I’m wearing Gloria Vanderbilt jeans as I type. Got them and a pair of Calvin Kleins at Costco, for seventeen dollars per pair — which doesn’t exactly scream quality. Since Costco’s lack of dressing rooms means I didn’t try them on beforehand, and they are lycra-laced while I fear belts, they require constant hitching by day’s end.
Yet I love them, ecstatically and nostalgically, as only a former designer-jeans-craving junior high school girl from the earliest 80’s can.
We were obsessed with designer jeans in upper elementary and junior high school, thanks to various brands’ aggressive marketing campaigns and a steady diet of their TV commercials. We wanted Calvin Kleins so we could writhe into spoken-word poses like Brooke Shields! We wanted to sport Gloria Vanderbilt’s name proudly, on our bottoms! We wanted Jordache, we wanted Sassoon, we wanted Sergio Valente, we wanted Bon Jour.
But designer jeans were expensive — around $50 each, in non-adjusted 1981 dollars. And I came from a family in which three rowdy, growing brothers blew through or blew out several pairs of jeans each year. My parents had not been brainwashed into designer jeans worship, and weren’t about to spend crazy money on clothes they considered casual and utilitarian.
My parents didn’t understand how my heart ached for designer jeans. I wanted them. I needed them. When friends had me over to show off their new jeans, I would palm the discarded informational tags so I could take them home and pore over them: “The Sassoon fit is extremely tight! You may need to lie on your back, on the floor, in order to zip them up.” I resented my plain beige Health-Tex trousers, which came with no such warning labels.
My friends and I talked about designer jeans all the time. We wrote comic strips featuring characters like Gloria Vanderbutt. I even wrote a play, “Jeans and Stuff,” — a nasty work of petty tweener materialism and social seething that my friend Michael’s mother agreed to type up (Why? How could she stand it?) and which I still have, although I cannot bring myself to read it.
My parents eventually gave in, probably so they wouldn’t have to listen to my whining. They took me to a jeans warehouse carrying all the brands I craved — Calvin Kleins and Gloria Vanderbilts excepted — for less than $20 each. By seventh grade, and through throwing all of my back-to-school points and paper route funds at that store, I had amassed five (5!) pairs of designer jeans. (Counterfeiting never even pinged my one-track mind.)
I wrote up a jeans schedule and posted it over the white & gilt headboard of my butterfly fabric canopy bed — where a good little Catholic girl would have a picture of Jesus — so I would not sin and wear the same jeans on the same day of the week, two weeks in a row. I would sometimes assign tops (I had a few Izod shirts of equally questionable origin, one lavender dress shirt with a matching pink-and-purple argyle vest, and a maroon velour v-neck shirt that I really loved), but ensembles weren’t really the point. I was wearing designer jeans, and, by their distinctively patterned, signature pocket designs, all the junior high world would look upon me, and despair!
Not that wearing the right jeans helped my social status. I remained, as I still do, a huge dork. But the right jeans made me a happy dork. And now, through the rekindled magic of warehouse shopping, I’m a happy dork once again.
My CISWY co-editor Jen frequently remarks that she is “Not nice.” I don’t believe her. But I do believe that I’ve been Not Nice for a long, long time, as this mortifying post illustrates.
I found every last part of seventh grade bewildering. The hundreds of new students, the maze-like new campus, the rows and rows of lockers, having to choose classes and then needing to switch between those classes six times each day, the concept of “popularity” and its blatant yet slippery links to student government elections, and the hundreds of new students.
My classmates and I had been plucked from our isolated, comforting, elementary school nerdling pod, and dropped into a massive social cage match. I found myself on the sidelines, confused and lost, in a holding pen with the geekiest geeks from five other elementaries.
I might have been at a social disadvantage, but I was also not a nice kid. And I quickly compensated for my social disorientation by picking on the weaker and geekier. Morgan Van Grundy and his bolo ties? Fair game. A friendly, gangly new kid with the then-rare name Cameron? In my sights. I quickly had them both squirming. Both asking me why I couldn’t be nicer to them. Asking what they had ever done to me.
I remained unrepentant. Besides, I lacked the self-awareness to explain that I preyed on them so I wouldn’t feel like fair game to the kids outside our fast-track classrooms.
After a few weeks as a free agent, I found an equally callous partner. Lara was a transplant from New York and had the accent to prove it. She was creative and vivacious and interesting, and told me secrets about life outside Southern California, about things like boroughs and fashion models. I started to spend afternoons at her house. I would moon over her designer jeans. She would tell me what it was like to have a single mom. We would talk in hushed tones about S-E-X even though no one else was home.
Lara was no more bone-evil than I was, but she shared my fondness for easy targets. So, when we weren’t gossiping, watching TV, dressing up, or laying waste to her family’s stash of Jello pudding pops, we were tormenting her neighbors and our classmates Deanna and Adele.
