It Starts Here, with Him

As of this month, I have been graduated from high school for ten years. This means that next month the Pink Torpedoes and I get to go to a reunion, the first our class has held since we dressed in purple and gold gowns and walked across the auditorium stage.

To commemorate this event, I'm going to spend the next month telling old stories. I'm going to tell stories about school, about growing up in our little town, about growing up with one hundred other people whose business we knew since we were five. I think it's only right to take a look back before seeing everyone again.

And there's no better place to start than in second grade, with Ryan.

For the better part of my school career, Ryan was my one, my only, my love. Did he love me back? No. Not a bit. In fact, he was repulsed by me, and he eventually, when we were older, took to calling me ta punta--which he thought meant "the prostitute" in Spanish (it does not)--but that's a story we'll get to eventually.

This story is where it all started.

It was second grade. Already Ryan was king of the school. Everyone loved him. Everyone. Girls, boys, teachers. Everyone was charmed by his spiked blond hair, his icy eyes, his toothy grin. In all my yearbooks, from grade second to eight, Ryan's yearly picture is easily visible: it's the one with the giant heart drawn around it.

I was not the only girl who had the habit of so clearly showing the position of her heart. Ryan had girls hanging off him at every turn. In gym, where we were able to ogle him as much as we wanted without being shamed, we all pressed our backs against the padded walls and watched as he scaled the ropes to touch the very top rafter. There would be a murmur in the crowd of second grade girls as he reached and reached and reached and then finally got to the top like it was no big deal, like those other boys--the chubby ones, the ones with no upper-body strength--just weren't trying hard enough.

He was beautiful. He was agile. He was tough.

He was also sort of an ass.

Or maybe it was me who was the ass. It's hard to tell.

I like to think I was a shy girl in elementary and middle school, but sometimes when I really think about it, I realize I had moments of boldness that reflected a future that might find me less crippled when it came to boys.

Because my love for Ryan was such a rabid love, I had no problem sharing it with the world. I told everyone about it. I told my mother, my father, my best friends, my cousins. I drew bubbles and hearts with his name inside. I wrote stories where Ryan was the main character and--surprise!--he fell in love with a wise-cracking character named Jess. I didn't hold back. Especially from him.

I followed him around, hopelessly in love. I was always trying to be sweet to him, to give him a treat from my lunch, to help him with his work, to tell him I thought he was real nice. I wanted to be his girlfriend. But Ryan wanted the exact opposite of all that: he wanted me to leave him alone, to stop talking to him, to keep my distance, to forget that I wanted to be his girlfriend. And he had no problem telling me those things.

One day, in gym, we were standing in our usual lines--one for boys, one for girls, directly parallel--and it just so happened that Ryan and I were across from each other. I was excited. I kept looking over at him and smiling, and he kept ignoring me. But he couldn't ignore me forever, especially when someone else in line hissed, Jess LOVES Ryan!

I was half horrified, half not. I didn't like other people to be airing my business--I thought it was plenty evident on its own--but I did like that now Ryan had to think about me and my loving him while everyone was watching.

I turned fully to look at him. I smiled. I reached my hand across the divide. I wiggled my fingers at him.

He narrowed his eyes. "I WILL NEVER LOVE YOU!" he shouted. And then he grabbed my hand and licked it. He licked it from the place where palm meets wrist, all the way up to the tip of my middle finger.

At first, I didn't know what to do. Everyone was watching, and I had just been publicly humiliated. Still, he'd touched me. He'd licked me. He and I had our first real and substantial bit of physical contact ever. And it was fantastic.

So I snatched my hand back and held it to my chest, to my heart. "I'm never going to wash my hand now!" I said, loud enough so the whole line heard me.

The girls giggled and touched my back, my arms, longing to be closer to the hand that had been, for a minute, touching Ryan's mouth.

Ryan just crossed his arms and turned away so he no longer had to look at me, a girl who would go on loving him for six more years, full-on, no stopping. No way, no how. He would never have gotten rid of me that easy.

