Even with his leather jacket, wraparound shades and permanent slouch, Matt can't quite pull off the menacing air people attach to drug dealers. Maybe it's the fact that he operates under the stately trees of Chicago's wealthy North Shore, or that he is only 17 and wears braces. He parks his late-model Lincoln in the student lot and saunters through the after-school crowd loitering on "Smokers' Corner," a short block from New Trier Township High School. Matt talks the language of business, not crime. "The way to make a large sum of money is with repeat customers," he explains. "With me, these kids can walk out of school and get good quality at good prices--$35 for an eighth [of an ounce of marijuana]. I'm not a pusher, which is disgusting; I'm a dealer--people who want it can get it from me."
Marijuana is Matt's top seller, but today he is hawking some psilocybin mushrooms to two ninth-graders, Russell and Jared. As a bonus, Matt drives his young clients to a Chicago head shop, where they spend $50 on an elaborate porcelain hookah shaped like a mushroom. Afterward they stop at Matt's place, where everyone repairs to the garage for a few bongfuls of "excellent bud" before heading home for dinner.
It is a classic afternoon's adventure for young suburbanites, with a touch--but no more--of peril. In Wilmette, Winnetka, Glencoe and Kenilworth, the posh white suburbs served by New Trier, drug use isn't associated with gang violence, crack houses, addiction or dead-end despair. Getting high has become almost boringly conventional. Drew (names and some other identifying features have been changed), a regular at the Corner, has even kicked around the notion of buying "New Trier Smoking Club" jackets with his friends and awarding mock varsity letters.
Most New Trier kids who smoke pot--by all accounts more than three-fifths of the student body--wouldn't be caught dead in a jacket like that. Only a fraction of New Trier's pot smokers--the denizens of the Corner among them--view getting high as the main part of their identity. For most, marijuana is an ancillary pleasure of growing up comfortably in the '90s, not the least bit incompatible with varsity athletics, the spring musical or advanced-placement chemistry. After all, most of the kids at New Trier will go on to succeed, just as their parents did. The fact that they have tried pot won't cancel out the perks of good breeding and unbounded opportunity.
Situated in Winnetka, where last year the median sale price for a house was $515,000, New Trier regularly sends 95% of its graduates to four-year colleges, many of them the same elite institutions that produced the lawyers, doctors and corporate executives who live here in large part because of the excellent school system. New Trier offers its students--85% white, 12% Asian, 2% Hispanic and 1% African American--everything from international relations and classical Greek to operatic choir and gourmet food. At New Trier, there's nothing called gym class or phys ed; it's kinetic wellness.