Deanna lived next door to Lara, and Adele lived a few houses down the street. They were good friends, and were cut from the same quiet, good-natured, studious cloth. I got the sense that Lara had been friends with them both in elementary school, but that they’d since had had a falling out. I never even bothered to ask what happened. I had no reason to target Deanna and Adele, not one — except that Lara wanted to pick on them, and I liked to pick on people. Because I was not a nice kid. Because it was easy. Because I felt powerless, and so craved power, no matter how tainted or piddling.
This is what Lara and I would do:
We would walk behind Adele and Deanna and snicker.
We would follow them onto the volleyball court during P.E. and demand to know what “that thing” on Adele’s face was (it was a beauty mark).
We would “oink” at Deanna and her perky upturned nose when the teachers weren’t listening.
We would call them at home, several times a day, and then hang up when they answered.
One day, a voice that wasn’t Deanna’s answered the phone at her house. It was a teenage girl’s voice, but a thick voice, a slow voice. I hung up and told Lara what I’d heard.
“Oh, that’s Deanna’s sister. She’s retarded. She wears maxi pads in the swimming pool!”
And, inexcusably, I laughed and called right back. The sister picked up the phone. I wondered again at her voice’s tone and texture, and then I asked for Deanna. Deanna picked up the phone, said “Hi?” and of course I hung up, because Deanna’s sister and our need to harass Deanna were two entirely separate issues.
But I thought about Deanna’s sister a lot, even as Lara and I kept up the harassment. What did the sister do all day? Did she go to school? Did she ever go out of her house?
Our own classes were small enough that after a few months we knew baseline biography information on just about everyone, so while I knew that Deanna had older parents, she never once mentioned her sister. Nor did anyone else. Not through five more years of classes together. I still wonder if Deanna’s sister was a source of pain, strength, peace, or all three. If Deanna’s silence was to protect her sister, herself, or both of them. If her silence was even a conscious effort.
Lara and I eventually gave up on Deanna and Adele because, to their credit, they ignored us. They didn’t have their parents or teachers intervene, they didn’t confront us, and they never retaliated in any way. They didn’t even acknowledge that we’d said or done anything to them. We stopped bothering them, because without reactions to fuel our actions, we lost our motivation.
We never succeeded in taking away even an ounce of their power.
Not that I didn’t find other victims to needle. After all, I wasn’t very nice.
—–
For those who now need something with which to wash their eyes, here is Susan Etlinger’s latest hero, slamming the foulness of the word “retard”:
“Molly, when did you have your first drink?” My thirteen-year-old niece asked.
“On my twenty-first birthday which was also my wedding day … and I was a virgin.”
“You Lie!”
I was in the eighth grade, and mom had just had a Bunco party where her friends left behind a bunch of vodka. The next day, before school, my two friends Sam and Maddy came to my house.
“Look what I got,” I said, revealing the bottle from behind my back.
“Let’s get wasted,” I said, taking the first swig and passing it to Sam who swigged and passed to Maddy who swigged and around we went until the bottle was empty. I filled the bottle up with water and placed it back on the kitchen counter. We stumbled through the back alley smoking a cigarette.
Maddy began laughing hysterically for no reason. “Careful, you might pee your pants again,” Sam said, referring to the major incident that happened one week prior to then: get wasted before school day.
Sam flicked a calligraphy pen filled with ink at my face. Maddy busted into laughter at the sight of me with black splatter thrown across my face. Maddy stopped laughing and ran out of the classroom.
“Hey look, Maddy peed her pants,” Sam yelled, pointing to the puddle left on Maddy’s chair.
I started to open my locker when I heard Maddy yell, “I hate you, bitch!” while jumping Sam. A crowd gathered and cheered on their favored chick. A teacher broke up the fight. I don’t know why, but my instinct told me to jump on the teacher who then grabbed me, and dragged us all to the principal’s office. We were suspended for three days.
“Well, you’re Lucky,” my niece says, “When I got into a fight last year, it was posted on MySpace.”
Yes, there are some perks to being an old fart from the stone age of analog.
In general I have not been the mom who couldn’t stand it when her kids moved to another stage in life. (Not that there is anything wrong with that mom.)
At times I have thought that there must be something wrong with me because I am able to walk away from milestones such as the first day of kindergarten, without crying. But honestly, I have tried to simply celebrate whatever stage my children are in. I loved my babies as babies, but I don’t wish they were still babies. I embraced having three toddlers under five at home, napping on the couch, and never showering. I appreciated that we didn’t have to be anywhere at a certain time, and that I basically had complete control over my children’s choice of friends—and their choices about everything else.
Then my oldest child started kindergarten. I was excited that we were done with being home and had entered a new era: elementary school. It seemed as though every year after that, I had another child starting kindergarten. And even though my youngest is only two, I feel as though he will start kindergarten any minute now.
