Summit High School
Forever...Summit High School is the shared educational setting for Katherine and Michael and the venue for a school-night performance that briefly unsettles Katherine’s assumptions about Artie. The evidence places the students in the same senior-year homeroom and gives the school a concrete dramatic presence through its auditorium.
Students and Homeroom
Katherine establishes that Michael is not an older student but a senior in the same year as her. When she asks whether he is in her class, the answer specifies that he is in her homeroom. The exchange locates their connection within the ordinary structure of school life and clarifies that they are peers, not students separated by age or grade.
Auditorium Performance
On the night of the play, Katherine, Michael, and Erica sit together in the fourth row of the Summit High auditorium. The production is Butterflies Are Free: Artie plays a blind young man trying to make his own way, while Sybil plays his mother. The school setting thus becomes the place where Katherine watches Artie in a role that differs sharply from her everyday impression of him.
A Change in Katherine’s View
Katherine finds Artie unexpectedly assured onstage and judges his performance to be as good as a professional’s. For a moment, the role makes her forget her familiar label for him as a game enthusiast. When Elizabeth appears in a revealing costume, Erica nudges Katherine, and Katherine makes a pointed attempt to tell Michael that Elizabeth is pretty—an effort to seem unjealous. The auditorium scene connects Summit High’s social and academic setting with the shifting perceptions and romantic tensions among its students.
