Which high school friend took a path you didn't expect?

not a friend, but the biggest asshole drug dealer at my school and his trailer park family ended up being Mayor of Toronto and Premiere of Ontario.

I just assumed they would be incarcerated by 21.

The top performer is still in his hometown working a minimum wage job :-/ The guy was crazy intelligent… I have no idea what happened…

I’m from a small town that has 3 factories in it. They employ a good portion of the area.

A friend of mine who was pretty socially awkward but really smart worked in one of the factories in the summers while he was going to college for accounting. He got his degree and…moved back home. He still works at the factory full time on the floor. We graduated high school in 2002.

pretty much all of my high school friends went off the deep end, except for myself.

my best friend went to jail for heroin positition and beating his girlfriend.
most of my other friends dropped out of college and burned out on drugs to the point they looked/sounded like homeless mushmouths, or if they were women, they got married at like 20 and popped out kids and never had jobs.

one of my girlfriends became a nun another one became a stripper
another became a nun then left the covenant became a trad wife
another one became a poor broke hippie and married the guy she dated after me who was poor broke musician, and they both became addicts.

a lot of other people i was not friends with, even if they did graduate college and get jobs, lived at home, married very young, and basically inherited their parents homes and never left the area. they never lived on their own or had lives outside of the town. that includes some of my relatives, they all ended up working for their parents even if they graduated college.

I grew up in a shitty town that was in the lower quartile of economy/education. i was maybe like 10% of people who grew up there who ‘made it out’. and when people learn what town i grew up in they tend to give me the cold shoulder because it’s not a ‘good place’ and ‘good people’ don’t come from there… which is pretty much true. it sucks to that i will never live down the fact my parents were broke and that town was the best place they could afford to live.

on the flip side, anytime i met anyone from my past… they think I’m major pretentious asshole now because I went to an ivy league school, got a good job, lived on my own my entire life, got a graduate degree, lived abroad, and now live in one of the most expensive zip codes in the country. and they start telling how ‘disappointed’ they are I’m not famous or super rich some bullshit. because they are miserable twats who hate their lives and made bad choices. I didn’t. i have never been back to that down since my parents sold the house when i was 21.

My punk show / skater buddy went hard into religion, which led to apparent right-wing politics.

The girl who got into every prestigious university for hard sciences is now working in the performing arts. I assume she was studying to placate her parents and then chose her own path as soon as she could escape.