But this year there has been a little kink in my plan to always embrace the next stage of my children’s lives, because one of them finally reached a stage that I just wasn’t excited about. My oldest son, Cole, has started middle school. Every day, he walks into the same building that I walked into during my first year of junior high. He’s playing the trumpet. I played the trumpet. It’s his first year to have a locker. I still cry when I think about trying to remember my locker combination.
We took Cole to and from school for the first few days of middle school, but now he’s riding the bus. Which is better, because I don’t have to break out in hives when I drive to the school and remember my middle school days.
Last spring we went to the school for orientation. I was walking the halls with Cole and I said, “Yep, Cole, right there. There’s the spot where Mama had her very first nervous breakdown. That’s right. That desk right there in what used to be Mrs. Moore’s class.”
Cole looked at me with an expression that clearly did not mean, “I feel you mom. I’m just so sorry.”
Like Mrs. Moore, he did not understand the plight of an eleven-year-old girl who was being made fun of daily by the boy who sat right across from her, because if Mrs. Moore had understood, she would have used her almighty powers to move that boy to the other side of the room.
When I say I was being made fun of, I do not mean the kind where people say to you, “Oh he is just flirting with you.” I know about the kind of teasing that is really just flirting. That’s what this boy did to other girls. But me, I was mocked, made the butt of all jokes and made to look like the complete idiot that of course I already believed I was because I could not everever get my locker open on the first try. Or manage to get to class with everything I needed. Or come up with a science project that would please the likes of Mrs. Moore.
Usually I managed to get all the way inside my house before I would cry. I would take deep breaths as I slowly walked the road from the bus stop to my house, and up the stairs to my blessed bed with the Holly Hobbie bedspread. “You can make it,” I would tell myself.
But one day, I couldn’t make it. I didn’t even make it out of third period. I cried so hard that I actually hyperventilated. Which finally made people notice that I was being hounded by a mean boy for the entirety of every science class. And here’s the thing about middle school. You don’t ever want anyone to take notice. Your parents, yes, and your close friends, maybe, if you have any. But not the rest of the world. To them, I was just trying to be invisible. So, yes, the mean boy got in trouble. It was a long time ago, so he even got spanked. Which I never lived down. Mrs. Moore finally moved him, disdainfully. And I spent the rest of the year trying harder and harder to disappear into the nonexistent spaces between the lockers.
When Cole and I got home from his orientation, he told his dad that I was completely crazy and could his dad please take him to all of the rest of his middle school events instead of Mom? When we filled my husband in as to why, he said with complete nonchalance, “That’s funny. When I was in seventh grade, I got spanked for making fun of a girl until she cried.” I lost just a little bit of respect for him right then and there. Respect he will not regain until he finds that poor girl and apologizes. Which he cannot do, because he doesn’t remember her name. They never do.
The good news is that I don’t think that Cole is going to repeat my middle school experience. And I know this not just because he is a boy. I know it because on the first day of school I picked him up and when he got in the car he was chewing on something. So I said, “Hey, what’s in your mouth?” To which he replied, “My locker combination.”
And because he is the kind of boy who would actually eat the only piece of paper he has with that sacred information on it, I had to give him a lecture right then and there about never making fun of girls.
I’m a loner and have been since nursery school. Even the idea of having a friend is completely foreign to me. My class is the amalgamation of the “smart” kids of the entire school district and we are all attending an full-time, every day “enrichment” program. It is 1.5 hours away by bus, meaning I leave home at 7:05am, well before sunrise for much of the school year. I am 2 years younger than all of my classmates. My entire wardobe consists of jewel-toned jogging suits and I am crowned with a bright red afro (thanks to an unfortunate haircut). I obsessively listen to the other kids but when I try to act social with them, even they can tell I’m mimicing. They think I’m a freak. In a classroom full of kids that were supposed to be like me… I’m still a freak.
I discover that I really enjoy working with my hands when we start taking wood shop. I’ve begged to be allowed to take weekly wood shop class with the boys, because my other choices are home economics and art, and I already know how to bake, use a sewing machine and have no artistic skill whatsoever. Reluctantly, the teacher grants me permission to join the class when my homeroom teacher intervenes on my behalf. I am delighted.
Wood shop is apparently a proving ground for the budding adolescent male, where the jocks suddenly are on equal academic footing with the nerds. The teacher belongs to the jock group, I can tell by the way he stands and who he jokes with, but beyond that classification the social nuances are lost on me. For once I’m so different I’m left completely alone… a girl isn’t worth the time of the jocks or the nerds.
We do different projects to learn to use the different tools, moving from hand tools to power tools and then onto the machines, giant sanders, saws, lathes. My success is mediocre, but I don’t care! It’s new and I love the smells and sounds and solitude of the projects. After a few weeks, the teacher tells us to prepare on graph paper a design to cut out on the jigsaw. Something with some curves and some straight edges, and he’ll approve the designs before we’re allowed to copy it onto a piece of wood. I spend the next week tracing and retracing the same design… a musical 1/8th note, where the note is a heart shape. I plan to carefully sand it and colour several different samples of the design for myself, trying to decide on what colour will look nicest hanging on my bedroom wall. I painstakingly draw more than a dozen of them, trying to get the
perfect balance of heart-to-stem, the heart shape proportional and not to fat, not to thin, the stem not so thick as to throw off the balance of the picture, the tail on the eighth note gracefully curved and angled.
