That Time I Met Enrique Iglesias

So I was dancing to this awesome song, and the music was up SO LOUD and the only thing that kind of ruined it a little bit was the fact that some weird guy in the background kept making funny yodeling sounds, but whatever, I was there to dance. I had gotten all cute, too. My black heels made my usually short legs appear long and lean and the fact that I had been practicing dancing to Bachata at home meant that I knew exactly what I looked like. All smooth curves and fluid hips.

I wasn't surprised when this guy started toward me from across the room. He'd been eyeing me for a while. He was wearing a black leather jacket with a white shirt underneath. I thought it was odd because I was getting so hot suddenly.
He started dancing with me, and I smirked at him innocently enough. We moved in unison for a few bars before he leaned into my ear.
"I know you want me," he half whispered. He looked a bit dazed, but actually pretty sexy.
"Excuse me?" I said. "Perdon?"
"I've made it obvious that I want you too."
I focused at a certain spot on the floor, still dancing, and wondered what the hell he was talking about.
"So put it on me," he said. "Lets remove the space between me and you." And he took his hand around my back and leaned in with his hips so that we were scissor-legged.
"Whatever, dude." I looked around a little bit to see if anyone was watching us. They weren't. But it seemed like everybody else was getting closer together too, not just me and this dude.
"Hey what's your name anyway?"
He didn't answer, but shook his hair out of his eyes and made a face. What a poser!
"Now rock your body," he whispered, and I started laughing.
"Who are you, Justin Timberlake?"
"Damn, girl, I like the way that you move."
Rolling my eyes, but still dancing, I chose to ignore him. "Shut up and dance with me, bro."
It was almost like he was totally ignoring me. I cocked an eyebrow and looked around.
"So give it to me. I already know what you wanna do."
Sighing heavily, I stopped dancing and stepped back from his scissor-legs. "Alright weirdo, TU NO HABLES INGLES??? You're weirding me out. So I'm about done here." And I turned and started walking toward the side of the dance floor.
Just as I got to the edge, he grabbed my arm and I turned around cringing.
"Look, here's the situation." He said. "I've been to every nation. And no one's ever made me feel the way that you do."
"Oh, really." I jerked away, but he had a firm grip.
"You know my motivation given my reputation. And... I don't mean to be rude, but tonight I'm loving you."
Suddenly I realized who I'd been dancing with. It was Enrique Iglesias. What the hell? His eyes were all warm and brown, but they were hollow looking in the flashing red lights with the suddenly very loud techno music pulsing all around us. The yodeling guy was still singing away somewhere, and everybody dancing seemed to be gyrating wildly. Where was I????
"Tonight you're LOVING me? What the heck are you talking about? You're dancing with me, okay? That's all. And who are you to be LOVING anyone for only one night anyway. Thats not quite my definition of LOVE."
Suddenly the music stopped and everybody froze, even me.
"--okay I really mean that Tonight I'm f***ing you. But I seriously don't mean to be rude. Plus, the censors will get all over me so I'm gonna keep saying that I'm LOVING you as opposed to F***ING you."
The music started again and everyone kept dancing, and my jaw dropped.
"You nasty man-whore bastard!"
I jerked away successfully this time. Oh yes! I knew about Enrique Iglesias' repuation. Practically having sex with Anna Kournikova in his videos, sweating profusely, getting moles removed, never actually being ANYONE's hero, and causing more pain than he could ever kiss away, he was a regular Cassanova.
"You're so damn pretty." He was chasing me, now, and no one seemed to notice. "If I had a type then, baby, it'd be you."
"Stop. Calling me "baby" and making lame sexual innuendos. Its not getting you anywhere."
"I know you're ready." He said. "If I never lied then, baby, you'd be the truth."
I stopped and turned. "What the hell is that supposed to mean anyway, Enrique? Are you drunk? Seriously, I'm not lying you need to get your filthy hands off me."

And he did. Because that's when he repeated himself for like the thirtieth time and tried to explain to me that he'd been just about everywhere and that I was special but at the same time he was a player and blah blah blah tonight he was LOVING me even though he really meant that he was F***ING me and only this one time.
Just after he repeated himself, five half-dressed girls came out of nowhere and started groping him and taking off his shirt.
"Security?!" I pointed, and looked around for the undercover guys I'd seen in the past, but couldn't spot anyone.
That's when the crowd on the dance floor opened up and parted for this black guy I recognized from the movie Crash. I liked him in that movie. What was he doing here with Enrique Iglesias? He started rapping, and all the people were dancing, and the girls were stripping Enrique pretty quickly, and I turned away because I didn't want to see anymore.

And when I opened my eyes all I could hear was that weird yodeling guy, and everybody was gone.

It was the weirdest night at the club EVER.

