JOURNAL CAMPUS CONFIDENTIAL : WHAT TEENS SAY ABOUT HIGHSCHOOL

Sex behind the gym. Guns in lockers. Drug sales in classrooms. Gang killings. That’s high school in the headlines.

Designer labels. Sweet-16 convertibles. Thousand-dollar proms. That’s high school in the TV listings.

But what’s the reality? Do society’s ills--drugs, gangs, teen-age pregnancies--make high school a nightmare? Or does it remain primarily the stuff of crushes, finals, cliques and three-hour phone conversations?

The Times spent a day with three students from San Pedro, San Gabriel and Van Nuys high schools in search of answers.

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Robby Lukin, 17, cradles the yellow rose he received from his girlfriend a few minutes ago.

He smells the flower, shuts his eyes for a few seconds and then looks toward the field where his steady, Courtney Brucelas, dances and cheers at a lunchtime pep rally. He smells the rose again.

“This is nice,” the 12th-grader says. “It makes me think that I might actually miss high school when I graduate.”

In many senses, Lukin is the ‘90s version of the all-American kid. He’s a second-generation student at San Pedro High School (both parents are graduates), a member of the baseball team, and he recently received a varsity jacket. What’s more, his girlfriend is on

the drill team.

“Robby’s grown up in San Pedro and heard what happened when his family went to high school,” says his mother, Barbara Lukin, class of ’63.

So school spirit comes naturally. Especially on the day of San Pedro High’s homecoming game.

“Today I have more school spirit than usual,” says Lukin. “The feeling reminds me of last spring.”

At Dodger Stadium last June, Lukin played left field for the San Pedro Pirates and helped his team to win the city championship. “It was a total trip ‘cause it was just like we were the Dodgers,” says Lukin, who is training for the upcoming season. “It was my proudest moment in high school.”

Baseball and Brucelas. Without them, Lukin says, he would like high school a lot less.

Before he hooked up with 16-year-old Brucelas, Lukin spent much of his time at parties.

“I thought partying was something I had do because I was in high school,” he says. “But it never really worked because I was so tired.”

Especially tired of acting like someone he wasn’t: “I just got sick of it all. . . . I couldn’t take it anymore. I just stayed at home by myself thinking, ‘Who am I, what am I doing and why?’ ”

Lukin says his commitment to Brucelas helped him to answer those questions. “I’ve calmed down since I met her,” he says. “She listens to me, and that helps me sort things out.”

Lukin believes that the relationship has helped him to grow up. And so has Brucelas’ 17-month-old daughter, Mariah Ashlie.

Lukin, who is not the father, says he puts the baby to bed when Brucelas is tired or plays with her when Brucelas needs to study or to practice her drill-team routines.

He doesn’t mind staying home on weekend nights and renting movies so they can take care of Mariah. (Brucelas and Mariah live with Brucelas’ parents.) “I just want to help her and make things easier for her,” he says.

The two say they’ve thought about marriage, perhaps after Lukin finishes junior college and Brucelas completes court-reporting school. “I’m looking ahead to the future,” says Lukin, who works four days a week at a pizza place and studies “just enough” to earn Bs and Cs. “I’m saving money for whatever might happen. “

But Lukin admits that responsibility often conflicts with the spontaneity and fun of high school: “It’s confusing when one minute someone tells me to act like a man and then the next minute someone will say, ‘You’re just a kid.’

“Who am I?”

Lukin finds comfort in a teacher’s lecture on depression. “Teen-agers generally feel more depressed because they often have to act like someone they’re not,” said Dai Sup Han, speaking to about 30 San Pedro students just before lunch. “They’re either treated like they’re kids or like they’re 30 or 40.”

Says Lukin: “That’s true, and it doesn’t make me feel like anyone respects me. In fact, it’s an insult to people in high school.

“A lot of people don’t understand what goes on in school. They like to think the worst.”

For example, Lukin says, adults may believe that racial tensions are a problem at San Pedro High, where most of the students are Latino or Anglo.

But “everyone is pretty kicked back about race,” Lukin says. “It’s not like other nearby schools, where the blacks hang out with the blacks or the whites with the whites.”

The bell rings. Lukin gives Brucelas a goodby hug. He smells the rose as he walks to his fifth-period English class.

“Oh, how cuuute ,” a loud classmate teases from across the hall. “Robby got a rose from his girl.”

Lukin shrugs off the jeers: “This shows she cares. We’ll probably both miss high school, but at least we’ll be together.”

Under the Influence of Peers

‘It’s hard to be true to yourself when you’re in high school.’

Jamie Nguyen, 16, stares at a button that reads, “A Quality Man Insists on Equality.” She hesitates about leaving the pin, attached to her backpack, unguarded in her sixth-period yearbook class.

Eventually, Nguyen gives it to yearbook adviser Steve Slagle. “Please make sure nothing happens to it,” the San Gabriel High School junior pleads.

“This button tells me I’m seen as an equal and not inferior to guys. It reminds me that I deserve the same kind of respect.”

Even though Nguyen is outspoken and has a sharp wit, she says she needs a reminder. “A lot of guys are sexist. Guys say stuff about a woman’s body as if a body is the only thing a woman has to offer. I just tell them to go back to their caves.”

But, she adds: “It’s hard to be true to yourself when you’re in high school. I have to keep telling myself that I have to speak out about my beliefs. That I have to make myself happy.”

It’s not always easy.

Nguyen remembers choking on her words when she wanted to ask out a “really cute guy who I totally liked.”

“I got chicken,” she says. “As a woman of the ‘90s, I believe women should also ask guys out. But that’s hard for me, and I know it makes me sound like a hypocrite. But I just couldn’t handle the rejection.”