Finally, the morning of the class arrives and I eagerly wait my turn, to have my design approved so I can pick out a piece of pine from the scrap bin and start work. I watch while the teacher nods and smiles at the jock’s designs, and sighs but approves the nerd’s designs. I present my own coloured master plan, on graph paper as specified, and wait.
The teacher frowns. His eyes narrow. I don’t know how to read it yet. Angrily, he gestures towards the drawing. “What is this supposed to be?”
“A love note!” I say proudly. I feel it is both clever and cute and am eager to learn how to use the jigsaw.
His face clenches, he crumples it up and tosses it in the waste-paper basket, tells me to sit at my desk. I’m too confused to cry while he steps into the next room, the art room, and speaks to the teacher briefly. I am shortly steered by the shoulder into art class, where I spend the remaining 6 weeks of the semester making a coil pot out of clay, my cheeks burning with shame because I still don’t know what I’ve done wrong.
I hated Karen Morley in year 8. She had naturally blonde hair so light it was nearly white. Her no-makeup skin revealed the colourless spots beneath to the world. When she laughed her small teeth were yellow against the red of her too-large gums; and she laughed a lot. Her clothes were boring and old fashioned, as if her gran had chosen them. She had no friends. Despite all of that, the boys seemed to love her. They flocked around her like seagulls around fish! And she had a boyfriend called Colin.
But she was so boring! She never said anything. She just laughed. She laughed at their jokes, she laughed when they teased her, she even laughed they asked her questions instead of giving an answer. But still they flocked.
Tania and I often stood frowning, arms folded, watching in disbelief. Now Tania and I – we were interesting, clever and funny. We could joke back, tease them with attitude and hold our own in any debate. We knew about football, politics, psychology and Marc Bolan. We also spent a lot of time on our clothes, hair and makeup. So why were they hanging around with her? She couldn’t even crack a joke and she had yellow teeth for goodness sake!
I can’t recall much about what we did to Karen Morley that year. I do remember Colin kicking Tania really hard in the playground for calling Karen names. I don’t remember the names that we called her but I expect being boring and yellow teeth were mentioned. We were outraged at his reaction. We had just wanted the boys to see what we saw. They were supposed to turn against her, not us.
Three years later Karen Morley and I sat together in the Form room only a couple of months away from leaving school. All animosities had long ceased. We chatted and laughed about teenage girly stuff. Then suddenly she told me that Tania and I had made her life Hell in year 8. She said we had sent her a card on her birthday and when she’d opened it “We all hate you” was written inside. I was devastated. I saw all the pain of that year in her face.
Karen Morley was a nice, pretty, not particularly clever person. She had never done anything to hurt me, but I had really hurt her. I remember that I said I was sorry and did not know what else to say. I wish now that I’d told her what pretty hair she had, how attractive her laugh was, and how destructive and powerful jealousy can be.
Jorge strummed his blonde wood guitar in the hotel patio. He swaggered right up to the table where I sat crunching a taquito de pollo drizzled with cream, flanked by my parents. I leaned toward him, his tight silver-spangled pants and mustard-colored mariachi suit bright in the Mexican sun. He looked me straight in the face, and launched into a song that seemed to be breaking his heart. Yo soy un hombre sincero…
I was twelve, and enchanted. It was Holy Week in Puerta Vallarta. California was still groggy from winter, but Mexico was wide awake, fragrant and rioting in color. Scarlet and magenta bougainvillea comingled, dripping over gleaming black balconies of twisted iron. Thick white-washed walls hid interior courtyards, filled with cooing birds and cooling palms.
I watched bright parachutes soar over the Pacific. I ate clams for the first time and crunchy curls of fried cheese dipped in smoky salsa. I devoured Gone With The Wind, perched poolside in a black bikini, legs slick with baby oil.
Back home, the foxiest boy in the 6th grade was Tim Morelli. If I did the right thing, acted the right way, maybe he would invite me to his fort, clasp his St. Christopher medal around my throat, ask me to go steady. A couple of weeks before our trip, Tim invited me to meet him after school at the bluffs, a hideout under the eucalyptus trees. I pushed my bike up the craggy, crusty hill and waited in the shade under tangy leaves, my heart thumping.When he arrived, Tim jammed his grimy hand into my underpants and wormed it around. I squeezed my eyes shut, lips pressed together. The going steady would come next. A ring, maybe. I waited. Footsteps crunched through the leaves and he pulled out his hand. His two friends, Wally and Dave elbowed each other, and Tim grinned.
