'I can provide for myself'

MELROSE -- After Amanda Kotkowski sweeps the floor at the beauty salon where she works after school, she scrubs the sinks where she sometimes shampoos customers' hair. She's an aspiring beautician with freshly trimmed, newly highlighted blond locks and an eye to her future. She's also a teenager with earnings and a hand in her wallet, wearing the Guess jeans she just bought for $88 and the $38 black top with croppedsleeves and Baby Phat logo that she almost returned, all purchased with Christmas money and wages. With her next paycheck, she'll buy that cute $46 shirt she saw at Bebe. "Everybody feels I'm crazy to spend $80 on a pair of jeans," she says. "But I guess I'm spending money now because I know later on I won't be able to do that."

Kotkowski, along with at least half her classmates in Melrose High School's class of 2004, adds paid work to homework. They take jobs to buy cars and clothes and cellphones and pizza, to fund hobbies, to save for college, and to fill time. Some, like Kotkowski and

Mark Fallon, who works at a skateboard shop, have jobs that match their passions. Some, like David Carroll and Karima Taswell, work several weekday evenings and weekends, too. Most earn $8 an hour or less, but some land more profitable posts. Christina Carucci charges up to $11 an hour for babysitting. Danielle Burke pockets $140 waitressing one busy Sunday. Jared Luxenberg gets as much as $25 an hour in the computer consulting business he started when he was 11. Even in a down economy, more than half ofMelrose seniors with jobs work 15 hours a week or more. Even with college costs rising, they, like teenagers interviewed nationwide by Teenage Research Unlimited, treat money as a commodity for the present, not a cushion for the future. Each week, the firm finds, US teens spend an average of $103 apiece, some from their own labor and some from their parents. In working during the school year, they swap time they could spend studying or exploring other interests for the power of paying part of their own way. Melrose's Metco coordinator, Doreen Ward, thinks high schoolers shouldn't work between September and June. "There aren't too many students who can do both," she says, "and if they're working, they can't commit to after-school activities."

Boost in self-esteem

Guidance counselor Marissa Ford disagrees. "A part-time job is wonderful for kids," she says. "It can boost your self-esteem, and you're valued in a different way than academically."

Seniors with jobs describe the workplace as a teacher with many lessons.

"There are way more pluses -- mostly, like, the money," says Bobby Forsey, who puts in 16 to 20 hours a week in a supermarket and, when he was younger, worked at a drugstore after school. "It's a good motivation. I guess, like, good references. They can see how good a worker I am.

"I've learned sometimes hard work doesn't get recognized. I worked at the drugstore for two years, and I called in sick twice, and I only got minimum wage."

"It teaches you a lot of independence," says class secretary Stephanie Genica, who works one or two evenings a week in a tanning salon. "At the same time, money is such an issue in my house, sometimes it becomes a burden. Now that I'm making my own money, I get less from my dad. At the same time, I get more respect."

Melrose is part bedroom suburb, part commercial center, with a historic downtown and shops clustered around its three commuter rail stations. Nearby is retail-rich Route 1, all of which provides fertile territory for teens seeking low-skill work.

For every teen like Forsey, who keeps a job for two years, there are others with the peripatetic careers of youth. "One week somebody's working," Burke says. "The next, they're not. They quit."

Jessica Hurley fires off a verbal resume: Freshman year she worked in a photo store for a few months. "After inventory, there were too many cashiers," she says. "I wanted to quit anyway. Too much stuff I wasn't interested in." Next came a few months at a drugstore where the boss "treated the kids really bad." She quit to be a cheerleader. She worked briefly at a clothing store on Route 1. "It was difficult to get to work," she says. "The customers were rude." She liked the pizza parlor where she worked for six months, but not the doughnut shop she quit after three weeks.

Since early summer, she's been working at a dry cleaner, checking orders on an overhead rack, using red tape to mark stains at the same counter her boss, who bought the place 17 years ago, worked when she was in high school. "It's an all right job," Hurley says. "I work with my friends. The people aren't that bad. Nice customers. It's easy."

Where the risk of monotony runs high, atmosphere often distinguishes the good job from the bad. Stephanie Genica's nominee for worst job is her first one, working nine months in a nursing home kitchen when she was 14. "It was awful," she says. "I was in the basement all day. I didn't get to interact with people. It was too repetitive. Nothing changed except the dinner." People sometimes wonder why Carroll keeps his supermarket job one evening a week now that he has a better-paying position at an office superstore. But the supermarket is where he met some of his closest friends when he moved last year from his mom's home in Holliston to his dad's in Melrose.

"After a week of hanging out with them, I felt like I'd known them my whole life," he says. "A couple of us are applying to the same schools."

If the yearbook included a superlative for "most hours in an after-school job," Carroll would likely snag the distinction. He works close to 48 hours a week, the state's limit for 16- and 17-year-olds. "My friends think I work too much," he says. Does he agree? "Sometimes."

Carroll is saving for his college social life. "I don't want to be a typical kid, sitting in the dorm, saying I can't go out because I don't have money," he says. "I might get more out of college if I help pay for it. I'll appreciate it. Maybe that thought will click in my head."

