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School portraits / Two friends remembering school · May 2024

Whitney Young Best Friends Never Shared a Class. They Had Spots.

Two Chicago seniors recorded a StoryCorps conversation two days before leaving school. It was mostly a map.

The School Gates column · 2 min read

Two teenage friends bend over a phone beside a school water fountain, their curved silhouettes forming an affectionate visual joke.
Illustration

In May 2024 two eighteen-year-old best friends at Whitney M. Young Magnet High School in Chicago sat down to record a StoryCorps conversation, and the first thing they established was that they had never had a class together. One of them amended this: besides senior experience, this year. "That's not a class," the other said. She said it three times, which is how you know it was a class.

They became friends after the AP World History exam, the only two people either knew who was taking it, and went for coffee. After that, never sharing a classroom, they ran their friendship on spots.

The first official spot was the back of Blue House, by the water fountain, during the ten-minute passing period, from which one walked the other to literature. There was a locker spot. There was a Physics Spot by the stairs. And there was the Bean Spot, so named because the two of them, hunched over one phone together, had looked like two beans.

My wife and I have one spot. It is the dishwasher. We meet there twice a day, briefly, to disagree about the top rack.

The school helps. Whitney Young randomly places every student in one of four houses, each a cross-section of the school with its own commons area, lockers and lunchroom. Blue House, with the WY Café, is the traditional gathering place before and after school. The school also lists over 100 clubs, from a 200-member National Honor Society to Chess, Robotics, Skiing and Snowboarding, Ping-Pong, the Star Trek Club and the Seinfeld Club.

A Seinfeld Club. At a magnet school. I would join it to watch thirty teenagers explain the parking garage episode to each other.

None of the friends' spots appear in the school's materials. The school supplied a building, four houses and a ten-minute passing period. The students supplied the map. The recording opens with one of them getting the day wrong, Tuesday, then fixing it: Wednesday. They were two days from leaving Whitney.

The eldest has a spot with her best friend. I know, because I have been told where it is not, which is anywhere near the car where I wait. It is near a vending machine. They have named it. They won't tell me the name. It's possible it's the Bean Spot. It's possible it's about me.

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Sources

The public records, school pages and published accounts this story draws on. Where the story imagines a scene or a line of dialogue, that is the column’s telling, not a quotation.

  1. StoryCorps: My Best Friend — Whitney M. Young Magnet Highschool, recorded May 22, 2024 archive.storycorps.org
  2. Whitney Young: Social / Support wyoung.org
  3. The Beacon, February 2009, page 2: New art swallows bridge and student interest wyoung.org