So Senior Skip Day is a Punahou tradition. So the seniors are required to skip school but we have to meet certain prerequisite requirements before we’re allowed to go, like all your books that are due at the library have to be turned in—you can’t have any library fines, all your work for your classes has to be turned in, etc…

And for some reason if you can’t go or don’t want to go, you have to get a form signed. So Senior Skip Day basically everybody has the same Senior Skip Day T-shirt and is wearing it… and you load up on the buses on the last instructional day of school and as a class you ride out to La’ie to the White Estate and basically have a picnic day…

I mean I don’t know what the fuck to call it… The about-to-graduate mini-vacation for the actual seniors portion isn’t the interesting part… So on that day all of the juniors (because it’s the last instructional day and the seniors are gone), all the juniors make shirts, “senior shirts,” which each group makes and they wear them to show that they’re seniors as well as what group they’re in.

And everybody from freshmen to juniors, that’s when they choose their spot to sit at for the next academic year. So people will sometimes come to school at 6 in the morning or earlier…

What used to happen—it stopped on our freshman year—was freshman prank day and that was when the juniors used to prank the freshmen… Our freshman year we had a crazy bitch, named Ilima (she was captain of the women’s wrestling team, covered in tattoos and piercings, known for her… “intensity” and hate for a certain group of girls in our grade)… and she took things WAY too far, managing to instill fear in all 400 students of our entire freshman class, even though for the most part everyone came out unscathed…

And if you’re wondering about the sophomores, the sophomores basically have nothing to worry about that day; they have zero responsibility. But to ensure that none of the freshmen get hurt (I mean, “pranked”) anymore, the deans set up a popup tent in the middle of the quad… and they take turns watching the Academy and escorting students to class themselves to make sure that nobody pranks the freshmen. Like if you’re known to be “targeted” by that year’s juniors, you can tell a dean and ask for protection… Which means that everyone only gets sneakier, so I guess the new tradition is to try to prank the freshmen without getting caught by the deans. That’s all I remember…

How did you come across this folklore: “it’s one of those unsaid traditions, I actually have no idea how I found out about it… you just “hear about it” as a freshman and you participate until you’re a senior when some things get officialized but really everything you do is up to you. You do what everyone else does/has done.”

Other information: “What happened our year, this kind of thing becomes infamous when certain people take it too far…”

I would be surprised if there were a lot of high schools that didn’t have some kind of event like Senior Skip Day, something to ritualize the liminal period between high school and not (graduation/college/the real world, etc.), or the junior-senior bridge (underclassman vs. upperclassman), or something that otherwise distinguishes seniors from the rest of the student population. It’s a time when people are allowed to make trouble, do things they usually don’t, and don’t know which group they belong to… yet everyone else, even those not going through the same transition, play along in a way and mark it as well.