Things Can Get Pretty Crazy at church school

He had been looking at me from a row over and back all two weeks we had been in Bible class. That was six classes, two Mondays two Wednesdays two Fridays, of intense stares penetrating my left shoulder.
His name was Ty Anders, and he was a baseball player at Lavery.

As an extremely conservative religious University, Lavery did not have enough money to invest in an extensive atheltics department. There was no football team. There was baseball, softball, soccer, and the basketball team, which was the major source of any "students of color" Lavery happened to acquire. Rumor had it that the students were recruited without ever being told about Lavery's religious affiliation, or that every student was required to go to Chapel and University Bible Monday through Friday, as well as take an additional Bible class of their choice every semester. It was intense religion.

Ty Anders had obviously been aware of Lavery's extreme reputation. I had spotted his seat in University Bible at the arena and had watched as he sang every song, flipped to every scripture, and praised his little heart out with hands uplifted. I thought it was odd, actually. He had a definite smack of POPULAR kid, of EXPERIENCED kid, with his New Balances, his shag hair cut, and the harem of blonde hotties that always loitered in close vicinity to the baseball team as a whole.

He wore a black North Face jacket and ripped jeans. I wore an imitation fleece and clearance shoes. I had only just discovered the wonders of straightening irons. I'd had no idea how the blonde hotties got their shine, but now that'd I'd been living around them for months, I was picking up a few cues. I couldn't tell if this newfound awareness guys had for me had to do with my picked-up tips, or whether I'd always been attractive and had fallen into a new group of people who HADN'T known me since I picked my nose in Elementary school.
The older I get the more I realize it was the latter.

"Hey, I'm Ty."
I had dropped a book on the floor called Marriage and the Christian Home. I hated that book, but my mother had spent twenty-five dollars buying it at the campus bookstore, so I picked it up. Upon standing, I realized that the baseball player was right in my face.
"Oh-- hi." The last of the other students were starting to file out, and Baseball-Ty and I were about to be alone in the classroom with the Bible instructor.
"Do you have class right away, or can you walk with me to the student center for some coffee."
Geez, cutting to the chase all ready, I thought.
"I can go. I don't have class right now."

I was starting to get used to male attention. In high school, the only shocking male attention I'd had to thwart was from the Asian foreign exchange student who watched me reach over the side of my desk to pick up my pencil in math class before informing me that there was "a whole other world" down my shirt. That hadn't been the most pleasant of experiences. At Lavery, though, jocks and preppy kids resembling the popular elite at my high school seemed to come out of the woodwork to suavely profess their interest in me. I still didn't see it coming very often, but it didn't surprise me as much. Then again, they weren't usually commenting about the other world inside my shirt either.

"So I have to ask you, now that I'm talking to you outside of class," Ty said. He turned around and walked backward for a few steps, looking me in the eye as he bobbed along next to me down the brick walk. "What are you writing in that notebook? Donovan doesn't give that much to write notes about, and the study guide he gave us should be enough for the test on Friday. What is so interesting that you hardly look up during class."
I flushed a little bit. "Oh, my notebook. I've just always had one. Its like... what I do until I sort out a story or something."
"I KNEW it wasn't class related." He was suddenly more animated than I had ever seen him. Especially considering how I'd watched him sleep through an entire class in the previous week, and I told him so.
"Oh that!" He laughed before opening the door for me as we stepped inside the student center. "That was because of my initiation."
"Initiation? The social clubs haven't even started rush yet." I was suddenly aware of everyone else looking at us on our way in. If only for a second, I wondered if I looked like one of the blonde, hottie, hangers on.
"Not a social club. For baseball. I'm on the team."
"I know that. What kind of initiation are we talking here?"
"Well." He looked around, and I noticed for the first time that his eyes were a pale blue color. "Its kind of more like hazing. See, I don't know how you're gonna take this and all," he chuckled, "but the baseball team initiates new players by getting high-- you know, smoking pot-- and then watching the movie Requiem for a Dream." He said it like he was a real rebel, a real bad boy, like it was something so awful and hilarious at the same time.
"Wow. Thats pretty intense I bet. I've seen that movie, and I would not want to watch it under the influence."
A smile broke across his face. "I KNOW right!??" I had passed the test.

