High Anxiety

Despite being in the top 5 percent of her class, Katy fears that she won't get into her colleges of choice, Brigham Young University and U-Va. Her family is Mormon. Both her parents went to BYU, and you'd think that would give her some advantage, except that the ranks of Mormons have steadily grown in the United States, and BYU hasn't, or not as much. "When I went there, if you were tall enough to push your money over the counter you could get in," says her father. "Now it's so doggone competitive, you've got to be a high-performing student with not only grades but fairly robust extracurricular activities to get in." In fact, it's really not so grim: According to statistics, BYU admits 80 percent of its applicants, and U-Va. admits about 40 percent. Most of these were in the top 10 percent of their high school class, a criterion that Katy easily meets, and then some. Still, to Katy, failure seems an entirely plausible outcome.

A full day with Katy feels like spending the day on a particularly hilly leg of the Tour de France. Most days, she gets up at 4 a.m. to have time to take a shower and straighten her hair afterward, a 40-minute process that involves a lot of blow-drying and, at the end, curling the very tips. She is not doing this for the benefit of any boy, because she doesn't have a boyfriend and doesn't plan to. "Last night I was with my girlfriend just talking about boys and how horrible they have become," she says, meaning that increasingly, the boys she knows are chiefly interested in one thing. "At the end of the year, last year, the senior guys all started to be very raunchy, talking about how college was going to be just sex with girls. And now I see guys my age, a lot of guys I'm friends with -- like, I was talking to one friend and said: 'Why don't you go out with this girl? She really likes you,' and he said, 'Yeah, she's really cool, but she's not going to put out.' "

Although Katy dated some last year, in technical violation of a household rule against 10th-grade dating, she has decided not to date at all this year, even though she is officially now allowed to. Sooner or later, she suspects, any relationship is going to reach that bottom-line conflict, and she doesn't need the pressure associated with always having to say no. What makes her resolve easier is that her father wants her to date only Mormon boys, and Mormon boys, she says, "are kind of nerdy."

Given this resolve, when Katy gets dressed in the morning, the people she is really dressing for are her female friends, which is a demanding thing in and of itself. With all the blow-drying and tip-curling, she doesn't have time for breakfast before her ride, a senior named Scott Jackson, arrives at 5:30 to take her to church class and then to school. Katy is taking seven classes in all. She has English every day; the other six classes take place on alternate days. Each class is 90 minutes long. If you miss one day, you miss a lot, particularly in the IB classes. This is why IB kids come to school even when they are sick. "If you take a day off, you're going to miss all this work; you have tons of work to catch up. We all get sick in the wintertime, but all of us are still going to school, puking everywhere," says Katy offhandedly.

So packed is the schedule -- and so large is the school, physically -- that during her school day Katy never stops for a drink from the water fountain; never goes to the bathroom; never visits her locker, because it's too far away to get to and still be in class on time. She barely has time to speak to friends, save for an occasional hug with somebody in the hall and, today, a half-hour lunch break. In line for a taco salad, she greets a group of non-IB-type friends, all boys, who are standing in a clump. "They say they're going to, like, drop out of school and go work in California," Katy says, taking her tray and getting a place at the lunch table with her friend Kiersten Hammond, an IB-type girl, and some other IB-type boys. It's 10 a.m., and Katy has been up for six hours.

Throughout her school day, she is constantly reminded that there are people who go on to college and people who do not. In algebra II, her soft-spoken and kindly teacher, Mr. Inyang, tries to convince them that regression analysis really is something they will use in life. "It doesn't matter what you are going to do -- work at McDonald's, go to college -- you will use it," he tells them. There they are, her two life choices: college or McDonald's.

Of course, to get into college you need to have something besides academics, and that is part of the reason why Katy runs cross-country, a grueling sport that involves a five-mile run -- at least -- every weekday afternoon. Today she has a meet, which means that when classes end at 1:50 p.m., she has 10 minutes to find her way to the locker room, change and get on a bus to Culpeper High School, where she waits until her own race at 5:30, which goes extremely well: She places fifth among the girls. Then it's the bus back to Manassas, which means she doesn't get home until 8:30, doesn't eat dinner until 9:30, and then works on her homework until well past 11, meaning five hours of sleep before she gets up and does it again.

And -- pleasure? Well, Katy likes cross-country. She likes IB anthropology, where her first week she was assigned to prepare a presentation on the four schools of anthropological thought about culture. All of the students had to make presentations, and all of them were assigned partners, but Katy's partner told her he was probably going to drop the class. Assuming she would make the presentation alone, she read the chapter and drew up a careful one-page handout on which she wrote a cogent description of each school of thought, underlining key terms and spelling out the differences for the benefit of her classmates. Then she heard from her partner, who said that he was not dropping the class after all. So she e-mailed him her outline. He cut it in half and sent it back. "He's smart like that," says Katy, sincerely.

She hands in the report, which is choppier than the one she wrote, and takes her seat to listen intently as their lively and erudite teacher, Ms. Ellis, introduces them to the pleasures of anthropological study. This particular IB class seems to have an equal complement of boys and girls, suggesting that boys, too, feel motivated and ambitious, maybe even . . . stressed.

Earlier today, however, Katy's friend Scott Jackson disagreed. "Boys don't care," he said, emphatically; boys don't feel stressed because boys know that everything will turn out okay. Hearing this surprised Katy, who thinks of Scott as one of the few boys she knows who feel as much stress as she does. "He gets stressed sometimes to the point where he can't even talk," says Katy, raising the question of whether girls are in fact more stressed, or simply more willing to admit it. In this case, the evidence would suggest both.

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Q: In general, how often do you experience stress in your daily life -- never, rarely, sometimes or frequently?

Percentage of local teens saying frequently

Local girls ... 42%

Local boys ... 28%

Q: What is the biggest source of stress in your life?

Based on local teens who experience stress

School ... 60%

Family issues ... 12%

Friends or people you are dating ... 7 %

Concerns about the future ... 6%

Work ... 3%

All others combined ... 12%

Liza Mundy is a Post staff writer on leave.