'It's crunch time'

MELROSE -- Christine Sullivan and Jackie Scully, all heat-straightened hair and carefully applied mascara and denim skirts and chewing gum on the first day of their last year at Melrose High School, have built impressive resumes here. Sullivan serves as vice president of the class of 2004, president of the National Honor Society, student representative on the city's School Committee, and cocaptain of the girls' swim team -- and she's tied for valedictorian. Scully, another swim team cocaptain, is also a softball player, hockey cheerleader, and student government delegate.

But as successfully as they've navigated high school, the pair are not so savvy that they can steer a group of freshmen to their lockers. Here as part of a small group of student leaders helping to guide the newest crop of ninth-graders in the two hours before the rest of the upperclassmen arrive, Sullivan and Scully are lost. They can't find their charges' lockers.

Sullivan shakes her head. She and Scully giggle. "I'm so sorry about this," Sullivan says.

Thus begins senior year for a class of 243 students who range from Sullivan, who's dreamed about Harvard since she was a young girl, to Danielle Sullivan (no relation), whose goal is to show up often enough to earn her diploma. They belong to a generation of teens whose numbers, 33 million and growing, represent the biggest batch of 12- to 19-year-olds since the baby boom. And they come of age in an uncertain time.

They were freshmen when the 2000 election landed in the Supreme Court, and next year they'll be among the youngest voters casting ballots for president. They were sophomores when terrorist attacks destroyed the World Trade Center on class president Andrew Fried's 16th birthday and when the United States attacked Afghanistan, which is where Danielle Sullivan's former boyfriend served before she met him. They were juniors when war shifted to Iraq, where the Army will send Sullivan's ex this winter. ("I see it on the news: Two more killed," she says. "I can't even watch it anymore.") The weak economy that's dovetailed with their high school careers explains the boxes cluttering Matthew Howard's house. His father's Internet consulting business collapsed in the dot-com bust, and now his parents have sold their home and will move the family into an apartment by month's end.

For the next year, the Globe will follow the senior class at Melrose High. Its members will apply to college, look for jobs, don tuxedos and gowns for the prom, sign one another's yearbooks, leave home, and face problems that won't be as easy to solve as finding those freshmen lockers. But the resilience of youth is on their side. They are also painfully aware of the perils of youth. Last December, a 2002 Melrose High graduate who was a two-sport team captain, an honor roll student, and the brother of a former member of the Class of 2004 died of a heroin overdose. Four months later, a girl in last year's senior class died of an overdose.

September is the season of old friends and fresh starts, when even students who have struggled through high school pledge that this year will be different. All summer the halls of Melrose High have been quiet. Suddenly they are alive with high-fives and hugs. Seniors plant one foot in the same old school and point the other to an unknown future. They are eager, restless, stressed, a little bit afraid, and finally old enough to sit on the sofas in the school lobby during lunch period.

"I'm six months away from being legally adult," says 17-year-old Jacob Lefton, "but I have to have a pass to walk down the hall in a public building to perform a basic bodily function."

"Like Jacob said to me once," says his friend Brittany Manley, "You grow and grow, and one day you can see over the fence, and there's the world."

School ties

Christine Sullivan arrives with three pages of reviews for her Advanced Placement French course neatly tucked in a folder along with a 13-page paper on "Darkness Visible," William Styron's memoir of depression, for her AP psychology class. "It didn't have to be 13 pages," teases Scully, whose own summer paper for AP psych runs nine pages.

The two have been friends since sixth grade. Scully's picture is in Sullivan's room in a yellow "Best Friend" frame. Stand out as she does at Melrose High, Sullivan could find herself among 3,000 would-be valedictorians applying to Harvard.

"It's not exactly like I have to go to the Ivy League. I loved BC so much I'd be happy to go there," Sullivan says. "I put pressure on myself. But it's not like if I'm not No. 1 I'll be upset when I'm 30."

Scully used to dream of going to a distant college, in Florida perhaps, but lately she's not so sure. Partly, she feels the uneasiness of a post-9/11 world. Mostly, she's a 17-year-old contemplating leaving home.

"I don't know how far away I want to be -- a couple of hours maybe, so if you're sick or you miss your family . . . " Scully says. "I don't know what to think of this year. It's kind of scary."

Danielle Sullivan enters her senior year with no roots in Melrose and her heart still in Medford, where she and her mother and sister lived in public housing until they moved to an apartment here just before her junior year. The collage of snapshots in Sullivan's bedroom shows her Medford friends. There, she says, she went to class but never did homework. In Melrose last year, she rarely attended.

"I just hated school. I wasn't part of a group," Sullivan says. "I know people say high school is the best years. I just want it to be over with." She's a senior now only because she repeated biology and geometry in summer school. This is her last chance to graduate with her class.

"I think it's going to be different this year. There's no more tries," Sullivan says. "There's no way I'm not going to graduate. No matter what I have to do, I'll do it. That's my biggest fear. I have to graduate.

"I would have loved to have gone away to college and gone to a good college, but I don't have the grades for it. But I can make it. Community college is fine, too."

Eight miles north of Boston, this suburban city of 27,000 boasts three commuter rail stations, access to the Oak Grove subway stop just over the Malden line, 15 houses of worship, everything from bungalows to graceful Victorians in its neighborhoods, and a view of the Boston skyline from the top of Mount Hood. Its downtown, with handsome brick fronts, is a historic district where Starbucks shares Main Street with Sweet's Stuff. Fewer than one-fifth of the households have children in the public schools, which may be one reason voters in June defeated a tax override that would have boosted funding for education.