I pedaled my lime green Schwinn home as fast as I could, thighs on fire, tears streaming into my ears. No medal, no gentle kiss. After that, Wally and Dave regularly ambushed me in the janitor’s closet. They wrestled me to the ground, then groped and grabbed at me. “Gusto,” they shrieked, mimicking a popular beer ad, and twisted the tender tips of my breasts.“Go for the gusto!” Each time, my nipples were purple for days.
But in Mexico, there were wide grins, low bows, a door swept open. And what does the señorita desire this evening? While Jorge strummed, I sipped my virgin strawberry daiquiri and imagined his mouth clamped over mine, what it might feel like to have that black mustache prickle my lips.
I was safe, high on my vacationer pedestal, a moat of chlorinated water, Hawaiian Tropic Cocoa Butter and my mother’s close eye keeping me from harm.
At home, though, the border between child and woman was dangerous. On weekends at my dad’s house, my older step-brother regularly terrorized me in the middle of the night, fondling my breasts with his dry hands, jacking off in the dark while I scrunched into a ball. Another guy started out as a babysitter, and we jumped Parcheesi pieces around a board, but after dark, the game changed; a slobbery kiss, a teenage hand cold on my belly, reaching, pushing.
“Don’t tell,” they all said, and I was ashamed, so I kept quiet. I figured I deserved it; that’s what happens to girls with breasts already as big as their mother’s, who dream of kissing mustached mouths, who are desperate to wear Tim Morelli’s cheap ring.
The lipglossy clear-eyed girls in magazines, the Susan Deys and Marsha Bradys swung their hair and grinned. They didn’t look scared. They wore gleaming white swim suits, slim bodies just right; no scraggly wiry hairs sprouting, no purple stretch marks, no Oxy 10 in their medicine cabinets, no worn copies of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret under their pillows. They were cool, possessed, sure, un-slouching, un-needing. Unlike me.
A couple of months before our trip to Mexico, I discovered a saddle-colored stain in my underwear. I was the first girl in the class to get my period, but I had seen the film strips, I knew that it was just men-stroo-ay-shun. I snuck into my mom’s bathroom and pushed in a tampon. It felt foreign inside me, uncomfortable; I didn’t feel like horseback riding or swimming, like the smiling Kathy Rigby had promised in the TV ads.
That afternoon, I hid in my room, record player blaring, furious at my body’s betrayal. I knew what was lurking across the border; more bruised nipples and slimy tongues, more grabbing and jerking.
My mom came in, asked how my day was, and the tears dripped off my jawline.
“Oh, honey, whatever it is, we can fix it,” she kept saying, stroking my hair.
“You can’t,” I cried, hanging my head. “Nobody can.”
After a few minutes, she spied my balled-up underpants in the corner and understood. She straightened me up, looked into my face, gently. “You’re becoming a woman.”
On our last day in Mexico, Jorge again came to our table. He sang a lovely lilting song, closing his eyes, chin tilted skyward during the best parts. “In your mouth, you will carry the flavor of me…”Then he took off his hat, and asked my parents’ permission to leave a small gift. “So that you have warm memories of my country,” he said in perfect English. It was a cheap, too-big necklace, a slab of marbled stone hanging from a cord. I was awed. It was the same mustard color of his mariachi uniform.
A tiny ballerina danced every time I cracked my jewelry box open to look at Jorge’s gift. I fingered the cool stone cradled in red velvet. But I never wore the necklace, didn’t want to feel the weight of it around my neck, the press of stone between my breasts. I just liked knowing it was there, waiting for me.
The summer before the seventh grade, I received an unexpected phone call.
“Kari! It is Trisha! You remember me, right?”
The voice was friendly but the name was not familiar. I probably uttered a noncommittal, “Um… hi!”
“You mean you don’t remember me?” she asked, her voice a bit sharper. She didn’t wait for an answer, “We were, like, best friends in the third grade.” Her voice sweetened, “You remember… right?”
I refused to say “yes.” My best friend in the second grade had taught me not to lie. And in the third grade she told me music was of the Devil and as third-graders we had to be “mature.” Of course, we also had the Crazy Club in the third grade, and that wasn’t particularly “mature,” nor was being crazy particularly God-approved. I didn’t remember a “Trisha” in that mix.
I couldn’t say “yes,” but I also didn’t want to admit not remembering her if she could be a potential friend.
That best friend from the second grade moved on to a Christian junior high while I went through several public junior high rites-of-passage such as having a seagull take a shit on my head during lunch, being accused of stuffing my bra, and having my locker broken into: the shelves my dad had built for me were doused with graffiti and the cheerful pink striped wrapping paper I used as wallpaper now had, “Kari is a Pig-Nose” written between the lines.
(The Pig-Nose thing was pretty unoriginal, but that didn’t stop me from crying when a group of teenagers with their noses taped up high entered the frozen yogurt place where I worked a few years later. They specifically asked for me to serve their yogurt.)
