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I caught a glimpse of the black shadows on my 14-year-old son's face as I drove him and his brother to school one morning this week.

He was wearing eyeliner.

Nearly avoiding a crash, I strained in that way we parents have of holding back from screaming, "What were you thinking?"

He was dared to do it, he assured me. It was a joke, not a fashion statement, not some initial step into the gloomy, jagged, disenfranchised world of goths, emos and vampires.

Uh-huh.

When I returned that afternoon, he was in good spirits, not beaten up, not cowed and not devoid of the eyeliner.

"This isn't that kind of school, Mom," he said. "It's different here."

Which is to say that Amy Biehl High School, one of 36 charter schools in Albuquerque, is as different as my son's face painting, only far more encouraging.

Those of you who have followed my column know of my secession from Albuquerque Public Schools — at least at the high school level.

I had wagered that my sons, neither one the academic whizzes I had hoped them to be, would flounder and eventually fail in a public high school too big and too bureaucratic to save them.

Private schools were beyond my price range. Charter schools were the new (and free) frontier.

Amy Biehl, situated in the heart of Downtown, was my choice because of its emphasis on community and college, requiring students to take two college courses and volunteer before graduation.

The school, named after a brilliant Santa Fe teen killed while fighting apartheid in South Africa, is also not hamstrung by a school board that cannot agree or a superintendent who cannot lead.

That became evident over the summer when we received notice that Amy Biehl was pushing back the start of the school day to 9 a.m., about an hour later than at most public high schools.

That decision was reached after parents, teachers and students met to talk about the issue and contemplate research on how teens just don't function early.

Imagine. Letting everyone decide.

"That's the advantage of being a charter school," said Sandy Beery, the new head of school. "We are small enough to look at the needs we have and figure out how to rework things to meet that need."

It sounds so simple.

And Amy Biehl sounded like Nirvana High — smaller classes, higher standards (students must earn a C to pass), caring and creative teachers empowered to put their talents to use, innovative administrators unencumbered by testy bureaucracy or wooden standards, involved parents, kids of all kinds who don't adhere to the usual adolescent cliquing — who didn't shun the odd kid, eyeliner and all.

Even still, it was a hard sell with the boys and, I later learned, many freshmen, who were reluctant to stray from their home schools, their friends, their status quo.

Son No. 2 — the one without the eyeliner — threatened almost daily this summer to boycott Amy Biehl over chores he did not fancy.

He went anyway.

"You know, Mom," he said after school began July 30, "I think I'm going to like it here."

Of course, his reason was because of all the "hot girls" at the school. But I suspect he will come to find other reasons for liking it there. Eventually.

The day Son No. 1 went Kabuki marked the start of the second week of school. (Amy Biehl is on a year-round schedule.)

That night, the school held an open house. About 200 parents and students came, an impressive turnout for a school with a population of about 260 and a staff of 27.

"We can do things that a school of 1,800 just can't," Beery said. "Students here become a member of a community they come to know and care about. And when they feel they belong, if they have that sense of belonging, they work harder."

The students who come to Amy Biehl, she said, derive from every demographic and every part of the metro area.

"If you watch for a while you see that they all really get along well — regardless of what they look like visually," Beery said.

Thank goodness for that.

"They take good care of each other," she said. "It's really a comfortable place to be."

Son No. 1 has since put away the eyeliner. That's a comfort to me.