One night, I had a dream that I was stalled in a car, and the only way I could get the car to move again was by kissing the person next to me. In real life, the person next to me is not someone I should ever kiss, and besides, what kiss has the power to jumpstart an engine?

But that’s what dreams are like. The decisions you make while you’re having them aren’t always the best or the most logical. So, when you wake up, you’re left wondering, “Why did I do that? Huh. Must have made sense at the time.”

That’s kind of what high school was like for me.

As teenagers, I think a lot of us take the “Pretty Little Liars” route to solving problems. I don’t mean we push people off the roofs of churches or test our neighbor’s hair to see if we’re siblings, of course. No, we’re like the writers of “Pretty Little Liars,” devising the most ridiculous, dramatic, and far-fetched solutions to our issues and still hoping that people tune in for more. I was not immune to this type of decision-making as a high school student. In fact, I did some pretty weird things, and I’m going to let you in on five of them right here and right now.

A note for the innocent and the guilty: This list isn’t about any of you. It’s about me. It’s about how embarrassing I was. If you find yourself included in one of these memories, it is not to chastise you in anyway. You were simply a witness to the human disaster I look at in the mirror every morning. I hope you’re having a good day, and your hair probably looks fantastic.

1. Told a Guy My Friend Liked Him before the Bell in Science Class in Front of Other People

Admittedly, this was the memory that made me want to write this article. I was thinking about how intense teenage crushes can be, and out of freaking nowhere, I remembered this moment from the last day of ninth grade. In the midst of my memory, I asked myself, “Why did I do that?” I still don’t know.

My friend had a small crush on this kid we knew, and on the last day of school in ninth grade, she decided he should know. I was in full support of this idea. Girls should tell boys that they like them. But because she was fifteen and shy, and I was fifteen and… not shy… she asked me to do it for her. I accepted the invitation to spill her crush with her permission.

Except why did I do that? There is something just so awkward about hearing that someone has a crush on you, but it’s even weirder to learn that information through someone else. But she wanted me to do it for her, and I wanted to be a good friend. So I did my part. As he walked into science class with his friends. Before he could sit down. In front of his friends. Because I thought I’d never get another chance to talk to him, and I might as well grab him for her while the iron was hot.

Come to think of it, I didn’t have to do that at all. I could have backed off and away. I could have pretended like I told the kid instead of embarrassing him in front of his friends before we could take our science final. And yet… no. I thought telling him, at her request, made me a good and brave friend. Except it didn’t. It just made me seem weird.

2. Very Obviously Dropped a Pen So That the Boy I Kind of Liked Might Pick It Up

Oh, how I would like to say that this decision was satirical. I’d like to say that I was just so cleverly sarcastic that I “only wanted to see what would happen” if I dropped my pen, and this boy picked it up. That would be a really great article to write if that was what I’d actually done.

But it wasn’t. When I dropped my pen in front of this boy, I was dead serious.

I couldn’t tell you why I thought this would be so romantic. I was sixteen, and I’d seen enough of the real world to understand that romances usually don’t begin to bloom after one partner drops a pen. But since we didn’t talk much (read: at all), I thought this pen thing would be some sort of bizarre icebreaker.

You wouldn’t believe me if I told you that it almost worked. It really, truly almost did.

Another one of my friends intercepted the interaction. Understanding that I very purposely and obviously dropped this pen for the boy to pick up, she whipped down to the floor and did the chivalrous thing. She grinned from ear to ear, held out the pen as though it were a lollipop, and chirped, “Here ya go!”

What she did, my friends, was an actual sarcastic comment on the asinine attempt at flirting I had up my sleeve. I was too delusional to understand that dropping a pen on purpose doesn’t make you seem cute and clumsy like a character the indie guy in your screenwriting class calls “a Zooey Deschanel type.” It makes you look crazy.

3. Listened to Wizard Rock

The level of shame I have in this confession is hard to imagine. My taste in music is weird enough as it is (60s bubblegum pop, 70s punk, and sometimes, showtunes happen). But when you add “songs that nerds composed, produced, and recorded about the ‘Harry Potter’ series” to that mix, you get the kind of person you pray not to be seated next to at Thanksgiving dinner. I don’t listen to wizard rock anymore, but in the tenth grade, it was like classical poetry.

