The Seniors

When I was in high school, the seniors were huge. They were tall, yes, but they were also wise and larger than life. I remember them being really something remarkable. After all, when we first arrived in the high school--this being before they built the addition and gave everyone lockers that you could open without using the combination but by using, instead, a well-aimed punch--they had their own section of the school that anyone who was not a senior or a senior's significant other could not go into.

The year my class--the class of '99--arrived in our high school, the senior's lockers were solid. They were probably the same lockers they'd put in when they built the school, which means they were made of actual substantial things like metal and more metal. Whatever the new lockers were, they weren't anything special, and they certainly weren't set off by themselves in a glorious elevated alcove like the seniors' were. My freshman self sighed dreamily every time she passed that alcove and had to look up to see the seniors who seemed so tall and world-weary. They'd seen some shit, you could tell, and they had been rewarded with those lockers and late arrival privileges.

It seemed like the only way to live.

I was thinking about this tonight as I sat in the gymnasium of a rural Maine high school--the one the TLK attended--watching a basketball game The Lady-Killer's brother was playing in. It was a weird experience. I was sitting in the middle of a hundred sixteen year-olds and watching a bunch of varsity high schoolers play ball and all I could keep thinking was, Who the fuck are these people? These are the seniors? They're children! They're babies! They're skinny, sickly-looking little things!

They were nothing like my seniors. I went to a whole bunch of basketball games when I was in high school, especially as a freshman because that was the year we had an exchange student from Australia and, while he was only cute from certain angles, he had a voice like buttah and he could dunk. Back then, basketball games were a spectacle, and those boys were ten feet tall. They also could grow facial hair and had feet so big it looked like they could share shoes with Ronald McDonald. I should know. Once, in gym class one of the senior basketball players stepped on my sneaker during a game of speedball and it left a permanent black mark that could not be scrubbed away no matter what I tried.

This particular boy, whose name was Mike, was probably well over six feet tall, or at least it seemed that way at the time. He was a bit chubby and slow-moving. He was the super tall guy every basketball team employs to loaf around under the basket at all times, in the hopes that he will simply half-raise his arm and tip a basket in. One of my friends was desperately in love with him, and she spent the entirety of our ninth period gym class following him around the floor during speedball or mat ball or whatever ball we were playing that week. This was fine with me because I was in love with the Australian, who was Mike's best friend. While my friend panted after Mike and actually worked up a sweat during gym by looking like she was participating smartly, I spent the period dodging the speedballs the boys flung deliberately at the girls' heads, and I went to my safe place: an elaborately-concocted future where my friend and I married Mike and the Australian, and we lived happily ever after as next-door neighbors.

But at the high school game tonight I couldn't get over it. I really had no idea what I was watching. These boys looked like what I remembered middle school boys looking like. Even the ones who weren't playing but were clearly at the game to hang out and look cool and were thus not exposing their pale-Maine-wainter-chicken-legs to the entire gym looked like babies. And that's when I realized it: These days, the boys look younger than they did when I was in school and the girls look older.

One of the girls sitting behind me, who was draping herself around one of TLK's best friend's shoulders to piss off her ex-boyfriend who was somewhere in the crowd, had makeup that looked like it had been shellacked on by some makeup artist, pre-Golden Globes. Her eyeliner--which I still cannot manage--was impeccable. She didn't have a hair out of place. Her outfit was skin-tight and stolen from the pages of Seventeen.

I hated her. I couldn't help it. I thought nasty, shitty things about her in my head. And then I realized I was insane and made myself smile at her to make it seem that I wasn't some cranky old broad that had accidentally wandered into the student section and would leave shortly, after she'd soiled her diaper and needed to be changed.

After I smiled and turned back around I said this prayer: Dear God, thank you for letting me go to high school in the 90s. Thank you for letting me grow up in a decade where we did not look like that.

I've never been one to look back on my high school years with rage or despair; I've never walked back into the school after graduating and uttered, "Man, this place fucking sucks!" I know now and knew then how lucky I was: I went to a good school. I did not get caught up in anything bad or illicit. I had a sweet, smart group of friends. We were good girls. Yes, there were shitty times and days when I absolutely refused to get out of bed and go to school because high school was hard, but it was not bad. Not bad at all.

I grew up riding out the wave of grunge. I wore my father's jeans and old sweaters to school. We rolled the sleeves of our t-shirts up and permed our hair. We had ratty old flannel shirts ala Angela Chase. We wrote notes and then folded them elaborately. We sat in the bleachers and watched our big, tough seniors dunk basketballs and then, later, watched from the parking lot as they threw their duffle bags into the backseats of their cars and drove home. We waited for our parents to picks us up.

It was a gorgeous life, and looking back on it now, I think it was extremely romantic. It was a real Time. It was a time unlike this one, maybe, because it was the last of something, things were about to change, people were already getting a little kooked off the impending 2000s, and nothing was going to be much the same anymore after that. We felt it. The class below us always argued they were better because they were the class of 2000. They were the first of the century! But this is what we thought of that: So what? That's not something to boast. The first of something can almost always be improved upon; the last of something usually goes out with a bang.

I don't mean to generalize and use the old things were just simpler back then argument. In some ways they were, and some ways they weren't. But I am glad for a lot of the more simpler things: the notes written in study hall and passed between classes instead of the instant gossip grapevine of text messaging; the absence of social networks; the clothes that didn't cling to our body; the boys who looked grown-up and gallant; sleepovers where we had fashion shows and played Girl Talk or Mall Madness.

If anything, I think it was a quieter time, where kids were forced more to hack it out on their own. I spent a lot of alone time in my room, figuring things out about myself. Do kids do that anymore? Do they sit in their room, without looking at a computer, a television, a cell phone, an iPod? Do they have time to sit still and listen and think, This is me, right now. This is me and no one else.

I'm sure some do, but not many and not often. And when I sat amongst those high schoolers or recently-graduated high schoolers at the game, I was filled with a certain kind of panic as I imagined myself in their world, in their school at that moment. What would I love? Who would I love? Who would I be?

But I didn't want to know. I wasn't jealous of them and their slick 2011 lives. I was overwhelmed with gratitude for my life, when and where I came from. And, also, as one of the boys on the court broke away with the ball and galloped toward the basket, I was seeing the Australian exchange student, his overly-gelled red hair, his long legs scissoring toward the key. I saw him lift, hover, float in the air above that basket before descending upon it and shoving the ball through the hoop as the entire gymnasium of our high school erupted in screams and everyone--not a single person glancing at a cell phone or iPod--leapt into the air because they knew they had just been the part of something holy.

Life As I Know It Is Now Over

Friends, the semester starts tomorrow morning. For the last four months, my life has consisted of the following things: sleep, kissing, food, a lot of driving, vodka, and more sleep. Starting tomorrow morning, my life will consist of the following things: department meetings, committee meetings, syllabi, dry erase markers, and papers.

That second list is a lot less cool.

But to celebrate the fact that a.) I got everything done before the start of the semester... even though I slacked off for all of May, June, July, and August; and b.) it's been a hell of a time, let's review some of my favorite pictures of the summer!

I got an iMac. iMacs come with built-in cameras, and we made use of that camera often. See also:

We're fancy.

We're cartoon-y.

We're on the moon!

Also this summer, there was a Pink Torpedo bachelorette party to deal with! And deal with it we did.

See? We dealt with it with penis. Pink penis.

And also some chocolate penis.

And then there was the Great Pink Torpedo Wedding of 2010. Remember? There was puking!

But more important (and less disgusting) than the puking, there was the bride and the groom (and that gorgeous headpiece).

There was also some magnificent ROCKING OUT.

And then there was the trip to the Midwest, which was unlike my other post-grad school trips to the Midwest in that its main purpose was not to be inebriated for five days in a row. Its purpose was to spend every available moment cuddling babies, like this one. He's a Wisconsinite. He belongs to two of my favorite people in the universe. He and I are best friends.

And here's the other baby. It might be true that she and I are not yet best friends--I brought her a tutu to, you know, selfishly buy her love--but she wasn't having it. Someday, though, she'll realize I'm uniquely handy--like when she's pining away after some blond football star who doesn't know she exists. Madelyn, your mother isn't going to want to talk about that stuff with you. But let me break out the reams of rhyming poetry I wrote about that situation in sixth grade, and if you're good I might give you half a glass of wine while we bond. Promise.

What I learned about babies: They can wear robes!

This picture was taken outside Lorrie Moore's office (!!!!) at UW Madison. It was a big moment for me. Also, just so we're clear: That sign totally says EROTIC POETRY.

My summer was filled with babies: newborns and not-yet-borns. I did hours of art therapy with the not-yet-born and his mother.

