My freshman year of high school (1999-2000) was pretty trying.
In November of '99, I was sitting around with some of my buddies in the lobby after lunch. We got an hour for lunch, and after you were done eating, everyone would just hang out in the lobby until 1PM and classes started back up. We got yakking about how the town next to us got a day off of school because someone called in a bomb threat. About 5 years earlier, someone called a bomb threat into our school and they just sent us outside to play all day. As a bunch of 14 year olds, we all thought this was hilarious and we should do the same and get a day off of school. So one by one, we all went into the bathroom and wrote something on the wall of one of the toilet stalls about some kind of bomb. I kinda chickened out, and wrote "if this is erased before October 31, the school will blow up". I felt like I'd done my part to go along with it, but hedged by putting a past date which would make it obvious that this wasn't a real threat. This was on a Thursday and we had Friday off for conferences or something.
Next Monday, riding the bus to school, we hear that once we get to school everyone is getting sent home because they found a bomb threat in the school and SWAT teams and dogs were there. My heart absolutely sank. I had no expectation that anyone would take this seriously. Keep in mind this was before we had school shootings in America every week. As soon as I got to school, I went into the principal's office, took responsibility, told them what had happened, and that this was just a prank no one really thought would get taken seriously.
They immediately had me questioned by the town cop, and asked me to indicate the other people involved. I refused to give anyone else up. I was immediately suspended for the rest of the semester, and my case was turned over to the juvenile court system. I spent my suspension working on the farm. We were pattern tiling (essentially plumbing crop land to help water drain off it) a lot in those days, so I was out in the elements (November/December on the IA/MN border) working 50 hours a week as a 14 year old.
After the juvenile court officer processed the case, he recommend to the county attorney that I be placed on an informal probation. His conclusion was that I was a good kid who did something stupid, owned up to it, and no one got hurt. The county attorney took that recommendation and wiped his ass with it. He charged me with Terrorism, a Class D Felony in Iowa. He said the reason for this was to send a message that this wouldn't be taken lightly, but it was obviously a combination of my refusal to roll over on the other kids, and my last name. My grandpa was the State Representative for our county at the time, and a political rival of said county attorney.
I was allowed to go back to school for second semester, and the trial was slated for the end of February. Because of what a hoopla the whole thing had become, and due to some other trouble I'd gotten into (parents had caught me drinking the previous summer, and some petty vandalism that I was never criminally implicated in), they decided to have me try doing a semester at the Catholic high school in Rochester, MN where my mom worked. No one there would know or care anything about the case I was involved in, so I was all for it as I felt like I had become a complete pariah.
At the trial, the judge almost laughed the county attorney out of court. I was convicted of 5th Degree Criminal Mischief, a simple misdemeanor, for the act of vandalizing the bathroom wall. My punishment was 10 hours of community service, which I completed by mowing the lawn of our church a handful of times.
In the end it amounted to absolutely nothing, but the whole experience was absolutely terrifying, emotionally draining, painful, and ultimately it steeled me into the person I am today in many ways. I loved going to school in Rochester, and spent the rest of my HS career there. Leaving my high school in a podunk town of 800 people with the same 30 kids I'd had class with my whole life and going to school in a much larger setting exposed me to all sorts of new ideas, and definitely got me to think beyond a small town mentality. I learned that being honest and taking your lumps when you fuck up tends to lead to a better outcome in the end. If I had kept my mouth shut, I'd probably have never gotten caught. They claimed they could do handwriting analysis, but they never figured that out on the other guys. Over the years, every single one of the other guys has come up to me and apologized for not taking their share of the blame. Some of them honestly seem truly guilt-wracked over the whole deal. Having to spend that month and a half out working like an adult was an extremely formative experience as the working conditions were often miserable (cold and muddy). I almost never lose my shit in truly trying situations, and this experience is absolutely the reason why. It just gave me a really unusual perspective that's benefitted me more often than not.
I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, but I'm better off for having been through it.