We drank frozen lattes and traded numbers, mine, at that point, was my dorm room number. I didn't yet have a cell phone. And he didn't laugh at me for it. Instead, he invited me to study with him for the test later that week.
***

"Where are you going?" My roommate Alana was getting dressed at the same time as me. It was seven thirty at night, and she usually put on her raccoon eyes and powder pink lip gloss while I was making raviolli or watching reruns of A Different World on Nickelodeon, but tonight I was debating between the red shirt with the cute collar or the white shirt that showed cleavage.
"I'm going with some guy from my Bible class to study for the test tomorrow."
"Ooooh, study date, huh." She quirked an eyebrow at me while powdering her nose in the mirror, then turned around. "In that case... white shirt. You gotta add at least a little spice to your Bible study."
Alana was one of the blonde hotties I was getting tips from. Though she didn't usually offer them up like she was tonight.
College is funny because its the first time in your life where the pot gets stirred and all the carefully constructed social layers get warped and mixed up. Nobody knows each other, and sometimes people like me ended up rooming with formerly popular girls like Alana. Somehow everyone always seemed to be able to still know who was who. So Alana never asked me to go out with her. Instead, I just used her stuff that was lying around when she left, or in the morning when she slept late. I still hadn't bought my own straightening iron. For all I knew they could cost a hundred dollars like the Birkenstocks she wore. They had little ridges in them for your toes and they felt really good. I had almost gotten busted when I'd worn them to church on a rainy Sunday.
"Thanks, Alana. You going out tonight?"
"Yeah." She picked up her purse and took one last glance in the mirror. "See ya!"

I considered looking through her shoes again, but stopped when she busted back in the room five minutes later.
"Dang it." She was mumbling to herself. "Forgot my birth control. Not like I need it or anything. But still."
I watched her leave after putting the tic-tac looking thing in her mouth.
Alana was on birth control?
My roommate had had sex?
***

"I really thought you were going to be like some up-tight cutesy girl, you know. But you're really cool."
Ty and I were in the student center again, this time with our Marriage books and our Bibles between us. I still had a multicolored copy of the Teen Study Bible that my mom had given me for Christmas when I was fifteen years old. Ty's Bible was brown leather and had big margins and gold leaf trim. I noticed that he had parts of it highlighted as we flipped the pages.
"Where are you from?" I asked. We had already filled out most of the study guide.
"Atlanta. I went to private school down there. Where are you from?"
"Here."
"Cool. You must like country music."
"No, actually. I think it lowers IQ scores."
He laughed. "Me too! Do you like Christian music?"
"Not really. My church sings old-people hymns. We're not really jiving with Michael W. Smith or anything."
"Some of it's really good, you know." He shut his Bible and leaned back with a smirk on his face. "You don't seem like most of the other people here."
"I'm not, really." I laughed, and checked my cleavage before I looked up at him. "I'm... from a very different school than this. My high school had more minorities than white kids. It was a public school."
"Woah. Were there like gangs and stuff?" I would have been offended, but he was smiling. So I smiled back.
"Yeah. Minority gangs, too. Brown Pride. KPG. The whole she-bang. But they weren't really scary or anything. They were just first and second generation immigrants caught in the gap. And its actually really weird for me, now, being here. Because I feel kind of caught in the gap myself."
"What do you mean?"
It was late, and the sanitation crew was cleaning the place up. The florescent lights glowed bright against the black night outside the windows. It was deserted, and the food stands were closed. Lavery is the only university I can think of that closes their student food options after standard business hours. If you weren't eating in the caf between 5 and 7pm, you had to go off campus. And even then you had to be back before 10 to avoid curfew rules.
"I feel caught in the gap because this place is so... Christian. And private. I mean, I feel like I can smell money radiating off of half these kids. And I'm not saying I'm poor or anything, but its just funny to be around so many people who are used to all of this. I'm not used to this. I'm not used to talking about God at school and praying before class starts and going to church every single day."
"You're not a Christian?"
"No. I've just grown up differently-- where there was a time and place for everything, and my personal beliefs were private. I could share them with people if I wanted, but its not like we all believed the same things. I feel like here we're all expected to be the same. And I'm not the same. I'm different."
Ty sighed, and smiled a little.
"You're something else." He stuck the study guide into his Bible and sat back again, looking at me. "I bet you do feel different. But different is good. I mean, I like different. I like you. And I know what you mean. Sometimes it feels like people are really closed minded and stuff. But God wants us to challenge what we believe in, because he knows we'll come back to him. I mean, I don't know why you came here, but I bet God led you here somehow. You're supposed to be here. Like fate."
I opened my mouth to retort, and one of the cleaning people turned on a vacuum cleaner. I jumped at the sound.
Ty pointed and laughed at me a little before leaning in over the table.
"You wanna get out of here?" he asked. I did.
"We could make flash cards somewhere else! I brought stuff to make them!" I held up some notecards.
"Or we could do something different." He half yelled over the sound of the vacuum. He smiled slyly with one side of his mouth.

