my priorities straight." She is still tight with her best friends -- childhood pals with similar backgrounds. But she regrets all the people she never got to know. "My freshman year, I wasn't as open-minded," she says. "I'd be like, 'Oh, these rich white people ...' Working on the yearbook, you learn that everybody has a story to tell. There's something cool about everybody. That's a good thing to find out."

In her senior year, she became organizations editor for the yearbook and won a trio of photography awards. She was president of a volunteer organization called the Connally Community Cougars and served on Student Council. Recently, she received a leadership award from FOX-7 News. When she enters UT, she will be only the second person in her extended family to go to a university. "When my dad was little," she says, "his dad would tell him all you need is a strong back. So he didn't care about school. He would cut out these articles for me and my brother about what college graduates earn and be like: 'Read this.'"

Her current boyfriend (different guy, still older) is already at UT. When she joins him there next fall, she'll enter the School of Education. She's thinking about teaching, maybe even math, her most difficult subject. But then again, maybe she'll go into advertising, or maybe something totally unexpected. "I just want to find something that I really enjoy doing," she says. "I like challenges. And I want a high degree. I know there's not a lot of Hispanic women out there getting high degrees. I want to prove people wrong."