Students say they work to finance a lifestyle beyond what their parents might support. Cars guzzle much of their cash.

Forsey started working for a car, thinking he'd buy a clunker. "But I kept working and making more money," he says, "so I decided to get something nice." Now he owns a 1989 Mustang he bought in July for $5,000, and, in the process, he found a topic for his college essay. Insuring it costs $2,800 a year.

Lisa Pollard, who works in a hospital kitchen and hasn't participated in an extracurricular activity since sixth-grade soccer, eyes a $500 Camaro. "I'd rather be working," she says. "I can provide for myself." Burke pays $200 a month to insure the Camry she would have shared with her dad had he not died in 2002. Kotkowski says, "Now that I'm older I can drive to the mall myself."

Spreading the wealth

The cellphone Kotkowski got for Christmas will set her back $50 a month. Carucci is saving her baby-sitting money for a $1,400 senior trip to Cancun, Mexico, and Pollard's thinking about the prom. Fallon wears out a $40 skateboard every few weeks. Nikko Patten-Weinstein and his girlfriend are fiends for Chinese food. The breath mints Burke downs add up to $10 a week.

"Let's say I get a $270 check" for two weeks' work, says Taswell, who logs 30 hours a week in a department store. "I'd put $170 in the bank." Next she spends $23 to fills the gas tank of the Acura her brother left her before he was deployed to Afghanistan, pays down a credit card bill approaching $1,000, sets aside $20 for school lunch at $2.50 a day and a daily bottle of Fruitopia at $1.25. "Then just stroll through a store and watch my money disappear," she says. "If I go to the movies, which is like $10, I'm not going to do anything else that expensive."

In the lull before last-minute shoppers rush the cash register, Taswell folds bath towels.

At school, she was voted "most respected" girl in the senior class, someone, her classmates say, with a smile for all and little inclination to talk behind their backs. Less apparent is her struggle against depression. This job, along with medication and therapy, is a weapon in that battle.

"It's after school when I used to have my depression spells. I needed something to fill that time," she says. "When I have a lot of time on my hands, I think. When I think, it never comes out well. I feel so much better now. When I'm sad, it's a normal sad, and the end of the world isn't coming."

Antwane Mills sells shoes on weekends in the same store. "You have to be around people's feet," he says, "which I'm not too fond of doing." But he, like Taswell, finds on-the-job psychological perks. "I used to get so mad if I couldn't get my way," he says. "At work, you can't have an attitude."

During basketball season, his twin, Andre, wears a suit to school on game days. Not Antwane, who sat out last season with an injury. "I'd rather not have the risk of being out late at games," he says. "I actually started getting good grades toward the end of my junior year."

That's why he stopped working weeknights. "By the time I got home, I was tired," he says, "and I had schoolwork to do." Taswell is glad the holiday season is over, and with it taking the Metco bus home to Boston, then driving to Dedham for a 4 p.m. start instead of the usual 5:30. "First quarter it wasn't affecting my grades," she says. "Now it might be."

Sometimes a job doesn't feel like a job. Take Fallon. He works Sundays at the skateboard shop where he was always hanging out and where he's now entitled to an employee discount. The curb outside is waxed to make it more conducive to maneuvers, but inside Fallon tells customers not to do flip tricks on the tile floor. "If it lands sideways," he says, "it will crack the floor." Here Fallon is taller than 6-foot-2 because he's on his board behind the counter. He knows which shoes have the protected heel serious skateboarders need and which are for show because, he grimaces, skateboard style is trendy and a lot of people want to dress like they can do ollies when they can't. "If anyone has a question, I can tell them about anything they need to know," he says.

An eye on the future

What Fallon's job is to his avocation, Kotkowski's is to her future vocation. She's always watching the way the stylists cut and color hair.

All fall she couldn't decide whether to go to college or straight to beauty school. Beauty school won.

"I kind of knew the whole time I wanted to go to hair school, but I didn't want to let people down," she says. "I visited college. This looks like so much fun. It was more the party life. That wasn't realistic. Working in the salon, I saw how much fun it was. It definitely helped me make my decision."

While some seniors choose between an after-school job and after-school activities, Patten-Weinstein, who works twice a week in the fish market of a seafood restaurant, juggles both. By the time he skins a salmon fillet, wearing a red cap, white apron, and old blue jeans "that will never ever smell good again," he's already practiced with the varsity swim team. He leaves work early to play drums with friends performing a Dead Kennedys song at a school coffeehouse. The next night he also needs a substitute at the restaurant, "which I hope will work out," because he has rehearsal playing trombone with a regional jazz band.

He works to outfit his basement recording studio. The computer cost $1,700, the equipment that connects it to the microphones was $500, and a microphone can run $100 or more. Cords are $20 each. The other day, Tim Norris, a cook from the restaurant, came by to record a song he wrote titled "I Went to Change the World But I Spilled My Beer," and Patten-Weinstein charged him $15 an hour for a three-hour session. He likes work best when it's so busy he feels like he's selling fish and peeling shrimp at the same time. "It makes the night go quickly," he says. "A lot of my friends have jobs where they complain how utterly boring it is. When they say stuff like that, I'm glad I'm not sitting around."