Ty was a nice guy. I had thought he was going to be shallow and rich and jock and all of the things I hated about popular kids. But he was kind. He opened doors for me and pulled out chairs. He gave money to homeless people and was really polite. Chill. His eyes weren't wild and jaded looking like I thought of the "popular" kids I had known before. He didn't look like he had any secrets I wasn't allowed to share. He just looked like a kid who had grown up a little more sheltered than me who had rebelled until he'd reconciled the differences between his life and other peoples'. Tha'ts what I remember most about him now. He smiled at me in this very kind way, and I felt like I was okay. He didn't smell a rat in my existence at Lavery.

We ended up at a Praise and Worship devotional event at a nearby church. The thing had already started. It was now 10pm and I was a little skeptical about any church even that would last that late, but Ty insisted that it was kind of like a concert.

"A concert?" I took off my seatbelt, still in the car. We'd had to look for a parking space and ended up on the side of the street. "I thought Church of Christ kids didn't do concerts. I mean, music in the church and all, you know?"
Ty looked over at me with a smirk. "Okay. There's a lot you don't know apparently. Let's just say not all CoC churches believe the same things."
"You mean you have a piano or something at your church in Atlanta?"
"No." We stuffed our hands in our coat pockets and started walking along the wet pavement. "That's worship service though, on Sunday. For devotionals and stuff like that outside the service, we sometimes have drums and a praise team and an acoustic guitar and all sorts of stuff."
He was looking at me to gauge my reaction. I maintained a straight face.
"So they're going to have drums and stuff in here?"
He smiled. "Yeah."

We entered through the side of the building and ended up right at the front of the room next to the pulpit. I could hear the music before we even opened the outside door. It was a song I'd learned since I was at Lavery. They sang it at the required University Bible in the arena sometimes. I liked the song, actually. But it sounded funny now with music. It sounded like a real song and not just a church song.
Ty took off his baseball hat and tucked it in his back pocket. I followed him to the door that would open up in front of the pulpit. There was a tiny window and I could see blue light coming from the auditorium through the glass over Ty's shoulder. He was taller than me, and I suddenly felt small and strange and a little bit scared with all the loud singing and loud music and holy glory praise hallelujahs.
"Hey. You ready for this?" Ty looked back at me, and I nodded. He grabbed my hand. "Okay then. Come on."
He opened the door and the music seemed even louder. It wasn't as scary as I had thought it was, but I could tell the minute he pulled me in that there was hardly anywhere to sit. I let him guide me down the side of the room, and took in the faces of all these people I'd seen around campus. The blue light was coming from spotlights above the pulpit, on which three girls and two guys were standing. The girls were singing and one guy was playing what looked like bongo drums while the other played an acoustic guitar. Everyone else was singing, too, and swaying, and several people were kneeling on the floor. I didn't know why I felt so weird.
Ty finally led us to a pew toward the back of the auditorium. There weren't as many people sitting around us there, and he let go of my hand as he sat down. He leaned in to my ear as I continued to look around.
"Not what you expected?" He was grinning.
"Its just... I've never been to one of these before."
I sang a couple of songs and watched the rest of the group praisy praise praise and worshipy worship worship and I just felt so weird. Like I was at what my mom would call a "holy roller" church. I tried to rationalize to myself that I shouldn't feel weird and that I should embrace this stuff. When a new song started, and the girl introducing it was reduced to tears when describing how beautifully God had made us, Ty leaned over again, still grinning.
"Things can get pretty crazy during this one."
"What do you mean?" I shot back.
"Just wait."
He was right. The song was long and repetitive and people were throwing their hands in the air and crying and kneeling and hugging one another and all sorts of stuff I'd never seen first hand. I was shocked for a few seconds and then didn't know what to do with it. It felt alien to me because I'd never known to be religious that way. I'd never known that. All I'd ever known was Overbrook High and its four required translations for printed take-home permission slips. There were lots of religions at Overbrook. And being there bathed in the blue light on a church pew next to a kid who had told me three days earlier that he'd recently gotten high while watching Requiem for a Dream was tripping me out.
He leaned into my ear again.
"You want to leave?"
I stared at the torn place on his jeans. "Do you?"
"Its a little loud, isn't it."
I smiled and leaned closer. "Its worse than the vacuum cleaner."

I never started dating Ty. I don't remember why. He always smiled and talked to me when I saw him in class and he waved when I saw him around campus. I might have been dating someone else, I don't remember. But I somtimes wonder whatever happened to him. He was really nice to me, even when Lavery seemed like a religious jungle.

My roommate Alana graduated with a premed degree, but ended up as a nurse. She got pregnant and her plans for full blown medical school had to change. Ironically she had the baby with some guy I knew from Overbrook. He was younger than us and incredibly immature. But he was always popular, which I find funny now, because thats how I thought of Alana, too.

I don't know if Ty was right about God and fate bringing me to Lavery. They "suspended me immediately" less than a year after my study date with Ty Anders. But I never felt like I belonged there. And it took me years and years and many mistakes to let that whole experience go. It sat on me like a dead weight that I couldn't shake. I let it define me.

