Castle Rock High School
Castle Rock High School is the local secondary school in Castle Rock, Maine, attended by Gordon Lachance and his friends. It is the institution where the academic tracking system that Chris Chambers bitterly describes—college-preparatory courses for the middle-class students from Castle View and Brickyard Hill, shop courses for the working-class kids—becomes a concrete reality that threatens to separate the four friends and determine their life trajectories. The school also appears as the setting for Gordon's own literary development, where he first encounters the novel The Invisible Man and where he later publishes his early story "Stud City" in the college literary magazine.
Academic Tracking and Social Division
Chris Chambers, speaking to Gordon during their hike to find Ray Brower's body, predicts that when they enter junior high school, the system will split them apart. "You'll be in the college courses," Chris tells Gordon. "Me and Teddy and Vern, we'll all be in the shop courses, playing pocket-pool with the rest of the retards, making ashtrays and birdhouses. Vern might even have to go into Remedial." Chris sees this tracking as a predetermined judgment made by teachers in "smart little conferences" where they decide whether a student will "contaminate all those precious college-course dootchbags." He argues that the teachers care only about whether a student behaved in grammar school and what the town thinks of his family. Despite the odds, Chris does enroll in the college courses in his second year of junior high, facing hostility from his parents, his friends, the guidance counselor, and most of all the teachers, who disapprove of his duck-tailed, leather-jacketed, engineer-booted appearance in their classrooms. He nearly quits a dozen times that year, but with Gordon's help—they study together almost every night, sometimes for six hours at a stretch—he manages to catch up. By their junior year, Chris stands nineteenth in their class, and both he and Gordon are accepted at the University of Maine.
Gordon's Literary Awakening
Castle Rock High School is also where Gordon Lachance begins to find his voice as a writer. In a book report for Miss Hardy, he reads Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man, expecting the science fiction story about the man in bandages and Foster Grants, but instead discovering a novel about a Black man whom nobody notices. Gordon identifies deeply with the protagonist: "That cat Ralph Ellison was writing about me." The story "Stud City," which Gordon publishes in the college literary magazine while at Castle Rock High School, is his first story that felt like his own—"the first one that really felt whole, after five years of trying." He reflects that it was the first time he had ever really used the place he knew and the things he felt in a piece of fiction, and that it was also the first story he never showed to his mother and father, because there was too much of his brother Denny in it, too much of Castle Rock, and too much of 1960.
The School's Role in the Community
Castle Rock High School is part of the town's social fabric, mentioned in passing as the place where Dennis Lachance graduated with honors, an event Gordon skipped by pretending to be sick, staying home to drink half a bottle of Wild Irish Rose and vomit in his bed. The school's teachers are discussed by the boys during their campfire talk: Mr. Brooks is "the biggest pussy in Castle Rock Elementary—he would just about cry if you sassed him back," while Mrs. Cote is "just about the meanest bitch God had ever set down on the earth," who, according to Vern, hit a kid so hard two years ago that the kid almost went blind. The school's guidance counselor later tells Teddy Duchamp that he should think about another career besides the military, prompting Teddy to call the counselor "a lying sack of shit" and earn a three-day suspension. The school's tracking system and its teachers' prejudices are presented as forces that either enable or crush the aspirations of working-class kids like Chris and Teddy, shaping their fates long before they graduate.