In the sixth grade I ate lunch with a Chinese woman who wore her old school uniform, a shy Polish immigrant, a girl whose mullet stuck up in the front revealing heavy forehead acne, and a fickle, spacey seventh-grader who repeated the seventh grade. Eventually, Mullet Girl decided she was too cool for me, so I stuck with the folks who didn’t speak English.
If “Trisha” was real, maybe I would have a shot at a friend who was cooler than those others.
“Um, well, we must have been in different classes,” I finally said to the voice on the phone.
“Nope!” Again, the voice was super-cheery and expectant. “Look… I am moving back into the area, and I wanted to see if you would show me around.”
“Um, sure!” Finally I could answer in the affirmative. I could be bouncy, helpful, and friendly.
“Why don’t you meet me on the steps on the first day of school!”
“Sure, absolutely!”
“You better remember me by then,” she cautioned, and then laughed, “Bye!” Was that a giggle and snort I heard in the background?
I was skeptical and worried. If “Trisha” was pretty, she’d be snapped up by the “popular kids.” And if she wasn’t… well, then she’d be yet another person that I ate with because nobody else would.
The first day of seventh grade, I waited on the steps close to the location where eight months later I would overhear the football team telling their coach that if I made cheerleader they would all quit the team. I had made finals; they were panicking. I didn’t make cheerleader.
I waited for Trisha.
And waited.
Perhaps there were giggles. Perhaps there were people hiding alongside a building, peeking out. But I didn’t notice them.
After the second bell, I ran to class. Of course I was late, but I hadn’t wanted to miss a potential friend. I didn’t want her to think I had stood her up.
That evening, she called, “Um, sorry. I couldn’t make it this morning.”
I promised to wait for her again the next morning.
Of course, nobody came.
The call that evening was, “Where were you? I waited for you!”
I knew she hadn’t arrived, had she?
I half-apologized, half-accused, “Well, sorry if you are real, but if you aren’t, stop bugging me.” I hung up without waiting for her response.
Fed up with public school life, I ended up at a private high school. But “Trisha” hadn’t forgotten me the way I had apparently forgotten her. That familiar voice phoned me shortly after my sixteenth birthday to inform me of a new dating service in the area. She didn’t identify herself as “Trisha,” but I am pretty sure it was the same person.
“No thanks, I have a boyfriend,” I shrugged.
The shock in her voice was noticeable, “Well keep us in mind for when he dumps you!” I heard plenty of snickers in the background.
Two years later, the phone rang. “We are from the premier dance academy in the country. We saw your most recent performance and are interested in having you apply to our school. To where should we send the admissions materials?”
This was a joke, right? Still, I couldn’t be sure, and I wanted to be polite, even if I had no intention of attending their school. I gave the voice my postal address.
A few minutes later, the phone rang again, “Oh, so sorry…” and then I heard a huge guffaw. The voice composed herself and shushed the peanut gallery, “It turns out that you are not the dancer we are interested in. There are many better than you. Best of luck with your college applications.”
“Actually, I’ve already been admitted to Brown University. But thanks for your well-wishes,” I responded. I knew their call was a joke, but my statement wasn’t a lie.
They called during the holiday break after my first semester of college to taunt me again with the fictional dating service. Fortunately, I was able to respond that their services were not necessary.
The next holiday break, the only calls were from my boyfriend.
I met a real “Trisha” years later. She is a gorgeous, thin, multi-talented woman. But she is also someone with a heart.
Mullet Girl is now quite beautiful and holds degrees in law and genetics. We are long-distance friends via holiday cards with occasional phone calls where I know the voice comes from a real person.
Christian Girl returned to the fold of our Crazy Club and we are now Crazy Mothers together.
I grew up in a small town outside of Chicago where the summers were so hot it felt like your skin was about to melt off and you would be happy because you suspected you would be cooler that way, and the winters were so cold your freshly-washed hair would freeze solid at the bus stop.
This was the end of the eighties, during the last gasp of the big poodle hair craze. In the eighth grade I had my crazy tangle out front teased up until it could ensnare low-flying bats. I was so proud of it! This, combined with my tendency to carelessly leave the house with the back of my hair still wet, and my fetching gigantic hoop earrings that could double as a belt in a pinch, meant I wasn’t one to wear a wooly hat. So, I was sick all the time, all winter long, and I tend to think that there was a relationship between my constant sickness and my habits.
Despite being smart overall (other than the hat thing), I was in the Math Facts for Complete Morons that year, which felt like torture to me. There was not a bone in my body or a dusty, forgotten corner of my brain that could make me retain math, I’m sorry to say. Even in college when I was required to take algebra and I did every extra assignment, studied hard, and stayed after to get help from the teacher, I barely squeaked by with a B. Now I’m pretty good with “practical” math, such as grocery store deals and restaurant tipping, but I was hopeless in those days. So there I was for the 4,000th time, studying basic math facts again.