And if Ty was right, and God brought me to that, then it sure was one twisted game of getting me to where I am today.

But I'm here, aren't I?

Len, The X-Files, and My Doppelganger

"Oh, yeah, I meant to tell you. I saw this girl on TV that looks just like you."
My brother was sitting in his usual spot in front of my 32" television which had finally made its way out of my bedroom and into the living room, uniting us all. Len had moved his x-box out of his own room and hooked it up. My TV was both larger than his and HD capable, though Len scolded me that 720p did not compare to 1080p when you dealt with video games. I didn't care. I was just glad he was sitting with everybody and being less of a hermit.

Things were improving at 3501 West Houser Road lately. Since I'd scraped the bottom of the barrel and changed my lifestyle a bit, staying at home every night of the week including weekends, I spent a lot more time on the couch with Len watching Netflix oldies like The X-Files. Oh David Duchovny...

"Are you telling me you saw my doppelganger? I hope she was pretty and not ugly and fat."
"Oh, no, she's all right. She just looks a lot like you in the face. Like from the nose up. Hang on and I can find it." He clicked through page after page of Netflix shows.

Len had recently scored a paid internship with none other than the nations' second most-watched wrestling federation. After finishing his first day, he had already sorted and read some fan mail from some of the bizarro viewers.

I was really proud of him. I was actually a bit jealous. But it made me happy to think that things would be okay with Len. I had rolled my eyes about him for probably all 22 years of his existence. But this was cool. I had gone around to half my co-workers at the office just to break the news that my brother would be working for a company that made money off of cage fights, ladder matches, and too much spray-tan.

"Okay, I found it. Here it is."
He pressed play as the camera was zooming in on an old British guy surrounded by an audience. I recognized the show as an auto program from the UK about restoration. The old guy and his buddies were hilarious. I'd seen an episode where they drove across four US states in cars that they bought for only a thousand dollars a piece, only to come back and close their show saying that the number one thing they'd learned in America was NOT to go to America.
"Look, see that girl behind the dude? She looks just like you, doesn't she?"
I sat up in my seat on the couch.
"Hey! She does look like me!"
"Seriously, doesn't she? Like, hold up she's about to smile."
A few seconds later, sure enough, the girl smiled.
"See, check out her cheeks and the way her eyes look when she smiles. She looks JUST LIKE you."
"Oh. Yeah, she does." I was kind of taken aback. Len was really excited about this.
"I was just watching the show and I was like, dude. Is that my sister? Is my sister in the UK right now?" Len laughed and then slowed down the video. "See, check it. She just did something. Wait, let me roll it back."
Len rolled the video frame by frame over the girl in the background as she smiled a tight-lipped smile and quirked and then dropped an eyebrow.
"That is JUST LIKE you!"
"Yeah. I guess it is."

Then Len went back to late night TV and I sat there on the couch wondering about how he saw me. I thought it was funny that he had even noticed someone in the background of a television show who looked like me. And I thought it was even funnier that he had taken the time to show me, and roll frame by frame over the facial expressions that made this would-be doppelganger look the most like me.

I thought of the other times in our lives when Len and I had been kind-of friends. We both liked funny youtube videos. We had hooked up the netbook to the TV so we could watch on a bigger screen. We had gone to eat by ourselves a couple of times. Really, though, Len had gotten on my nerves a lot.
He lives a lifestyle that was totally and completely opposite to mine. In college I had pretty much gone wild, while Len had come home like clockwork every weekend, saved his money, bought only video games and food, and didn't ever actually buy a car until he was a Senior. Yes, in college. I had a cell phone and a car by the time I was 19 and I used them to create my own idiotic independence. I was young, pretty, and boy-crazy. Len was conservative, quiet, and practically a eunuch.
We were opposites and we looked down our noses at one another.

Lately, though, it was almost like we were meeting in the middle. Len had gotten a sweet job, and I wasn't boy-crazy any more, or going out on retarded pseudo-dates. We sat around together and watched weird X-Files episodes about inbred freaks, alien abductions, and genetic mutants.
It made me think about when Len and I were younger. And I mean a lot younger. When Len was still little and I was his big sister walking him home from kindergarten. I had an excuse in the third grade that I could leave early and walk home with Len out of his kindergarten class. I can still remember the day when Mrs. Ault stopped me on my way out the door.

"Don't you think your brother can make it on his own today?"

I felt like she was butting in on my relationship with him. I liked being protector, leader, BIG sister. To this day, I'd call myself a nurturer. And maybe that's what some of those pseudo dates were about. What all the Catching in the Rye was about. That I am straight up, 100%, a nurturer. But what if, all this time, I was the one who needed to be nurtured the most? What happens when you realize that the one you've been trying to Catch is yourself?