I think it's quite clear that this was an excellent summer, and I'm sad to leave it behind, but--as always--I'm happy too. There's just something about first days, about the hope that comes along with them.

I'm ready.

All right, I won't lie. I'm not ready. But bring it on anyway.

Perv.

This week I read an article about some high school teacher/coach who called a girl into his office before laying a hundred dollar bill on the desk in front of him and saying, "I'll give you that if you take your clothes off slowly."

My first thought was ew, and then my second thought was wait a second. That sounds familiar.

Back in high school, one of our history teachers was a notorious pervert. He'd been around for a while. In fact, he'd also been my mother's history teacher back when she was in high school. In her old yearbooks, there he is, a younger version of himself with wet-looking hair and a thick mustache. The look he is giving the camera makes it seem as if he's counting the minutes until he can go home, slip into his smoking jacket, light a cigar, and put on some Burt Bacharach. In short, he looks like a big, fat pervert.

"Oh, he was a big, fat pervert," my mother told me when she found out I'd be having him for a teacher. "He wasn't even sneaky about it. He announced at the beginning of the semester that he was going to put all the most attractive girls in the front row. The so-so girls went in the middle, and then the guys got stuck in the back of the room."

"Oh my God!" I said. "That's disgusting!" Then I paused. "Okay, where were you?"

My mother? She was in the front row.

I was fairly certain Mr. Hardy wouldn't still have such a blatant ranking policy anymore--tenure or not, that was the type of thing to get a man fired from teaching honors history in the 90s--but that didn't stop me from spreading the gossip to my friends, and we all laughed when Mr. Hardy organized the seating chart so that the class outcast and one of the smartest boys got placed directly in front of him.

"Maybe Mr. Hardy's tastes have changed over the years," we joked.

But, really, they hadn't.

One afternoon I dropped by his classroom during a planning period to hand in a short essay extra credit assignment he'd circulated to the class.

"I'll read this while you're right here," he said. "We'll take care of the grade right now."

I stood behind his desk, next to him. I read my words over his shoulder. It was a dynamite little essay, and I was proud of it. I waited patiently for him to finish it and praise me.

And when he finished, he took up his pen and he hovered it right above the paper. "This was good," he said.

"Thank you," I said. I watched his pen very closely. I was waiting to see the good grade he was going to trace on the paper. But the pen just hung in the midair.

"I'll tell you what," he said. "I'll give you a choice."

I turned my eyes from the pen to his face. His hair and mustache were the same as they'd been in my mother's yearbook, but they were gray now. He still looked like he couldn't wait for a patterned silk jacket, a cigar in his fist. He looked like the type of old man who would say to a girl, "Hi there, Kitten. Why don't you come sit on my lap?"

"A choice?" I said. "What do you mean?"

"Well, I could give you a hundred points," he said, "or I could give you a hundred dollars because you're wearing that skirt."

I looked down at my outfit. I was wearing one of those numbers that was popular in the early 90s: plaid school girl skirt, navy knee-highs, chunky Mary Janes. It was my favorite outfit, and I always felt pretty good about myself when I wore it. The boys on the bus--the only boys who had crushes on me--went crazy for that outfit.

"Uhm, I'll take the points," I said.

"Okay." Mr. Hardy laughed and finally put his pen to the paper. He scratched a 100 at the top of my essay and handed it back. He made a notation in his grade book. "You're all set," he said. "I'll see you in class."

I wanted to tell him, "Listen, buddy, you're disgusting." I wanted to say, "Get a grip, pervert." But there was another part of me that wanted to thank him. I was not a pretty girl. I wasn't like the popular girls in our grade, the ones with high, perfect pony-tails and mega-watt smiles. I'd just recently stopped perming my hair, and I had a wardrobe filled with crocheted sweater vests. My nickname was "Chassie," short for "Chastity." The boy I loved most dated the skinniest cheerleaders at school, and I would eventually join the squad for two months in an effort to make him look at me. He never did. It would be years before I got my shit together.

Beyond my parents, not many people stopped me to tell me I looked nice, looked good, looked pretty. And I knew having a fifty-something history teacher tell me I was pretty wasn't going to solve any of my problems, and I knew there was something really disgusting about what he was doing, but for just a few seconds that day I let myself feel a little bit less like I was doomed to be a girl on the periphery forever. And then, minutes later, I hated myself for thinking like that because a teacher had just vaguely hit on me. I knew I should be more scandalized than I was, but at fourteen I was looking for anything to hang my hopes on, and I needed to take whatever I got. And what I got was Mr. Hardy, who never again said anything inappropriate to me. We made it through the rest of the year discussing world history, and I got my good grades, and I sat in the second row, and I tried not to think about what a horrible pervert was standing at the front of the room, smoothing his mustache and looking out at the girls in his class and thinking, Yes, yes. If only.

This Is a Story That Ends with Almost-Naked Guys Drinking Beer in a Pool They Aren't Supposed to Be In

Yesterday the girls and I climbed the stairs of the lodge at a local campground, where our 10 year high school reunion was being held, and presented ourselves as a united front. We gripped each other for support and crossed the threshold, and there we were, the class of 1999--well, 28 of us anyway; the turnout was dismal--and we had all grown up. Not surprisingly, most people were married and popping out pictures of babies and weddings. When a new person broke into our circle and started asking after our situations--"Relationships?" he or she would ask--we would go around with rapid-fire responses. It went like this: Engaged. Engaged. Dating. Married. Then it came to me. "I've got nothing," I said.

Beyond that, it was boys in jeans and girls in too much makeup. It was a DJ playing songs like "Mmm Bop" and "No Diggity." It was a buffet line of chicken wings, chicken wing dip, and vats of bleu cheese. It was a whole lot of whispering about a person's skinniness or fatness.

I couldn't take too much of it. It made me claustrophobic. And I knew that down the road there was another reunion--this one at the restaurant where I spent three years waitressing--and that reunion would be populated by absolutely no one who would remember when I was still the only girl in the fifth grade whose mother wouldn't let her shave her legs. Instead, the reunion would be populated by Josh and his class, who were celebrating their six year high school reunion because they missed their fifth.

So I left my reunion after putting in a few good hours, after shoveling a few scoops of chicken wing dip into my mouth, and I drove down to my old restaurant. I went in through the door flanked with balloons that were school colors very different from my own. Inside, it was dark and most everyone was drunk. They were wearing considerably nicer clothes than most the people at my own reunion, and taken as a whole they looked like a much more successful and put-together class. They might have been drunk and loud, but they were crisp and good-looking.
Josh was in the corner near the bar. He had a crowd around him, and he was telling a story that involved very large arm movements. Very dramatic arm movements. Everyone around him was laughing.

"JESS!" he said when he saw me. He hugged me so hard he lifted me off the ground. "You came!"
And then he started introducing me to his friends. There was a boy there called Fweep, so named because in high school his farts--and here's where Katy Clay just got invested in this story--sounded exactly like that. Fweep. Fweep. Fweep.

Then another guy turned around. This one was drunk in the way that some guys get--a way that makes them secrete a slick coat of grease, a way that makes their eyes go loopy in their sockets, a way that makes them too confident for their own good.

"Watch out for this one," Josh said.

"Did you go to this school?" the guy asked. He was having trouble focusing his eyes, so his question could have been more than an inquisition at an unfamiliar face; it might have been him not being able to see who was standing in front of him.

"Of course," I said.

"You got a boyfriend?" he asked.

"Yes," I lied.

"Where is he?"

I pointed in the general area of the bar.

"Okay," the guy said. "All right. But that means he's not right here." He leaned in closer and somehow managed to plant a kiss right on my cheek. When he did it, he opened his mouth a little and let his tongue leave a wet mark behind. I didn't want to wipe it off while he was still staring at me--I don't like to be rude, even to drunk idiots--so the kiss dried to a crusty film, which I later wiped on Josh's shoulder while he was trying to find pictures of his younger self on the collages standing around the room.

A few minutes later, I heard a girl's voice shrieking my name, or something close to it. I heard, "Jessie? Jessie! JESSIE!"

I turned and found myself face to face with my "cousin," a girl I'm related to by marriage--my grandmother's, to this girl's grandfather. This is the girl, of course, who once, at a Christmas party, informed me I was wearing the same color mascara a hooker would wear. And now she was standing in front of me.

"Oh, hi!" I said.

"It IS you!" she said. "I saw you walk in the door a few minutes ago, and I thought to myself, 'That girl looks a lot like Jessie!' And then I saw you close-up over here, and I realized it was you! It was Jessie!"

I smiled as brightly as I could manage. She was calling me by the name my grandmother--and no one else--calls me.

"Are you here with Josh?" she asked.