When you think about it, that makes sense. I love “Harry Potter” more than anyone should or needs to. I have since I was six years old. But I made a friend that year who was into the fan culture surrounding “Harry Potter,” and part of that was listening to wizard rock. I thought she was the coolest person ever to exist. I wanted to be as much like her as possible. Part of that, I deduced, was listening to wizard rock. In my lifetime, I have actually known all the words to a song about Hogwarts Houses by a band called “Ministry of Magic.” They were the best wizard rock band, she always said. We had all these crazy fantasies about finally seeing these bands in concert, meeting people in the audience, and bonding over our tendency to relate everything in real life to “Harry Potter” (or the intense, hyper-realistic belief that life actually was “Harry Potter” in a clever, algebra II-filled disguise).

Actually, come to think of it, maybe listening to wizard rock wasn’t so terribly embarrassing after all.

4. Transposed the Second Two Numbers of My Locker Combination after Christmas Break

This incident still haunts me. I have nightmares about needing to open a high-school locker to this day. A couple Decembers ago, my parents made me go into my sister’s school to grab books out of her locker (which was probably my locker five years earlier), and I had to unlock it. I panicked, and after approximately ten tries, I had to get another high-school student to open this thing for me. And I know why I couldn’t do it. The transposed locker combination still loomed over me, like a gray cloud named Morris. There’s no reason why the cloud’s name is Morris. I just think he would like that name.

Three years before the incident took place, an associate of mine had completely forgotten her locker combination once we got back to school in January. Of course, I became extremely anxious because I didn’t want to have to go to the office, ask them to look up those three magical numbers to let me in, and laugh at me. So, for two years, I would practice entering my combination everyday of Christmas break to make sure it wouldn’t happen to me. For those two years, it worked.

But by senior year, I forgot to practice. And when I got back to my tall, blue locker in January 2013, I was clueless.

I tried to open that thing for probably ten minutes, but it never budged. I pounded on it like it was a punching back in a training montage. I asked my friends for help, but they couldn’t manage, either. Finally, I took a deep breath and accepted my fate. I had to go to the office and ask the secretary to look up my combination.

That’s when I saw it. Those other two numbers? They should have been flipped. The shame and humiliation coursed through my veins like never before. But I knew I couldn’t let them see me panic. I took a deep breath and lied.

“Yeah, I don’t know what I’m doing wrong,” I said. “That’s the combination I keep trying.”

Was there any real reason to lie about my mistake? No. But I did anyway. Because that’s high-school-level decision making. You do the thing that makes the least amount of sense and is most obviously a lie.

5. Attempted to Follow "American Idiot" the Musical around the Country

This time in my life is actually something I only half regret. As I’ve mentioned before, I am a huge Green Day fan, so when “American Idiot” the musical toured in Detroit for the first time, I was thrilled. I met some fellow fans who became my two best friends for the latter part of high school and first year of college, and they had seen “American Idiot” enough times to count on two hands. I can’t really explain the pull that the show can have over you. You just have to experience it for yourself. It’s been five years since the first time I saw it, and I still wear my t-shirts and listen to the cast album sometimes. I was a pretty big fan. For reference, think of the “Hamilton” craze, excepted localized in the Detroit area among three teenage girls and only those three teenage girls.

My friends were even bigger friends than I was. They’d been following the show since 2010, and when the first national tour kicked off in 2012, they were ready. Not only did they see the show in Detroit, but they also took a whole weekend trip to Chicago for a couple of shows there. I watched on the sidelines. But this show and particularly this cast had such an emotional hold on us that we dreaded their last performance in San Francisco that summer. So, we did what any obsessive teenagers would do. We actually asked our families if we could go to San Francisco to be there for the last performance of “American Idiot.”

We asked that question like there was no way they could say no.

And just so you know, our parents didn’t just say no. They laughed at us (at least, mine did). They laughed because they actually thought we were prepared to take a trip alone. When I think back on it, we totally weren’t. We used to stay up late at night and do our best senior citizen voices because we thought that was fun.

Trying to follow a musical around the country is not only weird, but also, it is exhausting. You have to keep the cast and crew of the musical on Twitter mobile updates and monitor ticket sales closer than the computer itself. After awhile, it stops being fun and starts to feel more like the Hunger Games with punk rock choreography throughout.

But I only half regret it.

High school is embarrassing, weird, and by the time we’re knee-deep in it, we think we’re the smartest people in the world. But we’re not. Because we do things like follow musicals around the country and drop pens because some guy might think it’s cute to pick it up for you. It seems normal while it’s happening, but in the end, we all know what it becomes: adolescent war flashbacks and pretty decent sitcom fodder.