By this time they've taken their graduation tassels and yearbooks and put them away in a box with all the other mementos of high school.
For many newly minted graduates, summer is the time to make travel plans. They have airplane tickets to buy, or long drives in August and September to think about. They will journey over the Tejon Pass, or across the Mojave Desert, to the college towns and dorm rooms that await them.
But before you leave us, class of 2009, before you go on that first big adventure of your adult lives, do what Luis Penate is doing in the last few weeks before he leaves South Los Angeles for Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania.
"I want to go around and see some L.A. landmarks," he told me. His plans include one last look at the downtown skyline before he says goodbye.
Luis says he'll wander around a bit so L.A. stays in his memory, because he's already been to the East Coast once (on a college tour) and knows how different it is from our dry city by the sea.
I'm very glad Luis doesn't want to forget us. Because Luis is a thinker and a fighter, an 18-year-old Angeleno who wants to change the world. He's already done one courageous thing in his young life -- it was last year, about the same time Californians were going to vote on a controversial ballot measure.
We need Luis and all the other college-bound members of the class of 2009 to come back to Los Angeles one day. We need their brain power to sort out the messes we older generations are leaving them.
Luis is one of those young people who was gifted to us by El Salvador, a little Central American republic that has lost too many of its brightest and most ambitious people to the United States.
His mother, a legal U.S. resident, had spent much of her life traveling back and forth between the two countries. When she brought Luis to the United States, at age 11, he was already a precocious reader. He had just read "The Lord of the Rings" in Spanish.
He spoke no English, however. But he learned quickly, and in the sixth grade his English reading abilities took off. In the span of a few months he went from reading "Clifford the Big Red Dog" picture books to Harry Potter.
"One day I woke up and I realized, 'I know how to speak English,' " he told me.
Luis, who became a U.S. citizen last summer, also had the good fortune to be one of the first students in the Los Angeles Leadership Academy. The academy is a charter school that opened in 2002 in the Koreatown neighborhood where his family lived at the time.