"Yes," I said. "I mean, no. I mean, not like that. I'm here because I know him, not because we're together-together."

"I was going to say!" she chirped. "I hadn't heard that you were together."

"We're not." I lifted my drink to my mouth, wondering what we could talk about now that we got that out of the way. She was the type of girl everyone knew of. I'd always worked in restaurants in the town where she went to school, and if ever anyone found out we were marginally related, they would roll their eyes to the ceiling or make the sign of the cross and say they were pretty sorry about the way things had shaken out for me.

I tried to talk my way to the end of the interaction. "Are you here with a boyfriend?" I asked, nodding encouragingly, as if my vigorous head movements might divine a man who would then come to her side and take her away, back to the bar, to refresh her drink.

Her smile fell away from her face. "What?"

"Well," I said, "I mean, I thought maybe you still had that boyfriend you had... well, I don't know... when is the last time we saw each other?"

"Jessie," she said, raising her voice so everyone around us could hear, "I haven't had a boyfriend since the one who was physically abusive to me in college."

I stared. I stared some more. I wasn't exactly sure where to go after that. I am not skilled in the art of wheeling a conversation back to normal after someone reveals--loudly--that her boyfriend used to smack her around.

"Uhm," I said. "I'm sorry to hear that. I didn't know."

"Grandma didn't tell you?" she asked, genuinely surprised.

"Grandma and I don't talk like that," I said, and it was true. We really don't talk like that--mainly because my grandmother thinks I'm a lesbian.

"Really?" my cousin asked. "We talk like that." She paused and then smiled. "I know things about you," she said. "She's told me."

I looked down at my glass of vodka. It was almost empty.

"She thought the Boy From Work was way too young for you," she said. "She thought the way the old restaurant was run reflected poorly on him. Did you know she and Grandpa once went there and waited for ice cream while the couple who got sat after them got their full dinners before they even ordered their sundaes?"

I poured the rest of my vodka into my throat. My cousin went on, and I kept smiling and nodding and drinking until one of her friends called her away, and I turned immediately to find Josh.

"Do not leave me alone with her," I said. "You know the rules."

Josh and his girlfriend and his friends had balloons in their hands. They were going to walk over to the restaurant's regular bar. On the way over, they were going to pop the balloons and fill their lungs with helium.

"What should I say?" Josh asked.

His friend Kristen--the girl who got air-humped by Josh's step-father at the beer tent last week--stood on her toes and whispered in his ear. Josh gulped from the balloon and then started chanting the words to "Fuzzy Wuzzy Was a Bear."

After his helium wore off, Josh put an arm around my shoulders. "Do you remember that time," he said, "when I won that gift certificate from the raffle drawing?"

"The one that took place five minutes ago?" I asked.

"Yeah," he said. "That one. Do you remember it?"

Inside, the bar was what it usually is on a Saturday night: filled with sweaty people looking to get drunk and laid. The DJ was starting to play the usual songs to get people on the dance floor.

"Oh!" Josh said. "Do you think he'll play some Bone Thugs?" He looked at the DJ and then back at me. "What do you think, Jessie-Bone? Do you think he will if I request it?"

Just then a tall blond girl floated by me, beer in hand. She looked me up and down, her eyes narrowing. It seemed possible she was about to reach out and pluck my head off my neck as easily as if she were popping a daisy off its stem.

"Jesus," I said.

"Woah," Josh said.

"She wanted to cut me."

"I'm fairly certain," Josh said, "that you're right about that."

We got our drinks then and played darts (which we won) and erotic photo hunt (first babes, then hunks). Then, after Josh had declared to me for the fifth time that he was really drunk, I leaned over to tell his friend John--the one who could be Adam Levine's twin brother--that we should go outside, where he could smoke a cigarette and tell me about his MFA program because I missed mine, because I was curious, and because there are still mornings I wake up wishing I were in my bedroom in Minnesota, getting ready to go off to workshop.

We were out on the porch talking about our MFAs when Kristen came outside with her boyfriend in tow. She almost fell as she came through the doorway, but she quickly righted herself.

"John," she said. "We're going home. Do you want a ride?"

"Back to your place?" John said.

"Yeah."

"But then I'd be at your place."

And then I took a drink and jerked my head toward Kristen's tall boyfriend. "Going home for the lovemaking?" I asked because it sure looked like a possibility.

Kristen made a face. "I've got my period," she said, "and no one's getting their red wings tonight."

It was her boyfriend's turn to make a face. "I don't trust anything that bleeds for seven days and doesn't die," he said.

"No red wings," Kristen said. She put her arm through his. "No way."

A few minutes later--after Kristen and her boyfriend had conducted a long discussion about his truck, sex in his truck, if he'd had sex with his ex-girlfriend in his truck, and if he'd had sex with Kristen in his truck--they left, and a few minutes after that another of Josh's friends came outside and announced that everyone was leaving and they were going to go to his girlfriend's house, where they could use the pool and the hot tub.

Everyone seemed happy about that. They seemed prepared, like they'd known where this was where the night was going to take them.

At that point, though, I just felt old. I was sober and fresh from my ten year reunion. I was standing next to a twenty-two year old girl in a short dress I'd never in a million years look good in and it seemed like everyone in the world was younger and more fun than I was.

"You're coming, right?" Josh's friend asked. "You should come. Come."

Josh's girlfriend--the twenty-two year old in the short dress, a sweet girl--cuddled up to me and said, "Please? Please, Jess. Come with us."

"I'm old," I announced. "I'm very old."

"Please?" she tried again.

"John," Josh said, knowing full well the words would pull more weight if they came from the mouth of a cute boy, "tell Jess she should come."

"You should come," John said.

"Okay," I said.

And so we went. We went straight to the house with the pool and the hot tub. And it seemed like it should have been simple. We should've gotten into the hot tub without problem because I'd stood on the deck of the bar and watched Josh's friend place the call to his girlfriend, who'd said, yeah, come over, let's go. And we were over, and we were ready to go. But the girlfriend arrived on her deck, wet--she'd just been in the hot tub--and sour-faced.

"No," she announced. "No one's going in."

Josh's friend handed out beer. "We're going in," he said. "Come on. We're going in the hot tub."

The rest of us just stood there, looking at each other, and trying to avoid the couple that was--you could see it--on the verge of an argument.

"Please, Tiffany," Josh pleaded. "Just for a little bit."

She stormed off into the other room, and her boyfriend followed. The rest of us went out onto the deck and stood next to the hot tub, looking down at it longingly. On the ride over, I hadn't been exactly sure how I was going to pull off getting into the hot tub--the underwear I was wearing was sort of scandalous because a girl going to her 10 year reunion needs to have as much oomph and confidence as she can get--but now I didn't even care, and all I wanted was to sit in the very big hot tub and listen to those boys say stupid, drunk things.

Inside, the fight went on. Outside, Josh's girlfriend was freezing. "I want to go home," she said. "Can't we go home?"

"I know!" Josh said. He raised his beer can up to the sky. "We could climb the fence at the town park!"

"No," I said automatically because I am old, un-fun, and a girl who remembers what happened the last time Josh tried to casually make his way into a place he wasn't supposed to be. I stared at him and wondered if I should announce in front of his new girlfriend that the last time he'd done something like that he'd gotten his name in the police blotter, and because he was shamed and feeling like an ass, we drove around town and stopped to have a drink with the townies that inhabited each tiny bar. This could be my life, Josh had said. Maybe I'll turn out like one of these guys.

"Okay," John said.

"Yes!" Josh said. "We'll hop the fence and go for a swim! It'll be great!"

"I'm cold," his girlfriend said. "They're fighting. This isn't going to happen. Please, let's just go."

And she was right. It wasn't going to happen, no matter how promising it used to look and would look again. The girlfriend eventually came outside--angry, huffy, stomping--and began rolling the cover off the hot tub.

John started taking his clothes off.

Then the girl stopped. "No," she said. "No, I don't think so."

"That's it," Josh said. "Come on. The park. Let's go."

It was a horrible idea. Horrible. But Josh's girlfriend said she'd ride with me, that we could just follow the boys, drive the getaway car, retrieve them when they were done.

"Come on," she said, dancing on the tips of her toes, trying to stay warm in her short dress. "Let's go."

"I don't think anyone realizes how old I am," I said, "and how uncool I am. I am a good girl. I never did things like this in high school."

"We used to hang out car windows and slam trash cans into mailboxes," Josh's girlfriend said. "Let's go."

I went. I followed the other car--the car holding the boys and their beer--and even pulled in behind it when it turned into the cemetery next to the park.

Josh's girlfriend launched out of the car--she had to pee; she was going to pee somewhere in the graveyard; she didn't want to pee on anyone's grave; she ran for the line of trees at its back--and the boys opened the door to their car, talking about the logistics. How were they going to get through the field? Who was bringing the beer?

