High school was awesome for me. After years of being bored and the out of synch social outcast, I went to a public boarding school for gifted and talented. There was a lot of disappointment there in that a lot of the teachers sucked, I learned about sexism first hand, and I still ran out of math classes to take by my junior year (I played a lot of three person spades senior year), but being around other smart, quirky, and previously socially ostracized kids was wonderful. I met my husband and my best friend, and learned how to do my own laundry (also learned many things I had previously been sheltered from).
I wasn't particularly popular, but I had my niche and best of all nobody tormented anyone. There was no one popular clique. There were just different friendship groups, most of which I was on the fringe of because I tended to go home on weekends.
The biggest thing I learned was that I could never go back to being surrounded by "normal" people. That makes me an elitist, but I refuse to humble myself (which is an inside joke if you were in my high school class).
