This school is no game. You might think it is a game but, trust me, it is no game.

This isn’t some Fortnite match where the other 99 players all hide from you and post it on their Youtube channels. This isn’t anything like that.

This isn’t something where the teacher puts on a Kahoot but all the questions are in French, and then you realize you showed up to the wrong school this morning. This isn’t that, my friend.

Maybe you think this is all some elaborate prank that the teachers have been playing on you since day one where we make bets on which students we can expose before they graduate. But what they didn’t know was that I put fifty bucks on the wrong student and now I don’t have any money to feed my kid.

This isn’t a holiday cookie that you can grab out of Mrs. Betzer’s trashcan and peel the tissues off and pop in your mouth.

This isn’t a round of Among Us where you play by yourself and try to solve all the puzzles as fast as you can before your baby sister drives everyone into the lake. This isn’t that at all.

This is as real as when Ricardo cut his hair and then sold the hair online to pay for his cat’s diabetes medicine. But his cat won’t be home anytime soon, because she’s out partying with the girls.

This isn’t ‘freaky fun friday’ or ‘play pretend’ or ‘goof off hour’ or ‘silly squirrel party’ or ‘15th century pokemon dance off’ or any activity with a ridiculous name like that. This is serious.

You never had to walk to school uphill in the snow and then slide down the hill on the way home with your mouth wide open so that you could crunch on a few bumblebees for sustenance. Or what it’s like to have to have only snowballs kids have thrown at you to drink and then realize, oh no, that’s not snow at all.

I don’t hate you; I pity you. You will never understand the beauteous wonder of having a class with all blues or the plain nothingness of having a class with all greens.

You will never comprehend the feeling of power that runs through your veins when you give a child detention for talking back to you, or the great sadness when their parents ask you to leave their house.

I used to be like you. I would carefully sip milk out of the carton, instead of cutting off the top and chugging it all in one huge gulp while screaming.

I would listen to my teacher and laugh–and laugh and laugh–every time they said anything, just in case it was supposed to be funny. I would knock on the bathroom door and yell “POLICE!” and then handcuff the first person I found inside. And whenever I found two pencils I would put them on my head and pretend to be an alien.

But then something happened, something that would make me understand that this was no game. I laughed at the janitor cleaning the floors and threw some trash on the ground. What happened next would haunt me the rest of my life: He walked over and asked me to marry him. Ever since then, I’ve realized that this is no game.

Maybe one day it will be a game again. Maybe you’ll be able to run over and throw pencils at the teacher without people asking why you did that and when you’re going to apologize.

One day we’ll be able to walk past someone in the halls while maintaining eye contact the entire time without feeling weird about it.

If there’s one single thing I want you to get out of reading this article, then it’s this: This is no game. The other thing I want to ask is, could you join the journalism club?

(Author’s Note: Since publishing this article, the school administration has informed me that this is, in fact, a game. I apologize for everything I wrote. But please think about joining our club.)