"Do you have an exit strategy?" I asked.

"An exit strategy," Josh repeated. "Well, no."

"Where are you going to go when you get out?" I asked. "Do you want us to sit here--in a cemetery, in the middle of the night, and wait for you while you jump into the pool?"

Josh seemed confident that was a good plan. "Uhm, yes?"

"No," I said. "No way."

"Will you drop us off at the pool then?" he asked. "I don't want to walk through the field."

"I'm going to end up going to jail tonight," I said. "I know it."

"You will not," he said. "Come on."

And I said fine, okay, all right, and we drove the cars down to the gate--which was open--and up to the pool, where we turned off the lights and engines and watched as the boys went straight for the fence. They shed their clothes and started climbing the fence that surrounded the pool--built tall to discourage just these types of events.

"Is that a hot tub?" Josh's girlfriend asked, tugging on my sleeve. She pointed to the shallow pool that was separated from the bigger, deeper pool.

"That," I said, "is the kiddie pool."

She frowned. "Oh."

Josh's friend--the one who'd first promised us a night in a hot tub--handed us the case of beer. "Hang on to this," he said.

Josh and John were already over the fence and into the pool. The noise their splashes made almost gave me a heart attack. I looked back over my shoulder, at the entrance to the park, and thought about the excuses I could possibly make if a cop car just happened to turn in toward us.

Josh's friend started climbing the fence. He slipped. He steadied himself. He got himself up near the top and then reached down. "Okay," he said, taking a deep, serious breath. "Now, the beer."

It was passed up to him, and he finished his descent and went into the pool, where the boys floated, drinking, splashing.

Meanwhile, I was picturing life in the big house, eating gruel, becoming someone's bitch.

"I'm a good girl," I told Josh's girlfriend. "I swear. I am very uncool. I'm nervous."

Luckily, I wasn't the only one feeling nervous--all us girls seemed a little panicked by the amount of splashing and laughing going on, by the way the three piles of rumpled clothes glinted in the moonlight--so I told Josh that was it, we were getting in our cars and taking them down the street, where we would park in a lot and wait for him to call us.

And that's exactly what we did. We drove the two cars down to the church on the corner--the church where I took Sunday school and attended Confirmation classes--and we sat outside the rectory for ten minutes, five of which I used to continue to inform the two other girls of how old and uncool I was.

"We better not go to jail," I said. "Do you think I'll still be able to teach after I get out of the big house, after they lock me up?"

They were should that I would.

The boys called soon after, and we went to get them. I drove back up that gravel driveway--each crunch of tire a small death inside my heart, each crunch one more sound that would surely rouse someone and make them call the police to the park, where we would be busted for good--and I parked, let the girls out, and made sure the boys--and their beer--had made it up and over the fence safely. Everything and everyone was intact. And there were no cops lurking in the shadows. And everyone was suddenly freezing and tired and ready to go.

Which is what we did. We said our goodbyes, and then we pulled back down the driveway and out onto the roads that would take us home--Josh's car one way, mine the other--and I drove the road I used to drive on my way home from the restaurant at night, after working another Friday fish fry shift with Josh as my bus-boy, with Josh following me around and reminding me that he loved me. It was the tenth anniversary of my graduating high school, and as I parked my car and crept back into my house and snuck down the hallway quietly so I wouldn't wake my father, I felt about as young as I had in a pretty long time.

The Cowardly Lion

Everything was a mess at the beginning of my freshman year of high school. I'd just lost my best friend Tammy in an epic fight that had her recruiting seniors who prowled the halls by my locker and threatened to give me a beating to end all beatings. After that, I tried out for basketball--which I liked, and which I could play okay (I could shoot a three pointer like it was no big deal)--but the first night I went to try-outs I hardly made two steps onto the court before I dissolved into tears, thinking of the cruel things Tammy had done and said earlier that day. That night I rode the late bus home wondering what I was going to do with myself now that I had given up on trying out for basketball.

The answer came a few months later. The music teacher was holding tryouts for the annual musical, which that year was The Wizard of Oz. Before that announcement, I don't remember myself ever, ever, ever thinking, Hey! I want to be in the musicals when I'm in high school! But maybe I did. I do remember that whenever the high schoolers came to the middle school to put on a snippet of the play for us--a dress rehearsal and a clever advertising hook for them, since we'd then go home and whine to our parents that we wanted to go that weekend to see the rest of the play--I loved watching them. It seemed like such a fantastic way to spend time--singing, dancing, putting on elaborate costumes, prancing around stage with everyone watching.

I was shy as a girl, so even if I admired it and thought it looked wonderful, I probably would have never summoned up the courage to actually do it. But thanks to my fight with Tammy, which had left me moping and confused, I figured I needed to do something that was contrary to what I usually did. I was going to rebuild myself, brick by brick, and then be able to come out of this whole friendship-breakup looking calm and poised. I was going to make myself something better than Tammy.

So I tried out for the play. Tammy tried out for the play, too--that was horrifying--but for a long time, we did not attend the same rehearsals because I didn't arrive on scene until Act II, and she was in Act I.

I won't lie: I was pleased to get the better part. I'd wanted to be Auntie Em, but our music teacher was on this kick about seniors getting the better parts, even if they sucked--and, boy, did Auntie Em ever suck, thus changing our teacher's policy on seniority--so I got a part of an Oz girl. That might seem generic, but it wasn't. Mine was a tiny part, but it was fun. I got to chase the Cowardly Lion down the aisle from the back of the auditorium, where we were to slip in while the pit band played us out of intermission and into the next act, and I got to scream and beat him with an umbrella. Then, once we were on stage, I had some lines where I got to have all sorts of attitude. (One was this: Isn't ANYONE going to do ANYTHING about this terrible beast? I flicked my wrist and cocked my head at the end of the line, and I looked a little like I was having a sass spasm.)

It was all very fun. It was the time of my life. We became a little family over those months of practice. Cliques formed, but not harmful, threatening ones. These cliques were just groups of people who'd attended the same rehearsals, were in the same scenes, were being measured for the same costumes, and had spent so much time together that they couldn't imagine loving anyone else so much. The munchkins stuck together. The Oz girls stuck together. The pit band stuck together. And where was I? I was with the Cowardly Lion.

The Cowardly Lion loved me. He was a trumpet player in the school band who'd somehow gotten roped into the role because he was the lion--a wobbly-kneed boy who could make his voice scale into high levels and then crack. He wasn't much of a singer, so that made his solos kind of painful, but the rest of his performance was pretty cute. He had just the right voice and presentation for it.

The problem with the Cowardly Lion was twofold. First, he was chubby and sweaty. Second, he had a vague stalkerish bent to him. He called my house often, hounding me, trying to make me be his girlfriend. He'd often construct long chains of logic that supported reasons why we should be together, but I dodged him at every turn. Generally he was fine, but there were times he seriously creeped me out, and I would do everything in my power to get off the phone, to get out of the car, to escape the hallway when he was in one of his insistent I'm-Gonna-Make-You-Mine moods.

He had a certain amount of power over me, though, and he knew it. He used it. After all, while I was busy not being in love with him, I was also busy being in love with his best friend, another trumpet player--a tall, charming, nicely-coiffed senior. The Lion called him the Italian Stallion whenever we discussed him.

"You coming over to sit with me and the Italian Stallion tonight?" he'd say, and right then he knew he'd have me hooked. Of course I was going to come sit with him. He promised he'd get me closer to his friend, that he'd give us time to get to know one another. But he was really only attempting to endear himself to me.

The night of the cast party, after we'd finished our three night engagement of the show, the Cowardly Lion volunteered to give me a ride home. Since I was only fourteen, and since most of my friends were only fourteen, too, there weren't too many options for me to use for a ride home. It was either this or have my parents come get me. I thought this was the lesser of two evils.

Until, of course, he tried to kiss me.

I pushed him away and told him that he was never, ever, ever to try that again. I told him that I thought I'd been pretty clear. I was not interested in him, and it was likely that I was never going to be. I crossed my arms and sat in silence for the rest of the trip home.

He called the next day. When I picked up the phone, there was a loud explosion in my ear.

"Hello?" I said.

"Ch-ch-BOOM!" he shouted.

"What the hell is wrong with you?" I asked. I was still mad about the night before, and I was sort of hoping that now the musical was over, he and I would have less reasons to talk to each other.

"Ch-ch-BOOM!" he shouted again.

"WHAT IS THAT?" I demanded. "What are you pretending to be?"

"A gun," he said. "Actually, the gun--you know, the one you cocked and aimed at my heart last night?"

"Oh my God."