Fact: I was deeply, deeply bored.
Fortunately, I had something else to focus on: I was completely in love with the boy who was across the room from me. I could stare at him for the whole hour, because our desks were broken up into two groups of rows that faced each other, with a big aisle down the middle. I was almost right across from him, but one row over, so lucky for me no one was blocking the view of his utter handsomeness.
Rather than fussing with fractions, I studied this boy. I noticed how many times in a week he wore his favorite sweater (orange with a snowflake pattern) and if he had gotten is hair cut (bowl cut to shorter bowl cut). Once he was out sick for three days, leaving me alone to twist and fidget in my seat as if I was being burned at the math stake.
Yearly, usually in January, the whole school would be hit by that coughy-phlegmy plague that lingers for weeks. I had an unsympathetic mother who would pretty much only let me stay home if there was good, solid evidence I was currently bleeding from a major artery or nonstop rocket-style vomiting. So there I was in my math class, at that stage of the cold where you feel like you need to sneeze constantly.
Fact: Middle school girls often find normal bodily functions embarrassing.
The whole class sat quietly, working on some math problems that were assigned in-class. I had the most tortuous tickle — it was as if the entire contents of my head were trying to escape. If only I was at home and could sneeze and blow until I felt better. But no. If I did that in class that would mean my classmates would know I was human, and did disgusting things like sneeze. If I couldn’t even sneeze, then noseblowing was ABSOLUTELY out of the question.
I kept holding my sneezes in, making pathetic little “Eep! Eep!” noises as I held them back, feeling more and more as if my head would pop. I would not be caught dead carrying something as practical and grandma-like as tissues, so even as I began to wish I had some, I continued suffering in squeaky near-silence. Some people, bored to death of their basic math facts, leaned over to whisper, “Bless you.” My math teacher had even thoughtfully provided a box of tissues on the corner of his desk for student use, but there was no way I was going to parade across the room in front of the boy I liked and fire up the schnozz trumpet.
Desperately, I began to consider my options. Could I make it up to the front and whisper for permission to go to the bathroom? I didn’t think so. My eyes were so watery that the math problems on the paper in front of me were beginning to blur and swim. I was going to … OH NO.
Fact: I was totally hosed.
“WHAA-CHOOOOO!” I lost it, breaking the heavy mathy silence that blanketed the classroom. I clapped my hand, covered with the too-long sleeve of my sweatshirt, over my upper lip, mouth, and chin which were all now densely covered with a shiny snot goatee.
I froze where I was, and glanced around furtively. A couple more “Bless yous” were tossed my way. No one seemed to be paying attention. Even the teacher was busy marking our pop quizzes from that morning. With trepidation, I looked across the room. There was the object of my secret love, brows knitted, working away at his math problem. Whew. Sleeve still in place, I hunched down over my work and tried to figure out what to do next as my face burned. At least I could see my paper again.
I scraped off a little bit of the snot goatee at a time. To this day, I think it was probably the most fluid that has come out of my head, ever. I thought, could I hide under my hands and ask for permission to go to the bathroom now? No. Even more embarrassing now that my face had exploded. I kept working away at it a little bit at a time. To my horror and deepening panic, the part of the sleeve I was working on became totally saturated and I had to roll the snot up inside my sleeve. I turned to the other sleeve, lamenting the fact that it was my favorite sweatshirt (I thought it was hilarious: “I think, therefore, I party,” plus it was big, warm, and comfortable). Would this ruin it? I still kept glancing up at the boy I was crushed out on across the way, who, as usual, did not notice I existed.
Finally, my face was dry again and my sleeves were rolled up almost all the way to my elbows. I was saved! I didn’t think there was anything left on my face, but I touched it repeatedly to make sure. I congratulated myself on my cleverness.
Then, setting his pencil down, my crush nonchalantly slid his chair back and stood up from his desk. He strolled across the room and took a tissue out of the box on the teacher’s desk and quietly blew his nose with his back to the class.
Oh, DISGUSTING. How could he get up and blow his nose in front of the whole room like that? It was at that moment that I noticed he had kind of a funny-shaped head and … was that a boil next to his nose? I, the girl with her own snot ensconced inside not one but both sleeves, discovered that I did not love this boy as much as I thought. Love is fickle that way, I guess.
I grew up in a small town outside of Chicago where the summers were so hot it felt like your skin was about to melt off and you would be happy because you suspected you would be cooler that way, and the winters were so cold your freshly-washed hair would freeze solid at the bus stop.
This was the end of the eighties, during the last gasp of the big poodle hair craze. In the eighth grade I had my crazy tangle out front teased up until it could ensnare low-flying bats. I was so proud of it! This, combined with my tendency to carelessly leave the house with the back of my hair still wet, and my fetching gigantic hoop earrings that could double as a belt in a pinch, meant I wasn’t one to wear a wooly hat. So, I was sick all the time, all winter long, and I tend to think that there was a relationship between my constant sickness and my habits.