A Brief History of Things I Have Stolen: Part One

I started thinking about this today as I was writing, and I think it's time I came clean. I have stolen a surprising amount of things over my lifetime. Never from a store--I'm far too sissy to be a shoplifter--but from people, from places, even from Christmas trees. So I'm finally ready to admit to my tiny robberies, even if it means I'm finally revealing how devious and snotty I was as a child.


(1.) The Construction Paper Reindeer --- Elementary School

It's no secret that I hate math. I hate math. Whatever section of my brain conducts computations and measurements is sluggish and bleary. It is perpetually hungover. It's always been like that, too, even in elementary school. I was always behind, always confused, always lost during math lessons, which led to my hating and obsessing over it, which led to my falling further behind.

My hatred for math is legendary. I got the scar on my chin because I hate math so much. I was in first grade, and we were doing a worksheet on adding. To help us with the process, we had small and flimsy plastic disks that stacked on top of each other that we could count out, push together, count again. This was how we started to add.

But even if that was as simple as anything, I hated it. And because I hated it, I had to do something to keep myself amused. So I started flicking those little disks off my desk and onto the floor--plink! plink! plink!--and then getting up, stretching my arms, and taking my time rounding the row of desks to collect my lost disks. When I got back my desk, it was plink! plink! plink! all over again--red and blue chips falling to the floor.

Well, on one of my trips to gather the disks, I got a little fancy. I put my left hand on a desk and my right hand on a desk and then I kicked my legs forward, trying to propel myself with a little zip, but what happened was less zippy and more bloody. I went flying, face first, and my chin cracked into the concrete floor. There was blood everywhere. I would end up getting stitches from a doctor who spoke almost no English except the words "no scar" (liar), and, later, my parents presented me with a Barbie and a multi-colored Slinky. And I so got out of doing that worksheet.

My hatred of math continued after that. No matter of Slinky or Barbie would change my mind about it. And because I was useless at math, I was always behind with my seat work, and I was smart enough to realize the people who were usually behind on their seat work were the kids who had developmental problems, the kids others called retarded. This made me feel even worse about everything, especially on the last day of school before Christmas vacation.

That day we had three worksheets to do for seat work, and after that we would be able to work on our Christmas craft, which was a construction paper reindeer. We had to cut out his brown body, his white accents, and his red nose. We had diagrams that talked us through the elaborate system of folds and safety-scissor cuts we needed to make to put the reindeer together, and I was excited to get into it. But, as usual, I was late with my seat work. It was that math stuff again, and it was making absolutely no sense to me. All my friends had handed their worksheets in and were moving on to their reindeer. I was jealous. I was panicked. Was there enough time for me to get everything done?

Then my classmates were finishing their reindeer. They were hanging them on our Christmas tree for safekeeping until we left for the day. And because they had finished everything, their praises were sung by our teacher, and she let them play quietly in the corner while the rest of us slackers finished up.

Needless to say, I did not finish my seat work in time to start on a reindeer. And our teacher told us to hand everything in and get ready to go home. There was a mad scramble for our tiny lockers in the corner, and suddenly everyone was shoving limbs into jackets and boots.

"Merry Christmas!" our teacher said as she waved goodbye. "I hope Santa is very sweet to all of you! Don't forget your reindeer on your way out!"

And, well, I was embarrassed to walk out to the bus without a reindeer because then everyone would know that I hadn't gotten my work done, that I was just like the retarded kids, that I was a retard, too.

So after I bundled myself into my coat and boots, I ducked into the flow of students leaving the room and heading off to the bus. When we passed the tree, I reached my hand out and plucked one of the best looking deer off the tree without faltering. I walked confidently to my bus, with that reindeer dangling by a red string from my wrist. And when I got home later, my parents were pretty impressed with me.

You're such an artist! they said. Look at what a good job you did!

And I smiled and said thank you.