"It's true," he continued, "you shot me down. Shot me right down! Not a care in the world! You just aimed and fired!"

I sighed. "I've been crystal clear about this for months," I said.

"Is it because I'm fat?"

Well, that was part of it, but I would never tell him that. I wasn't stupid enough to think that one morning I'd wake up and be suddenly attracted to him. To make a relationship, there was either a spark or there wasn't--and on my side, there definitely wasn't. Why would I lie to him and pretend otherwise?

"You're just not my type," I said. I tried to soothe him. "It's okay," I said. "There are plenty of girls who like you."

"Ch-Ch-BOOM!" he said. "Whatever."

And that sound haunted me for the rest of the year. Whenever he would call, whenever he would pass me in the hall, whenever we shared a study hall together, that sound was thrown in my direction or written on a note that was deftly passed over to me. He stopped calling me by my name and started referring to me only as "Ch-Ch."

In my yearbook that year he wrote me a snarky little message that recalled my ultimate rejection, but he also took the time to sneak the phrase Ch-Ch-Boom onto a lot of random pages in my book. Pasted over the track team's photo? Yes. Scribbled on the artwork page? Yes. Scrawled over the face of my favorite teacher? Yes. He'd plastered the whole book with little Ch-Ch-Booms.

And I'd like to tell you it stopped there, that he got it all out of his system, but it and he did not. He went away to college, and when he got there and got an RA position, he started calling to tell me about his first sexual exploits--in detailed fashion. Which is why I think six months can go by without me even remembering that boy exists. I think I have tried to submerge that information and those memories--often when I think back on that play, he is edited out--but sometimes it sneaks back on me, and I can't stop thinking about those months I kept saying no, no, no, and he kept saying you don't know what you're talking about.

Notes on Being the Opposite of Young

(1.)

Listen. It's not that I'm old, ancient, hunched and hobbling, but something about me is changing. Every day I am becoming more distracted by what the truly young people are doing. But it's more than distracted; it's confused.

Last night I couldn't sleep, so I was up watching That 70s Show on The N--the network for teens!--which shows commercials for all these fantastic shows I really wished I was young enough to watch--shows about high school skanks and tough surfer girls and teenagers who get knocked up and boys who kiss boys. It's enough to make me wish I was a teenager again. The network makes me think fondly back to the days when I loved Saved by the Bell and Blossom and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

But the problem with The N, even though it does play marathons of That 70s Show, which soothes me almost as much as M*A*S*H--I think it has something to do with my undying love for Hyde--is that it plays the same commercials over and over and over, and there's only so many times a girl can watch the same clips of the best Degrassi moments. So last night I had to surf the channels, and what's around The N on my cable lineup is MTV Hits and MTV Jams, and I kept going back and forth between them.

I was horrified. HORRIFIED. When I turned on MTV Jams, this song was playing:

DO THE RICKY BOBBY? THE RICKY BOBBY?! Would someone please, please, please tell me why a rap artist got it in his head that it was a great idea to try to spark the next dance step by invoking a Will Ferrell character?

The whole thing is a train wreck. I kept blinking, thinking I was imagining the whole thing. But no.

Is this how people were feeling back when I was younger, back when we were learning how to do Da Dip, the Tootsee Roll, maybe even the Macarena? Maybe so, but even those songs--while gloriously ridiculous in their own special 1990s way--have some sort of merit. There's actual instruction going on there. I am learning how to do the dance. And it's a dance that consists of more than just "doing the Ricky Bobby" and "posing for the frame."

And if I wasn't horrified enough, the next time I turned back to MTV Jams, this video was playing:

That's right. The STANKY LEGG. This video is showing me how to do the STANKY LEGG.

First of all, I don't even know what a legg is. I know what a leg is, but the closest thing to a legg in my world is Leggs, which is a brand of stockings. And for some reason, I'm betting they don't want to be associated this video. And beyond that, why should I want to learn a dance that requires me to have a body part that is stanky?

Can we all just stop? Seriously. Can we just stop and let these men do their business?

(2.)

Of course, it's not just my sudden revulsion at the videos that make it into rotation on MTV. It's also my body.

My hip has started clicking. If I bend too quick, if I twist wrong, if I hop into a jog, there's a little toc! that emanates from my hip--and the first time I heard it, I refused to believe it. I remembered that sound. My ninth grade English teacher's hip made that same noise, and every time she walked by that's all you could hear: toc! toc! toc!

I used to think, Jesus. That woman is falling apart.

Now I toc! too. And everytime I do, I roll my eyes up to the ceiling and wonder when the hell I turned into Miss Keefe.

Now I'm just hoping I don't inherit her love for sitting on top of the front row desks, her knees not quite pressed together enough to keep her lady business in check under her skirt.

A Brief History of Things I Have Stolen: Part Three

Part Three: A Picture of that Boy I Loved --- High School

It was my junior year, the year Amy and I had our lockers downstairs by the shop. Every morning we came into the hallway that smelled like a lumberyard, and we'd put our coats and hats and gloves away. We'd grab our books and stuff notebooks into our backpacks. And we'd do this around one of the other J.S. girls, whose locker was in between ours.

It's important to know my history with this J.S. girl, beyond knowing it's possible that I stole her clay castle from middle school art class. This particular J.S. and I had been best friends for years in middle school, probably longer than we should've been.

We lived on the same road and shared a seat on the bus every day. One morning late in our middle school careers, we were gossiping about some people we knew, talking about how we couldn't believe this and we couldn't believe that, and then J.S. looked over at me, smiled, and said, "This is why you and I are best friends."

It was a nice little moment. We didn't use that term out loud all that often, and it was good to hear it. It was confirmation. Validation. It was intoxicating. I walked around all that morning feeling indestructible. After all, I was a girl with a best friend. A very good, smart, funny best friend.

When we sat down for lunch that day, the other girls at our table were doing what girls of that age often do: mapping out the social circles of our school. They wanted to know who was best friends with whom. Each girl took a turn naming her best friend, and we'd all smile, nod, and turn to the next. When it was J.S.'s turn, she put down her sandwich and wiped her hands off the quilted napkin her mother had tucked into her lunch bag.

"I don't really have a best friend," she said. "I'm close friends with a lot of people."

My stomach rolled over. My heart cracked in two. I stared at her, willed her to look at me, but she wouldn't. She stared straight ahead and then picked up her sandwich again.

It was the worst kind of betrayal I'd ever felt. I wanted to march straight into the nurse's office and throw up at her feet--which seemed possible--and demand she call my mother to come get me, just so I didn't have to ride the bus home and face J.S., that traitor.

We weren't friends after that. There was no fight, no drama, no public shaming. There was just a clean, quiet break. I started sitting with other girls on the bus, and I ignored J.S., who got on near the end of our route. She always had to do the long walk of the aisle knowing she would have to find her own seat, that she might end up sitting with the chubby boy who had a crush on her or--worse--elementary schoolers who chattered on the whole time about monkeys! and boogers! and cookies!

Because J.S. and I didn't have a dramatic dissolution of our friendship, we managed to coexist in the same friend circle at school until we graduated. But I never forgot what she did to me. Ever. And when, at the end of our sophomore year, I started hanging around some boys from the school district over, J.S. suddenly wanted to revive our friendship.

On the bus in the mornings, she would hang over the back of the seat in front of me and try to ask me questions about those boys, who she'd met before, too. She was in love with them. Especially one of them--a skinny, long-limbed boy who liked to dance and sing. If she happened to go somewhere over the weekend where one of them was present, she would leap onto the bus Monday morning to hang it over my head.

This distressed me. This distressed Amy. After all, she and I were part of his little band of groupies, and we thought we knew him better than anyone. He didn't have special nicknames for J.S. He didn't go to Homecoming or the February Twirl with her. He didn't invite her to summer parties at his house. He didn't write her poems. He didn't learn the steps from Usher's latest video for her. He did all that for us, so we clearly knew him better. And when she pretended she and he were just so close, it drove us crazy.

And finally, there was this. The last straw. One morning Amy and I walked into our hallway that, and there was J.S. and her yawned-open locker. She was standing in front of it and taping a new picture inside. The picture was of that boy.

"Look what he gave me!" she said as we came over to spin our own combinations and get into our lockers.

"Cute," I said through clenched teeth.

"Yeah," Amy said. "Cute."

After she left, Amy whirled around and stared at me. "Can you believe her?" she asked.

"I hate her," I said, and at that moment I really did. She'd crushed me years before, and I'd never really recovered. And now she was trying to compete with me--and, as it turned out, many other girls--for this boy's heart. I'd had it with being cordial about everything. This was war.