Len laughed at something on TV. I was glad he hadn't lost me over the years. That he could still pick my face out of a crowd in the background of some random British TV show. It made me smile.

Apology

I have been trying to write to you for the past two weeks and can't seem to come up with a single scrap of interesting material.

I'm really sorry.

The older I get, the less I seem to want to share with other people. I can't tell if that is a result of maturation in that I don't feel the need to be heard or sympathized with any more, or if it is a result of depression and self-defeat in that I don't feel like any of my life is worth sharing anymore.

To be honest with you, I'm a little bit scared about the future. I am scared in ways I never thought I would be. I'm afraid that I will sell myself short. I'm afraid that soon everything will be over, and I'm also afraid it will never start. I'm afraid that I will never be satisfied. I'm afraid I'll be alone in my head forever. I'm afraid the opinions of others will be allowed to run my life, and I'm afraid NOT to let them.

I'm afraid of how dumb all this sounds, and how you'll probably get to the end of this post and be like, "God, what a retard."

But I just want you to know that I actually AM really tired of censoring myself for other people so I can control what they think of me. Its so flipping hard sometimes! And I'm doing okay at it right now, but I don't know how long I can hold out. So be prepared. There might be a little explosion on the horizon.

Right now, though, I just seem to be waiting.

Popular Kids Meet the Equalizer

"How is your daughter doing in school this year?" I hadn't had a chance to talk to the girls from Valuations since I'd come back to the office. My return to teaching had become only a hiatus from my desk job. I was back after six months. I'd been placed in the middle of the office floor this time, far away from Valuations, where I used to sit.

Tricia sat diagonally from me then, and I'd heard many a story about her daughter being bullied at school, and many a phone conversation between Tricia and the school principal. Now we sat across the table from each other at a department luncheon in a Mexican resturant.

"She's doing well!" Tricia remarked of her daughter, "I think she's finally worked up the guts to stand up to those mean girls."

"Good!" I said. "Middle school girls are the worst. I'm tellin ya. That's where I just came from, and I think its probably the first time in kids' lives where cliques start to form and you start recognizing popular kids and not-popular kids. They don't really seem to be aware of that in elementary school."
"Yes!" Tricia said. "And you know what they're picking on her about this year? Her clothes! If she doesn't have on Hollister or American Eagle she doesn't even want to show up at school."
"Yeah, uniforms have really changed things like that in Metro schools."
We nodded, as did the other ladies next to us at the table.

I always hate department luncheons with no seating charts. Everyone mingles, but you never know who you're going to sit by. If you get stuck with someone who's your superior, you get nervous. If you get stuck with people you don't know, you get left out. If you get stuck with someone you hate, you get annoyed. Its a total crap shoot.

Megan Cates was sitting next to me, adjacent to Tricia. Megan was fairly new. She was mid-twenties, blonde, a tad chunky, and rumored to have tattooed eye make-up, meaning that her eyeliner was permanent and would never come off. That weirded me out.

"I don't even think we had popular kids when I was in school," she said. "Everybody was pretty nice to each other. There were groups that hung out together, but I don't think any one group was quote unquote cooler." She chuckled, and took a sip of water.
"Did you go to a small school?" Tricia asked.
"Well, it was a small town, yes."
We digested that for a minute, crunching our free chips and salsa.
"You mean you seriously never got picked on?"
"No. I can't remember a single insult." Megan smiled. "I guess kids aren't like that anymore. I wonder what causes that."
"TV," Paula chimed in from the other side of Tricia.
"Probably," I added.
We crunched our chips again in silence, listening to the commotion at the other end of the table.
"Well if I've learned anything from teaching its that your experience in school is totally unique to you. Nobody has the same experiences. I don't remember kids being crazy hooligans and running teachers out of their classrooms, but I went through Honors and Advanced Placement classes where that didn't happen that often. Teaching Standard classes and low performers really made me realize that things haven't changed, but my perspective has."
Megan nodded to me, but I didn't stop there.
"So... maybe there were some other kids who DID feel picked-on at your school."
She paused.
"Well come to think of it, yeah. Actually. I guess there was this one girl who was kind of a bully."
That wasn't what I had asked, but I was interested.
"All of my daughter's bullies are girls!" Tricia added. "People don't really call girls bullies. I guess they think they're too feminine, but they can be just as mean and awful as boys."
"Well, this is actually a pretty funny story," Megan started. "When I was in high school I was active in a lot of clubs and stuff. I was on the yearbook staff, and I dated Jeff, who is now my husband--"
"--Oh! That's so cute!" Paula was still listening too.
"Yeah, so I dated my husband for like two years of highschool before we went to college." She took another sip of water and her grin got all big and loaded like this was a super juicy story. "Well. There was this girl at school who I guess wanted to date Jeff? Anyway, she just got so mad at me for dating him. And she was kind of a weird girl, too. Like she's still weird. I think she's a lesbian now or something, like she seriously does DRAG shows and stuff as a MAN, which is funny, because she was mad at me all Senior year of high school for dating Jeff, who is a man." She laughed, and made this face like 'WEIRD-O!' and continued. "Well, she was on the yearbook staff with me, and before the pages went out to be printed, she got into the lists and deleted my picture and my name out of the yearbook altogether."
"Oh no!" Tricia and Paula across the table gaped.
"Your Senior picture!"
"What did you do?"
"Nothing," Megan said. "I mean, they gave me my money back, but there wasn't really anything we could do. The books had already been printed. And they knew who did it, you know. So they kept her from walking the line at graduation; she got an F in yearbook class. But let me tell you. My friends gave that girl hell about doing that to me. I mean, she probably wished she'd never even met me."
"What do you mean?"
"Oh," Megan mused, "They called her some terrible names, drove to where she worked, slashed her tires. You know, stuff like that."
"Oh my god! That's horrible!" I was taken aback.
"Well she reaps what she sows, huh?" Tricia seemed unsurprised.
"That poor girl." I said.
"Well, I wasn't in on any of it, of course. She tried to press charges against me or something for damaging her property but I wasn't even there, you know. And that whole rest of the year was just hell for her I'm sure. But she probably deserved it." Megan smiled. "Other than that, though, nobody was mean or clique-y in my high school. Everybody pretty much got along."