Despite being smart overall (other than the hat thing), I was in the Math Facts for Complete Morons that year, which felt like torture to me. There was not a bone in my body or a dusty, forgotten corner of my brain that could make me retain math, I’m sorry to say. Even in college when I was required to take algebra and I did every extra assignment, studied hard, and stayed after to get help from the teacher, I barely squeaked by with a B. Now I’m pretty good with “practical” math, such as grocery store deals and restaurant tipping, but I was hopeless in those days. So there I was for the 4,000th time, studying basic math facts again.
Fact: I was deeply, deeply bored.
Fortunately, I had something else to focus on: I was completely in love with the boy who was across the room from me. I could stare at him for the whole hour, because our desks were broken up into two groups of rows that faced each other, with a big aisle down the middle. I was almost right across from him, but one row over, so lucky for me no one was blocking the view of his utter handsomeness.
Rather than fussing with fractions, I studied this boy. I noticed how many times in a week he wore his favorite sweater (orange with a snowflake pattern) and if he had gotten is hair cut (bowl cut to shorter bowl cut). Once he was out sick for three days, leaving me alone to twist and fidget in my seat as if I was being burned at the math stake.
Yearly, usually in January, the whole school would be hit by that coughy-phlegmy plague that lingers for weeks. I had an unsympathetic mother who would pretty much only let me stay home if there was good, solid evidence I was currently bleeding from a major artery or nonstop rocket-style vomiting. So there I was in my math class, at that stage of the cold where you feel like you need to sneeze constantly.
Fact: Middle school girls often find normal bodily functions embarrassing.
The whole class sat quietly, working on some math problems that were assigned in-class. I had the most tortuous tickle — it was as if the entire contents of my head were trying to escape. If only I was at home and could sneeze and blow until I felt better. But no. If I did that in class that would mean my classmates would know I was human, and did disgusting things like sneeze. If I couldn’t even sneeze, then noseblowing was ABSOLUTELY out of the question.
I kept holding my sneezes in, making pathetic little “Eep! Eep!” noises as I held them back, feeling more and more as if my head would pop. I would not be caught dead carrying something as practical and grandma-like as tissues, so even as I began to wish I had some, I continued suffering in squeaky near-silence. Some people, bored to death of their basic math facts, leaned over to whisper, “Bless you.” My math teacher had even thoughtfully provided a box of tissues on the corner of his desk for student use, but there was no way I was going to parade across the room in front of the boy I liked and fire up the schnozz trumpet.
Desperately, I began to consider my options. Could I make it up to the front and whisper for permission to go to the bathroom? I didn’t think so. My eyes were so watery that the math problems on the paper in front of me were beginning to blur and swim. I was going to … OH NO.
Fact: I was totally hosed.
“WHAA-CHOOOOO!” I lost it, breaking the heavy mathy silence that blanketed the classroom. I clapped my hand, covered with the too-long sleeve of my sweatshirt, over my upper lip, mouth, and chin which were all now densely covered with a shiny snot goatee.
I froze where I was, and glanced around furtively. A couple more “Bless yous” were tossed my way. No one seemed to be paying attention. Even the teacher was busy marking our pop quizzes from that morning. With trepidation, I looked across the room. There was the object of my secret love, brows knitted, working away at his math problem. Whew. Sleeve still in place, I hunched down over my work and tried to figure out what to do next as my face burned. At least I could see my paper again.
I scraped off a little bit of the snot goatee at a time. To this day, I think it was probably the most fluid that has come out of my head, ever. I thought, could I hide under my hands and ask for permission to go to the bathroom now? No. Even more embarrassing now that my face had exploded. I kept working away at it a little bit at a time. To my horror and deepening panic, the part of the sleeve I was working on became totally saturated and I had to roll the snot up inside my sleeve. I turned to the other sleeve, lamenting the fact that it was my favorite sweatshirt (I thought it was hilarious: “I think, therefore, I party,” plus it was big, warm, and comfortable). Would this ruin it? I still kept glancing up at the boy I was crushed out on across the way, who, as usual, did not notice I existed.
Finally, my face was dry again and my sleeves were rolled up almost all the way to my elbows. I was saved! I didn’t think there was anything left on my face, but I touched it repeatedly to make sure. I congratulated myself on my cleverness.
Then, setting his pencil down, my crush nonchalantly slid his chair back and stood up from his desk. He strolled across the room and took a tissue out of the box on the teacher’s desk and quietly blew his nose with his back to the class.
Oh, DISGUSTING. How could he get up and blow his nose in front of the whole room like that? It was at that moment that I noticed he had kind of a funny-shaped head and … was that a boil next to his nose? I, the girl with her own snot ensconced inside not one but both sleeves, discovered that I did not love this boy as much as I thought. Love is fickle that way, I guess.
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