Of all the puzzling things a person could do, spending extra years in high school when they don’t have to has to be one of the most baffling.

When I was 16, I was not exactly an amazing person. I was the embodiment of a constant tug-of-war between teenage arrogance and crippling self-doubt wrapped in a coating of acne-prone skin. For obvious reasons, this is not a scene I would like to revisit, let alone spend more than a decade in.

But in fact, that is exactly what one 34-year-old woman in the U.S. has done.

Born into a rocky family situation — to put it lightly — Charity Johnson reportedly spent her whole life looking for a place to belong.

She was in and out of foster care as a kid, and at 14 was living in a group home without contact with her parents.

Various circumstances prevented Charity’s relatives from caring for her; her father was in jail for murder; her mother was homeless and transient until her death in 2002; her grandmother was dead; her sister died of leukemia; others couldn’t or wouldn’t take her in.

Without any family, she stayed in the group home, and eventually moved in with a long-lost sister who had resurfaced. The sister was seven years older than her and married with kids.

After a while, that situation failed and Johnson spent more time in a troubled youth home. Finally, she aged out of Texas’ child foster care system.

She found a family to take her in, and is reported to have graduated from an alternative high school at age 23.

Again, that living situation soured, and so she went online and found another mother figure to take her in.

She repeated this for years, moving all around the U.S., living with different “moms” ranging from a Nevada housekeeper to an Ohio pastor.

She would find vulnerable people to take her in under the guise of her own vulnerability.

Indeed, she was a vulnerable person, but she took advantage of people who were looking for love as much as she was.

Eventually, someone in Longview, a city of 81,000, got wind of what was up from a former “mom,” and she was found out.

The news she was much older than she reported shocked even her 23-year-old boyfriend, who believed she was 18.

She spent 29 days in jail after pleading guilty to the misdemeanour charge of failing to identify herself to a police officer. Her fate in the city is uncertain, and she is reportedly keeping a low profile and working at McDonald’s.

The revelation of her transgressions have elicited a wide variety of reactions: some washed their hands of her, others promised to forgive her, and still others only wanted to understand her.

It’s a bizarre thing to do and she may be the first to have gone so long, but she certainly isn’t the first to lie about her age to re-enrol in high school.

A 22-year-old man in Tennessee reportedly faked a high school transcript so he could enrol and play basketball in 2013.

A 21-year-old man in Michigan fudged his age so he could enrol and play football in 2012.

If it sounds like something out of the movies, that’s because there are movies about adults pretending they’re teenagers to go back to high school.

In 21 Jump Street, which was a TV show in the ’80s and spawned two movies in the last couple of years, a couple of rookie cops went back to high school to bust various crimes taking place at teenager-oriented venues.

Never Been Kissed, the landmark 1999 rom-com starring Drew Barrymore, follows a reporter going undercover at a high school who ends up flourishing there as she never could during her embarrassing youth — hence the title of the movie.

The difference with these characters and their real-life counterparts is that the characters’ work — their adult careers — are what leads them to fake it ’til they make it.

The real people clinging to adolescence more closely resemble Channing Tatum’s character in the first 21 Jump Street movie.

He was a cool guy in high school and expects to breeze through his undercover work, reliving his glory days.

The thing is, times have changed and he’s no longer the cool guy he once was — a discovery that rocks his world.

While the teenage years may be ugly at times, they are a necessary phase on the trajectory of life. The idea is to go through them, learn from them, and then grow out of them.

But sometimes there’s a flaw and someone goes way off the trajectory, resulting in a truth that is stranger than fiction.