So I did the only thing I could do: I got a better picture of that boy and I stuck it up in my locker. My picture was far superior in that it included both me and the boy, who had his arm around me. We were in the backseat of our friend's sister's car, and we were on our way home from a night of dancing.

Of course J.S. questioned it the day I hung it.

"Where was that taken?" she asked.

"On our way home from Passions," I said. I passed my hand over it, lovingly.

And J.S. frowned. She'd never been to Passions with this boy, that was for sure. She'd never gotten to squeeze in close to him on the drive home. She'd never gotten to feel his hand on the bare skin of her hip. I wanted that to be clear, and the picture made it so.

And maybe that could've been it. Maybe I could've been satisfied with that frown--which clearly signaled my victory--but a few days later, I had the opportunity to make my victory even more stunning when J.S. walked away from her locker toward homeroom, not realizing that when she slammed her door closed, her jacket had gotten caught in it and was sticking out the bottom.

"Oh my God," Amy hissed. She pointed to the jacket. "I bet I can get it open," she said. "We can get the picture!"

Our lockers were in the new wing of the school, and that meant they weren't nearly as sturdy as the ones up in the old hallways. Those ones were steel and strong. These ones were just flimsy. There was a possibility that we could yank it open, even if the lock itself had clicked into place. After all, every day we watched one of the boys in our grade walk up to his locker, place his fist just so, and then slam it against the locker in this one exact spot, and that locker would spring open without him fooling with the combination. These lockers weren't any great example of modern engineering.

"Go see if anyone's coming," Amy said. It was almost time for the first bell to ring, and that meant the hallways were mostly empty. So I ran down to the end of the hall, peered left and right, and then gave her the all-clear. I ran back up the hall and watched as Amy bent, wrapped the edge of the jacket around her hand, and yanked. Nothing. She yanked again. Nothing. She yanked one more time, and the door swung open so hard it crashed into mine.

We just stared. We couldn't believe it. Then we started laughing and screaming and jumping up and down.

I snatched the picture from the locker and slammed it shut before the first bell rang, and Amy and I turned the corner toward homeroom knowing that now there was only one girl in our school who would have a picture of that boy hanging up in her locker--and it would be the right girl. It would be exactly the way it should be.

Of course, a year later we would realize that many girls at the boy's school had a picture of him in their lockers, many girls were wandering around telling people they loved that boy, they loved him so much, and he said he loved them, too. But right then, on the day J.S.'s coat got caught in her locker, we were twelve whole months from figuring out what he'd been up to, what kind of lies he'd been spinning across the school districts, and we felt invincible and righteous. We were absolutely shining in our small victory, which would, in the end, count for exactly nothing.

Enter the Kid Wearing the Bird Head

There is one girl in my creative writing class who always rolls her eyes when we spend time writing in class. She complains that she has nothing to write about. "Oh my God!" she says. "I have nothing interesting to say!"

You know what she is? She's a big fat liar. Here's how I know that:

Two weeks ago, I opened class with a fairly simple prompt. "For five minutes," I told my class, "write about the strangest, weirdest, oddest person you've ever known. Don't censor yourself. Don't worry about grammar or mechanics. Just write."

So they did. Then I told them to tear those paragraphs out of their notebooks, fold them in half, and pass them down to me. They did. I shuffled. And then I handed the odd little paragraphs out at random so we all ended up with a character that wasn't our own.

I always write along with my students, so I'd filled a paragraph with details about a girl I went to high school with, a girl who went sort of crazy-crazy-nutso and kept this really weird journal with news clippings and drawings of martians and showed it off to a few people, and word eventually got to the principal, who then called everyone who'd seen it--including me and all my friends--into his office at separate times and asked us to describe in great detail everything we'd seen in there.

"Do you think she's dangerous?" he'd asked me.

I thought she was lonely. I thought she'd been picked on for most of our childhoods. I thought she was the daughter of a farmer and she smelled bad. I thought she tried too hard. I thought she had odd mannerisms and hair that needed washing. I thought all of this might have stemmed from those jeans she wore in fifth grade--they had little ducks embroidered on the back pockets, and fifth grade was way past the time anyone was wearing duckie-embroidered jeans.

I told our principal no, I didn't think she was dangerous. I thought she was strange. That was all.

Still, the administration feared the worst. All sorts of security measures were put into place for our graduation day. We heard there were undercover cops in the audience. We heard they were ready to spring into action at even the slightest unexpected rustle or move.

In the middle of the ceremony, after rain started pelting the roof of the auditorium, one of the seniors snuck off the bleachers on the stage and out the side door so he could shut his car windows he forget to put up before he came into school. When the auditorium door--heavy, steel--slammed shut behind him it sounded like a gun shot, and everyone jumped.

And that was the story I'd given away. I don't know who got it and I don't know if they were able to construct a story, an inner-life for that girl, but I hope so. I'm hopeful because from that prompt, I was able to do something good. Really good. And it's all because of the girl who rolls her eyes, the girl who complains she's got nothing to write about.

Her paragraph was about a boy she went to high school with. He smelled. He didn't shower. He wore clothes that didn't fit. And all of that was fine--sort of normal for high school boys, I suppose--but then the paragraph revealed the good stuff: one day he showed up to school wearing a bird head--something from a costume--over his own head. He refused to take it off, and he wore that thing to school every day.

I thought that was too good to be true. The first thing I saw in my head was a high school parking lot, that kid leaning against his car and taking a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket. He lit a cigarette and then reached up with his free hand to open his beak, so he could smoke the cigarette through the costume. So I wrote that. And then I wrote a paragraph in which a very pert, preppy girl named Alexis (said with an exclamation point after it--ALEXIS!--sort of like how they said it in the old Cheri Oteri/Will Ferrell cheerleader skits) comes into homeroom to announce that Jimmy Carbone was in the parking lot wearing a bird head and that she was pretty sure he had a gun and that he was going to kill every last one of them.

It was so fun and weird to write that I felt guilty for stealing my student's good character away from her, and I told her so.

"Are you kidding?" she said, surprised. "I would never write about him. He was just some weird kid from high school."

And I was thinking, My God, Girl, we're all just weird kids from high school. Is there anyone or anything better to write about?

Conjunct This, Saturn.

You would never in a million years guess this by looking at him, but my office-mate is big into all things astrological. This is not something he likes to broadcast. It is not something he wants a lot of people to know. In fact, at last year's department Christmas party, when he promised me he'd show the birth chart that plots the planets at the exact moment of my birth, he made me go into a separate room so he could smooth my chart down on a coffee table and point to the different elements, explain them so I'd understand why I am the way I am. He kept his voice low. He kept one eye on the door, just in case anyone happened by.

Everything he told me was interesting and sickeningly accurate, and I was pretty amazed by the whole thing. And it wouldn't be the last time. This past week, my office-mate brought my chart back in and scooched his chair over to my side of the room. He had a thick book in his lap. "Okay," he said, "let's do this."

My office-mate knows I haven't been having the most stellar time lately. Although I've been having a perfectly lovely semester--seriously, it's been a pretty giant love-fest with my students these last few weeks--he knows my personal life has been glum and gangly. Just ugly. And there were days I would drag myself into school feeling guilty because I liked my students and I wanted to do right by them, but the last thing I wanted to do was stand at the front of a classroom for hour and a half chunks and try to teach them things about writing and literature. I would sit down at my computer and thunk my head to the desk and moan, "I can't do this. I don't know. I'm just so tiiiiiiiiired."

And my office-mate would lean back his chair, nod, and say, "Well, Jess, that's just Saturn."

He explained that people like me--people with their sun conjuncting Saturn--were in trouble for a while. He said Saturn was a planet that made things difficult, heavy, cumbersome. He said it was going to be rough going but then things would get better.

That didn't sound so bad, so I brightened and asked when exactly I could expect my life to feel less like it was a five hundred pound man rolling over on me in the middle of the night--and I fully expected my office-mate to say something like, "Oh, it should all be over by next week!"--but he shrugged and said, "Somewhere around August."

Needless to say, I needed more information. I wanted specifics. If my life was about to be total crap for a mess of months, I wanted to know why. So my office-mate brought in my chart and a stack of reference books.

He pointed things out on my chart and then cracked open one of the books. "Here," he said. "This is you. Read all of this."

"Have you read it?" I asked.

"Yes," he said.

"And is it horrible? Does it say I'm a horrible person who will have horrible things happen to her?"

He gave me a Look. "Read it," he said.

And I did. And it scared the living hell out of me.

Basically, it said that thirteen years ago something awful had happened in my life. It was a time of great upheaval, and that upheaval directly shaped the person I am today. In fact, the book said I'd gone so far as to make myself a promise thirteen years ago, and this year--this one right here--was the year that I was going to make good on that promise, that something was going to come of it. It also said that I couldn't make good on that promise with too many other things cluttering the way, so I was probably going to go through an awful dissolution of a relationship and that I better not try to start anything new either because that was going to be ugly, too.