The waiter came a few minutes later with our food, and cross-table comparisons to lower priced Mexican resturants began. But I couldn't stop thinking about the girl. I couldn't stop thinking that the only reason Megan hadn't experienced any bullying and thought that her school didn't have cliques was because she was in the biggest clique of all.

Everybody probably got along from her perspective because they weren't about to cross her or her friends, and she was probably too self-centered to even notice that people didn't like her. I mean, if the girl really did become a lesbian later she was probably going through some intense times in high school. Megan and her friends probably weren't the only ones who thought she was weird. And who knows! Maybe something actually HAD happened between her and Megan's husband Jeff, to make her really angry. Some of the best people I know had the worst times in high school. In fact, it's all the popular kids who end up never leaving town and making anything of themselves. The weirdos are always more successful.

Isn't it strange when you're years and years beyond high school, but you can still feel the old us-and-them principles creeping in? I suddenly knew for a fact that had I been in high school with Megan I would NOT have been able to be her friend. She wouldn't have glanced twice at me. More than likely I would have made friends with the girl that got terrorized. And yet here we were having lunch together just because we worked in the same building.

Man, adolescence sucks.
When I was teaching middle school kids my favorite kid was a class clown who made jokes to roll the insults off his back. He came from a broken home and was the youngest of four, the only boy, and his mother had recently become pregnant with some random guy's kid even though she didn't take care of the four she already had. I wanted so badly to explain to him how adulthood was an equalizer. That he really could be whatever he wanted to be. That no label would ever stick with him his whole life. That he was brilliant and hilarious and good no matter what people said or how many times he was sent to the principal's office.

But you can't explain those things to someone who hasn't experienced them. His future felt like a white void where he didn't even exist yet. It didn't matter what I said, he was not going to be able to fill in those blanks. His only reality was now. And for all he knew it would be all he'd ever know.

And thats how I imagine that girl that Megan was talking about. I imagine her balling up her fists because the only reality is now and she's trapped; she can't move.
It makes me wish I could teach again, just to talk to her.

I put down my fork and looked at Megan laughing at something Tricia said.
She was a temp just like me.
Adulthood really is the equalizer.

Prelude to My Non-Gothic Life

I heard my cousin say something depressing.

My aunt is supposedly studying theology at a local university. This came to me as a surprise because she is a grandmother, and has already aged beyond the standard "college age group." Additionally, religion is not something that is openly discussed on that side of the family. Thus, I had no idea that theology would be of any deep interest to her, or, for that matter, worth spending thousands of dollars on professional study.

"Why, hell..." My cousin Ben said, after hearing this news. He was wearing a polo shirt and ripped jeans. I could not decide if the jeans were designer or just worn from many nights of drinking and running amuck. He slouched deeper into my grandmothers forty year old couch and worked the wad of dip around in his lower lip. "I'd probably set the place on fire if I set foot in a church. I'd straight up burst into flames."
My uncle and my cousin Gina laughed.
"I have no business being there," Ben said. "No sir."

How sad, I thought. That's probably the BEST place for him. But it would be too weird, too out of the norm to board that train of thought. It would also be too weird and out of the norm for me to suggest I thought so.