In the grassy area with benches called Senior Court, Nguyen and her close friend, Pam James, 16, chatter nervously. They’re in a hurry because they have only 40 minutes to talk about boys, friends, classes and curfews.

“If we can get someone to drive, we can go to Old Town Pasadena, walk around the stores and check out the cute guys,” Nguyen says, offering ideas about what to do on the weekend.

“Even though right now I want to stay single, liberated and free.”

The fourth-period bell cuts their conversation short.

“I’d like to say I don’t care what people say about me, but that’s easier said than done,” Nguyen says on her way to class.

Disapproval from her peers compelled her to drop last year’s “alternative-gothic” all-black wardrobe. Wearing a white shirt with a navy skirt, Nguyen calls this year’s look “casual.”

“People don’t stare at me like they used to,” she says. “When I wore black all the time, people looked at me like I did drugs and alcohol. Of course, I didn’t. I wanted to show them they were wrong.”

And Nguyen wants to prove they’re wrong about Vietnamese-American stereotypes too. She’s not quiet, she says, she’s not reserved--and she’s not a whiz at math.

“I like to break the mold of stereotypes,” she adds. “I’m outspoken about things that matter to me. I’m not going to hold back because I’m Asian and that’s what Asians are supposed to do.”

As for math, Nguyen says she could do without it: “Math is my weakest subject, but people think it’s easier for me because I’m Asian. I have to work at math. At all my classes.”

That hard work has earned her mostly A’s, which she’ll need for the colleges she dreams of attending--Stanford, UC Berkeley or the Ivy Leagues.

Nguyen also edits a section of the yearbook, competes on the Academic Decathlon team, performs in the Thespian Club and manages the junior class council. “I do everything I can to make sure I won’t destroy my future,” she says.

But some things about the future seem out of her control. Nguyen says she worries about being an Asian student in an East Coast college.

“Teachers have told me (San Gabriel High School) is a security blanket for Asians because there’s a lot of Asian students,” she says. “People come here and ask, ‘Where are the white students?’ Does that mean if I go away from this area, people won’t accept me because I’m not white? That thought really, really scares me.”

When the pressure builds, Nguyen says she escapes by listening to music. She relates especially to the song “Stripped” by Depeche Mode:

Take my hand/Come back to the land/Let’s get away. . . .

“That’s about me. About stripping off the fake image. Coming down to the core and shrugging off the excess to show the real person. Refusing to do things that please other people. I’m not that kind of girl. I have to please myself.”

Learning to Look Past Stereotypes

‘A lot of teen-agers . . . just don’t see people in terms of colors. Race doesn’t matter.’

Tina Gutierrez, 17, ignores the stares.

She already knows what the other students are thinking.

Nerd.

After all, Gutierrez is eating lunch on “the quad,” and everyone at Van Nuys High School knows that that’s the hangout for students in the math/science magnet.

“People think we’re the nerdy type,” the 12th-grader says. “They think all people in the (math/science) magnet do four or five hours of homework every night and worry all the time about getting straight A’s in hard, advanced-placement classes. Yeah, right.”

As a magnet student and co-captain of the varsity cheerleading squad, Gutierrez says many peers slap her with a double dose of stereotyping: “I’m the studious type and then I’m the dumb cheerleader.

“I hate stereotypes because they’re almost never true,” Gutierrez says. “But that’s the way a lot of people like to think around here.”

There are, of course, cliques at the 2,800-student school, and Gutierrez and her friends are happy to give the rundown. The football players hang out in the cafeteria--the better to gulp down food. Club-goers and partyers, “the Dancers,” practice their moves near the basketball courts. Students in the performing arts magnet--wearing all black, pointy shoes and dark makeup--lounge around the lockers and classroom buildings.

She shrugs. “This is too tiring to dwell on,” Gutierrez says. “I have more important things to think about.”

Such as college. Gutierrez recently mailed her applications to a handful of University of California campuses and some local private universities. She says she would feel lost if she moved too far from her family and 21-year-old boyfriend, whom she’s been dating for 2 1/2 years.

“I know my boyfriend’s age would scare the hell out of a lot of parents, but my parents are lenient,” says Gutierrez, who lives with her mom in Sylmar and regularly visits her dad in Simi Valley.

“They trust me. They know that I think highly of myself--and I don’t mean that in a conceited way--and would never do anything to put myself in danger. By danger, I mean I would never do things some people think teen-agers do, like take drugs, mix alcohol and driving or have unprotected sex.”

Carole Gutierrez says she trusts her daughter to make the right “moral choices.” “Tina is mature and she has a high self-esteem, so I give her freedom to do just about anything,” her mother says. “And I’m not bothered by her boyfriend’s age because I trust her and I know he respects her.”

Many strangers, however, seem troubled by the relationship. Gutierrez, whose mother is Anglo and whose father is Latino, says she gets dirty looks and nasty comments because her boyfriend, Cassian Daniels, is African-American.

“I don’t understand what’s the big deal with biracial relationships,” Gutierrez says. “It’s mostly older people and conservative people who stare at us.”

Few people in her age group give them a second glance. “A lot of teen-agers seem to get along with other races better than adults,” Gutierrez says. “They just don’t see people in terms of colors. Race doesn’t matter.”

It’s never mattered to Gutierrez. She says she doesn’t consider herself Latina or Anglo: “I just think of myself as a person. Calling myself one or the other would be denying part of me. And I’m just not into classifying people.”

But some of her peers are. Gutierrez remembers a friend, who is also Anglo and Latino, calling herself white in a room full of Anglo people and Latino in a group of Latinos. “See, people would think better of themselves if race didn’t matter. People do these type of things because they want to fit in or they feel ashamed of their nationalities.

“I don’t think about race, and that lets me like people for what they do and what they believe in,” she says. “That’s how I look at myself, and that’s why I think highly of myself.”