(It's interesting to know that while I was reading this, I could not keep from conjuring up that part in The Wedding Singer where Adam Sandler and his movie-fiancee, who just stood him up on their wedding day, are discussing the reasons why the wedding didn't occur. His fiancee lists all sorts of things she doesn't like about Adam's character and he says, "Once again, these are things that COULD'VE BEEN BROUGHT TO MY ATTENTION YESTERDAY!!" I think I felt sort of like that. All like, Gee, thanks, Saturn. Fuck off.)

Anyway, I knew exactly what the book was telling me. I knew exactly what event it was referring to. I knew exactly what promise I'd made to myself. And I would've remembered it just fine on my own, but a few nights before, as I was unpacking one of those last straggling boxes from the move, I stumbled on my diary from my freshman year of high school (which was thirteen years ago), and I read through some of the most depressing entries a fourteen year old girl could ever carve out of a page.

My best friend and I had just gone through a very public and evil fight, and the end result was that she said she hated me, and I said I hated her, and she said she was going to get some of her upperclassmen friends to beat the shit out of me, and I said she should just go ahead and try it. Then for the next few months I was doubly sad: after all, I was vaguely terrified I was going to get my ass beat by that tall junior who was rumored to have been in jail, plus I no longer had my best friend in the whole world.

There was something important that corresponded to all of this. My family was taking a winter vacation down to Charlotte, North Carolina so we--a NASCAR-loving brood--could tour the raceteams' shops and get our pictures taken next to Jeff Gordon's championship trophy. I packed all my best turtlenecks and chunky shoes, and I sat in the backseat of the family car with my earphones capped tightly over my ears for the length of the nine hour drive. I seethed the whole time. I thought, I hate my best friend. I hate her. I hate her. I thought, How could she do this to me?

But my mood lightened in Charlotte. I loved Charlotte. And I realized there was a whole big world outside the small town where we went to school, where we lived. And I realized I was meant for bigger things than I could find in that town. And right there, in Charlotte, North Carolina, right outside the Charlotte Motor Speedway, I promised myself two things: that I was going to be the one to get out of our small town, and I was going to become a writer. I was going to become a really good writer. I was going to make something of myself. I thought those things would make my best friend miss me. I thought those things would make my best friend realize she had made a huge mistake. And that's what I wanted more than anything.

Now Saturn is telling me it's time to make good on that promise. And I'm listening. I know Saturn's game now. I'm clued in. I know it's going to be hell for a while and that I'm going to feel fairly awful about everything until this all blows over--just like I did back then, back when losing Tammy's friendship was all I could think about--but I'm ready, and I've been ready, and I'm trying. I'm really, really trying.

Redheaded Hellcat

My fascination with red hair began back in junior year of high school. That was the year I met a boy--Curtis--from a neighboring school district who would eventually become my cousin's boyfriend. But when we met, Curtis was as single as they come. He was so in love with my cousin and wanted to break her down, wear her down, make her his own, but my cousin was having nothing to do with that. She had a football star in her life at that time, so she kind of hefted Curtis off on me at a summer bonfire party she was throwing.

Curtis and I hung around that night at the bonfire. He pouted quite a bit. My cousin was off charming her football boyfriend and he'd been stuck with her not very cute cousin, so he wasn't quite a fan of the way the night was shaping up. Of course, after a little while I did a little breaking down, wearing down of my own and suddenly there was something going on. We had rapport. We had wit. We had a thing. But none of that was enough to turn his attentions. And, unluckily for me, my cousin would eventually get tired with the football player and move on to Curtis, who had been biding his time and following her around, thinking, She'll snap out of it. She'll snap out of it. She'll snap out of it.

She snapped. She snapped right out of it. All the rapport, wit, and things in the world couldn't win against my cousin--willowy, blond, beautiful eyes--and so they went off together, and I went on being the only thing left for me to be: mousy friend.

Except Curtis didn't really think I was mousy. He thought I was pretty funny, pretty badass. He thought my friends and I--girls who ran around like a little squealing gang, doting on him, telling him how sweet we thought he was, asking him to sing us another song, asking him to do the Usher dance for us--were something as close to superheroes as he'd ever know. He nicknamed us The Superchicks and gave us each superhero figures that embodied our personalities. Patty was a patriotic red, white, and blue-spangled figure with boots up to her thighs. Amy was a vamp in a couture dress and spike heels, and her leg snaked out of a slit that went to heights impossible for us to wear at that point our lives. And me? Well, I was slim and slinky, with red hair that necessitated a description with the verb tumble. It was all pretty fantastic:

I loved that that was how a boy saw and thought about me. The picture was everything I wanted to be but felt I wasn't: powerful, tough, beautiful, sassy. And I thought the first step to making my real self more like my superhero self was to morph into her the best I could. The catsuit would be a problem, but I could do a little something with my hair. I could make it red. And so I did. And Curtis? He loved it. He thought it was absolutely brilliant, which made me feel brilliant and clever and capable. Suddenly I was a whole new girl. I had a whole new bounce to my step.

Of course, the whole Curtis thing was destined for ruin. He said he liked my cousin, he liked me, he liked my cousin, he liked me. He also liked several other girls from his school district, but I didn't find that out until much later. He was the worst type of boy. He built me up, he made me think I was really something, he made me feel like I was bigger and more powerful than any other girl my age, but he was doing the exact same thing for lots of others, which meant I wasn't special. I wasn't anything like my superhero.

But even if I wasn't tough, even if I wasn't badass, even if I wasn't powerful, I was a redhead, and I could walk my shining red head past him every chance I got. I could throw my hair over my shoulder and send him a look that said, You screwed this up, buddy, and don't you ever forget it. There was power in that hair. There was power in that color. It was what he had wanted, what he had loved, and now I had made it my own. I had taken it away from him. It was no longer his.

And since then, I've used red hair as a sort of marker, as the first movement from one stage to the next. After Keith and I broke up, I dyed my hair red. After the Wily Republican broke my heart the first time, I dyed my hair red. After the Wily Republican broke my heart the second time, I dyed my hair red. It was always something I felt I needed. It was a way to measure heartache and healing. It was a way to show the world that I wasn't going away quietly. I was going to go loudly and with a fuss. I was going to throw my red hair over my shoulder--I was going to let it tumble behind me--and I was going to be the wildest girl they'd ever seen.

Today I dyed my hair red again. I sat in my hairstylist's chair and said, "Do whatever you want to me, as long the hair is red." I said, "Do what you think is best." I already knew what was best for me. I needed to shake some of the sadness from my heart. I needed to move myself toward whatever is waiting around the corner for me.

What Happens When I Listen to Toad The Wet Sprocket

Today I was driving back from Portland when Good Intentions by Toad the Wet Sprocket came on the radio. And suddenly it was 1995 in my head. I was fourteen years-old. I was on the bus to a field trip and sitting behind Tammy--my best, best friend--and she was making out with the boy that would eventually take down our friendship.

This happens every time I come across "Good Intentions." There can be long stretches--months, years--where I completely forget that song even exists, but when those first few notes come over the radio and I do remember, things get foggy inside my head. Something in those notes has the ability to steal into my heart and twist it backward, all the way back to eighth and ninth grade, to the years where I was desperately trying to be my best friend, to the years where she was desperately trying to become anything but who she already was.

But it's not Tammy I'm thinking about when Toad the Wet Sprocket gets a courtesy play during the 90s hour on local radio. It's the boy--the one who's pressing her up against the reinforced bus windows, the one who has been pressing so close for so long it's possible that their skin might grow together, might root them to that spot. They have been making out for the last thirty minutes straight, which I, up until that point, had thought physically impossible. At fourteen, I didn't know much about kissing--I was still two years away from getting my first--but what little I did know seemed to support the fact that it involved a lot of mouth action and would, I assumed, impede the breathing process. I figured you had to come up for air every now and again. But Tammy and--well, let's call him David--so proved me wrong.

Tammy and David kissed in a way that I haven't really seen since. Their methods were what I based all my knowledge of kissing on. Which possibly explains why I was so terrified at the prospect of putting my lips on someone else's for the first time--I was sort of afraid I was going to choke or gasp or run out of air and prove to be a complete novice. When Tammy and David kissed, they sucked their mouths together and--I can only assume--tangled tongues the entire time. There was no gentle pecking, no together-apart-together-apart-together-apart the way normal human beings kiss. There was just sucking. Sucking, sucking, sucking. For, like, an hour. And whenever they separated, there was a moist unlocking sound, and Tammy always had to wipe at the corners of her mouth. She just looked so practiced and smooth and cool about the whole thing, and I knew I was going to completely screw it up if ever I got to try it.