That side of the family has layers. They're like onions. There are things you get to see, the "appropriate" parts, and then there are the hidden, unseen things. Motivations for bizarre actions go unquestioned. Its the epitome of the Southern Gothic movement in literature. There is no need to ask why this and why that and whats up with this. One is polite, and cheerful, and nothing is ever wrong. This is not to say that something is always wrong, but occasionally there will be something that it seems everyone talks around. And still occasionally I wonder if I'm the only one who smells the rats.

There are nine cousins, and I am the third oldest. Three of my cousins are married and have children. Two older than me, and one younger. I like watching them. I like to see they way they interact as married people, as families. I hope to myself that they're happy, that they're safe. I wonder if they'll play charades and gestures and pictionary with their emotions. I wonder if there's hope for me. I wonder if all the bad modeling will lead us all to the same highs and lows. I wonder what we'll do when our grandmother passes away, and the house and the glue that presses us together a few times a year will still adhere. I guess one day we'll find out.

Still there are some things I am certain about. I want to make sure I smoke out all the rats in my relationships. I want to shoot down the elephants in the room and transcend awkward levels of communication. As much as I love Southern Gothic literature, I really don't ever want to live in Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. Or McCullers' Sad Cafe.

And I still wait for the fresh start that will be the prelude to my non-gothic life. So as Ben giggled like a school kid, and my cousin Gina changed the conversation, I stayed polite. I didn't say a word, and I tried to think about something else.

Advice I'd Give My Daughter

Sex is not power. Anyone can have sex, and most guys would have sex with a bar of soap if it looked like it wanted it, so make sure you don't lower yourself to that level. Don't be the soap. Be you.

Even if you don't quite know who you are yet, its good to pretend you're important. People will treat you the same way you treat yourself. Every time. Its like the Golden Rule flipped inside out. So don't mope around thinking you're a piece of crap, and don't put up with anyone who wants to treat you like one. Because the people that do that are only doing it because they feel like pieces of crap themselves. Look for this, and you'll realize its true.

Make sure you look good. If you like the way you look, or at least put effort into it, you'll realize you feel better about yourself. This means that, yes, sometimes shopping therapy is necessary. Because its good to feel fabulous. All the time, if possible.

Accept the fact that no one is going to rescue you. Do not be fooled by romance novels and chick flicks. Do not live your life waiting for something to happen to you that will change everything. In the end, you are the one who brings about all the changes. Don't surrender that right to anybody else.

Be the change you want to see in YOURSELF. Stop thinking of yourself in terms of what other people see, and think of yourself in terms of what you see in yourself.

People can change. But don't expect it out of anybody but you. If you wait for someone to change, you could be waiting your whole life. Realize that sometimes timing just sucks, and there's nothing you can do about it. It doesn't matter how cute he is, if his life is a mess you can't expect him to clean it up just because he met you. The only thing you will ever have control over is yourself. Don't ever forget that.

If you're waiting to do something while no one's watching, you shouldn't do it at all.

Feed the fish in the fish tank, and know you are needed.

Secrets are not beautiful. They won't keep you warm at night, and they trap you in ways you can't even understand right now. Be honest with yourself AND other people. Its beautiful and it will make you feel good.

Religion is not "gay." Despite the hilarity of some televangelists, faith in God is the best possible thing to have in your life. Talk to him. But most importantly, listen to him. If you stop and just listen, he'll always tell you what to do.
Matter of fact, stop right now and make an effort to listen. This time, when you ask a question, don't you strangely feel like you already know the answer? Stop and do this at least once a day. It will change your life.

Don't drink. I know you will, though. Please remember that alcohol is a depressant, it makes you gain weight, and that even when you think you are totally in control, you aren't.

ps- If I catch you drinking I WILL kill you.

Don't get wrapped up in what you think is cool. Remember that your life is short. Time passes quickly. Your youth will fade. You'll be thirty one day. And you'll look back on all the things you did at your age and think... what? Do everything with your future in mind. The present is its best predictor.

Drugs will make you barf. Including herbal drugs. Especially herbal drugs.

Sometimes you have to stop talking to people who allow you to behave unhealthily. If they're holding you back, you don't need them. Don't feel bad letting them go, and don't feel like you have to explain a thing. Change your phone number. Delete your social network. Read a good book. Buy new clothes. Dye your hair. Reinvent yourself.

It is impossible to screw up so badly that you can't ever have a fresh start. The only thing keeping you from the best version of yourself is you.

Be good to your family members. Don't hide things from them. Don't be ashamed of them. They are a part of who you are, and they'll never stop loving you.

And finally,
Eat fruit.
Drink milk.
Don't smoke.
You will thank me later.