"Melrose has this much racial diversity," says high school principal Daniel Burke as he moves his palms close together, "and this much economic diversity" -- he spreads his hands wide apart. Fried's father is an orthodontist who's straightened the teeth of more than a few Melrose students. Lisa Pollard's mom is a single mother who drives a school bus. There's a used Volvo in the driveway of Lauren Picard, daughter of a longshoreman and a physical therapist. Her dad says he will register the car in her name after she finishes her college applications. Class secretary Stephanie Genica, whose dad, a single father, rebuilds auto engines, cannot get her driver's license until she can afford to finish driver's ed.

The senior class is 91 percent white. Ten of its 22 nonwhite students are bused here from Boston as part of the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity voluntary desegregation program. Forty seniors are members of the National Honor Society, and 21, as of last spring, have yet to pass their MCAS exams. If the Class of 2003 is any guide, more than 90 percent will continue their education after high school, including almost 80 percent who will go to four-year colleges. That leaves David Crespo, whose band, Ravin Klaim, won WBCN's High School Battle of the Bands, in a minority. He's thinking of working after high school.

"You get so many people pushing me: `You've got to go to college. You need it to succeed,' " he says. "But I'd like to pursue the musical career I've done for the last four years. Maybe I'll take a year off.

"I've always wanted to move into Boston. Maybe I will. If I don't feel I'm being true to myself, I'll choose a different path."

Class distinction

After raising $16,000 over the past three years, Melrose's Class of 2004 has earned the nickname "Corporate America." The annual faculty-student basketball game the class members founded in their sophomore year is both popular and lucrative. It's known, too, as an academically strong class, which promises to make the college application process for the most ambitious members even more competitive than usual.

"It is probably the most talented senior class I can remember in many a year. I'm afraid they're going to butt up against each other," says guidance director Thomas Schott. "Last year's top 10 were as strong as this year's top 10, but usually it falls away pretty quickly. This year the depth is unbelievable."

Graduation marks the official commencement of the rest of the seniors' lives, but unofficially the change is already starting. Just a few days before school started, class treasurer Larvel Scott was saying, "I'm really excited. You've waited all your life, kind of, for this." But now, as he surveys a crowded corridor outside the cafeteria, headphones around his neck, the scene feels much too familiar. "It's back to the same routine," he laments. "The people you see in the hallway are the same. Nobody's changing. Now it's crunch time. You have to make a name for yourself. And some people have the same attitude: Party, party."

Scott, who lives in Dorchester but spent much of his childhood in South Carolina, enrolled in the Melrose schools as a Metco student his freshman year. He cringed whenever his white classmates greeted him with a "Wassup, dog?" and chatted about rap. Sophomore year he played Tom Robinson in "To Kill a Mockingbird," and, he says, "I found out there were some people who were really cool." Last spring he ran for office even though he'd never been involved in student government. Just about everyone says his speech was great, a heartfelt talk about finally wanting to give back. He beat the incumbent treasurer by five votes.

"I want underclassmen to remember me," Scott says. "I want Metco kids to know they can do more things than just sports."

Gregory Guyott is less concerned about leaving a legacy than leaving with a diploma and a season of baseball to his name. When he tells hall monitor Linda Hansen that he's back, Hansen says, "We're witnessing a miracle." Guyott, who is 18, should have graduated last year, but he'd skipped too much school to march with his class. "I'd go out with my friends," he says. "Basically, I'd smoke weed every day. I didn't realize it was making me lose my motivation slowly."

Now, as long as Guyott finishes Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" and Bill Bryson's "A Walk in the Woods," making up the summer reading he never did, and keeps up with his work, he's here for a fifth year. One mistake, and he's out.

"I missed out on a lot of things I should do in high school. I was a good athlete, but I didn't have the grades for sports," he says. "I want to prove I can do it and play sports and do all the things I wanted to do in high school. All these people say I can't do it. I want to get the diploma and shove it in their faces."

Guyott is one of those students for whom "high school wasn't the right place or time," says Schott. "When I meet him in a mall at 25, he'll be married and have a good job. I've seen it time and time again. Kids who are hellions here turn themselves around."

Lofty goals

It's senior year, and dreams are big. Picard, highlights in her long blond curls and a lacy shawl around her shoulders, wants to be a civil engineer and design tall buildings. "I look at skyscrapers. They're perfect," she says. "I don't feel smaller. I feel bigger because we as human beings were able to do that."

Genica, piercings in her nose and just below her lower lip, looks at an evocative pencil sketch she made of a pensive girl. "I can't believe I drew it," she says. She wants to study photography in art school even though she's only now taking her first photo course. "I take pictures with my automatic camera," she says. "I see things in terms of what an amazing photo that would be."

There's a world to change, and Crespo, Lefton, and Manley, founders of Education First, aren't waiting for graduation to begin. After the tax override failed, the school slapped a $275-per-sport user fee on athletes. In August, Education First staged Jamfest, a fund-raiser featuring Crespo's band and other musicians that cleared $2,000 for the city's schools. The display case outside the main office pays tribute to their work.

"It's always the people who can't defend themselves at the polls who get cut," Lefton says. "I think that's pretty disgusting."

The rhythm of a new year takes hold. Danielle Sullivan starts her after-school job as a receptionist at the YMCA, and, she says, "I have a better attitude about school." Christine Sullivan wins the 200-yard freestyle race in the first swim meet of the year and places second in the 500. "I swim distance," she says. "I can reflect more and push myself more. You really have to know how to pace yourself."

At the Bellevue Country Club pool one bright late August morning during the preseason, Sullivan taught the swim team's freshmen how to slap the water rapid-fire and cheer for Melrose High. From the huddle of splashing, shouting girls came the voice of another senior: "I'm going to miss this."