And you know the most horrible thing? The person I wanted to try it with the most was David. After all, I was the one who liked him first. It was a strange thing, me liking David, because I was a very good girl--nerdy, brainy, quiet--and David was none of those things. First of all, he'd failed a grade. All his best friends had facial hair and talked about getting cars. He seemed worldly and interesting and misunderstood. He played the drums and always carried a spare set of drumsticks around with him, which he would tap on books and desks and radiators--usually at inappropriate moments, like when Mr. Weaver was talking about the beauty of Mark Twain's prose.

I didn't fully understand why I liked him. He was everything I didn't want. He was everything that would've put my parents into cardiac arrest. He was everything that a girl like me never, ever, ever got. Was he cute? No, not really. He was skinny. He had knobby knees. He wore a lot of ratty blue plaid. He had that hair that was popular in the 90s--parted in the middle, long down each side, greasy. His best feature? His eyes. They were a blue that you very rarely ever see--pure and clear, striking, icy. Looking into those eyes, a girl could forget an awful lot. She could forget the list of detentions on a boy's record. She could forget the smart-mouthed way he talked to teachers. She could forget that he smoked. She could forget how to breathe.

When I first developed my vague interest in David and his eyes, I mentioned it to my best friend, and she didn't seem all that impressed. But a few months later the two of them were dating.

I didn't mind all that much. It wasn't like I was going to get him for a boyfriend. Ever. But this way--with my best friend dating him--I was able to be close to him without being rejected. I was their third wheel. I was their lookout girl. For months I kept my eyes peeled, scanning dances for chaperones, scanning hallways for teachers, scanning our seats at the racetrack for her family. But even though I was looking out, I always had one eye on him.

David liked me. I knew he did. He thought I was funny, in a nerdy sort of way. He thought I was nice and good to talk to. He thought I was fun to hang out with. But I knew that's where it stopped. He never looked at me and thought, Gee, I wish I was kissing Jess instead of Tammy.

But that didn't mean I wouldn't get my chance. Because I would. Because I did.

When we moved up to high school, Tammy went through a brief upheaval. She suddenly realized there was a whole other world out there, with new boys and new social groups and new opportunities for coolness. She wanted to be mature and sophisticated. She wanted to run with the wild crowd. She accomplished that in a two-step process. First, she cut off ties with our old friends. Second, she developed a crush on David's best friend--one of the ones with facial hair and a car--and then cheated with him.

David, who had spent the better part of a year half-breathing through marathon makeout sessions and giving hickeys, was crushed. He suffered through the breakup in a very poetic way. He was, after all, a musician, and he grieved in a very rockstar kind of way. There were a lot of dramatics. There was talk of suicide. There was talk of kicking the shit out of everyone involved in the situation. There was talk of drugs and alcohol. And I know this because I was the one hearing this talk. I had tried the best I could to talk Tammy out of going off with David's best friend, the boy whose only redeeming quality was a potentially large penis that the older girls whispered about. After a year with David, I knew there was more to him than all the badass bad-boy stuff. He was--honest to God--a really nice boy. But Tammy would have none of it, and she went off and did what she wanted to. And afterward, in a desperate attempt to win her back, David started calling me to make his case.

At first I tried to explain to Tammy just how bad David had it, just how bad he was suffering. But she was content with her decisions. There was no changing her heart. So I kept on taking David's phone calls. I kept talking him through it.

Tammy and I were yanked apart shortly after the breakup. There was bad blood. I didn't like how she was suddenly living her life, and she didn't like that I was taking David's side, that I was talking to him every night. There was a big fight, which threw me into the exact same position as David. Suddenly I was telling him how much it hurt, how much I wanted her back. And so we did the only thing left to do: we dated each other to try to fix the things she had broken in our hearts. And to get a little bit of revenge.

It didn't really work. The revenge or the relationship. By this point, David had been transported to another school district and, since neither of us had cars, we never saw each other. We talked every night and said that we loved each other, but it was mostly a charade. Still, he was my first boyfriend that lasted beyond a weekend. And there was one day where our relationship suddenly became very, very real to me.

We'd somehow both fixed it so that we would be at the mall at the same time. I was there with one of my oldest friends--a girl who grew up down the road from me--and he was there by himself. The three of us had a short window of time to wander the mall before our parents came again to claim us. We had to make the most of that time. And I knew this meant David would want to kiss me. He would want to kiss me a lot. He was used to that. He would expect that.

And me? Well, back then I was scared of everything. And topping my list of fears was my first kiss. There was such potential for disaster. After all, there was no way in hell that I was going to admit to him that I'd never been kissed before. Did I want him to think I was a mutant? A prude? A freak? I wanted him to think I was capable of everything Tammy had been capable of, even if that was impossible.

But, oh, did he ever try his best. He had his hands in the back pockets of my jeans the whole time. He pinched me and poked me. He nuzzled into my neck. He slipped his hand up under the back of my shirt. He drew a finger down my spine.

I loved every minute of it, even if each move he made chiseled another worry, another fear into my heart. I liked the feeling of being chased, of being wanted. I liked the feeling of a boy trying so hard just to get me to turn toward him, to give him a little bit of tenderness.

And so I did something a little reckless. In the middle of Claire's--that chain jewelry store in every mall ever built--I turned into David and kissed his neck. Then I kissed his nose. Then I kissed his lips. But once my lips touched his, I realized my mistake. He would certainly make the move to take more than just a peck. I pulled away before he could even open his lips. I wanted nothing to do with complicated kissing. I wanted nothing to do with teeth and tongues and the mechanics I didn't yet understand. He pulled me back to him, but I squirmed away. I would keep squirming away for the rest of the day. He would lean in, and I would lean away. I would twist my way out of the cage of his arms and dodge behind a rack of clothes, a stack of books, a bench.

We both left unsatisfied. I'd wanted to kiss him--to really kiss him--but I just didn't have it in me. I wasn't Tammy, no matter how hard I tried. There was too much I didn't understand, and I wasn't sure I even really wanted to understand yet. And that was the day David realized that dating Tammy's best friend wasn't anything close to dating Tammy. It wasn't the healing thing he'd wished it to be. I wasn't going to rescue him. I wasn't going to be that good story he told to his friends years later--the story that started with him dating one girl, falling hard for her, then realizing the one he really wanted to be with was his girlfriend's mousy best friend. Neither of us were going to come away from this having fixed our broken hearts.

We broke up shortly thereafter. It was the sweetest, kindest, easiest breakup in the history of breakups. During our nightly phone call, David casually mentioned he thought it might be better for both of us if we went our separate ways because, well, he'd met someone at his new school, and it was so hard to date someone in another school district anyway. We didn't even have cars. He could tell he wasn't what I wanted or needed. He asked me if that was right, if he'd guessed correctly. And he had. I wanted Tammy. I didn't want him. But I wanted him to be free and happy, and it was a relief that he was saying what I'd been wanting to say for weeks. I told him a breakup was fine with me. And so we told each other how much we liked each other, how much we wanted to stay in each other's lives, and that was that.

Then I didn't have Tammy and I didn't have him. I never had either of them again.

But there are times--like when Toad the Wet Sprocket comes on the radio--that I like to think about David and those few strange months we were together. Way back in the beginning--before he and Tammy took up together--I'd thought of him in a way that wasn't entirely fair or flattering. I thought he was bad news, no good, and trouble. I figured he had very few redeeming qualities. But he proved to be one of the biggest surprises of my teen years. He was sensitive and kind and funny. I loved to come home from school to hear him talk about his day. There was an easiness between us. There was friendship. I would've never expected it.

Not that long ago I saw David again. As luck would have it, after high school he ended up in a relationship with another girl from my group of friends. The two of them had a baby together, and they and the baby showed up to a wedding of yet another of our high school friends. David and I said approximately ten words to each other the whole time ("Hi" and "How are you" rank high on the list), and I spent the whole time feeling just so incredibly weird. I marveled at how two people can go through such drama together and then, years later, be complete strangers. But it didn't matter. When I watched him tussling on the floor with his baby--his baby who is a miniature version of him, with the same eyes and sly look--I was so thankful that we'd had each other for a short period in our lives. And I was so happy that both of us were able to shake all of that ugliness off our shoulders and move on, even if it felt in those moments like we were never going to be able to breathe right again.

So I'll take all of that. I'll turn up Toad the Wet Sprocket whenever they come on the radio, and I'll let my heart sing its old songs, and I'll sit very, very still for three minutes so I can live in my old life, my old body and be thankful for Tammy, thankful for David, thankful for those years where nothing and everything in the world made sense.