Behind The Castle Walls

Writing, Ned Vizzini discovered at age 14, is a great way to blow off steam. After a tough day at school, the New York City resident pulled a piece of scrap paper from his backpack and let loose, as he puts it, a "profanity-ridden" rant. "Afterward, I felt a lot better," he writes, "and when I read my words the next day, I thought they were pretty good." He was soon writing "slightly less profanity-ridden essays" for a local alternative newspaper, and in 1998 he got a piece published in the New York Times Magazine . A book contract followed, and Teen Angst? Naaah ... is the result, making the 19-year-old Vizzini, now a college student, a full-fledged author. One of his stops along the way was a famous New York City high school.

When I arrived at Stuyvesant High School on September 9, 1995, I was already terrified. I was terrified of high school girls; I was terrified of high school cliques; I was terrified because I'd been told that if you stood near Stuyvesant at 8 a.m., the wave of teenagers going to class would trample you. You'd be ground into the ground. I'd heard that some people died that way.

Turned out I didn't need to be so terrified. True, I didn't do too well with those high school girls. And the cliques got on my nerves. But the wave of teenagers going to class became my friends, and I became one of them: head lowered, hood raised, sleepwalking into school with my heavy...