Flotsam

Age 13:
On the first day of Junior High School you wear a thinly ribbed purple sweater and a pair of Guess jeans. You have braces, and your blonde hair has dried with an odd swoop, making you look vaguely Dutch. Under your sweater is a stolen brassiere. You aren’t much of a shoplifter, really, but your mother detests bras, the very idea of bras, and has refused to buy you one until your breasts are pendulous enough to hold a pencil all on their own. You are all too aware that your chest lacks the ability to hold any office supply, except perhaps a post-it note.

Each week your seventh grade English teacher gives you a list of 50 words to be used in sentences. You are desperate to make these sentences interesting, to showcase your burning, nascent talent. You feverishly imagine Ms. Calvin at home, grading drab, colorless assignment after drab, colorless assignment. She lifts your paper. She marvels at your distinctive handwriting. Reading your sentences she is nearly epileptic with laughter, choking and gasping, tears spurting cartoon-like from the corners of her eyes. She reaches for the telephone to call her close, personal friend The Editor of The New Yorker.
“Hello, The Editor of The New Yorker? It’s Ms. Calvin. You simply must read this—One of my students has taken an admittedly hackneyed form, the vocabulary sentence, and given it a daring, inventive twist…She is quite extraordinary…without a doubt the most original literary mind to come out of seventh period English lo these many years…”
Papers are handed back and the tops of yours say “Messy” “Coy” and “Please Re-Do.” You notice, for the first time, that Ms. Calvin is a sour, small woman with tightly curled, immobile hair. She wears matching skirt and sweater sets and cheap gold jewelry. During “Spirit Week” she dresses so thoroughly in school colors that you must look away from her, embarrassed by what seems a disproportionate display of enthusiasm.
What does she know of Literature? What does she know of Art?
You receive a C- in seventh grade English.

Age 14:
You become infatuated with your best friend Kate’s older brother. He is a lusciously unobtainable seventeen. He plays the guitar.
In the dark one night, during a whispered conversation about sex, Kate suddenly snaps:
“You sound like you want to,”
To which you immediately reply:
“I don’t.”
This is a lie. You do want to.

It is the eighth grade now, and your braces come off. You start your period, mistaking it for a hemorrhage—hemophilia, or a cruel, Old Testament punishment for masturbation. You dye your hair purple in the girls’ locker room at school, staining a shower stall grape. You listen to Bikini Kill and attend a surfeit of punk shows, striving for that alluring amalgam of revolutionary passion and disaffected scorn that seems to come so easily to everyone else. Stoned for the first time, you gaze at a Wheat Thin and begin to giggle. Ah, you think, so this is what Mr. Huxley was talking about.
You begin to read excessive amounts of philosophy, and to apply these theories to inappropriate pop-culture subjects, such as Fraggle Rock. You write a paper entitled “The Nothing Is Coming: Existential Themes in ‘The Never-ending Story’”

Age 15:
You are not a particularly skillful skateboarder, but your hatred of athletics is temporarily overcome by your devotion to style. As you are coasting down a hill, insouciantly unable to stop, a man grabs your upper arm. The board shoots out from under you.
“Hey!” you say in that eloquent way you have, shaking yourself free and smoothing your Astroturf skirt. He grins and hands you a square of yellow paper.
“Come to my party,” he says.
“Vandal Productions,” says the square of paper. There is a phone number across the bottom.
When you call the number a voice recording gives you directions to a record shop where you exchange twelve dollars for two faded carnival tickets.
“One to get in,” explains a boy swaddled in a puffy down vest, “and one for a balloon.” You roll your eyes. Balloon. How old do they think you are? The boy hands you another square of paper, on which are printed another set of directions, this time to two shuddering warehouses flanking a muddy vacant lot. Inside, people are dancing with a fluid, kinetic ferocity–or, alternatively, are strewn like corpses around the periphery of the dance floor.
It is three o’ clock when the shining silver nitrous tanks arrive and people line up with their balloon tickets. You feel, for the very first time, exactly your age.

Age 16:
Eager to enter the world of work, you become a courier for an enterprising senior-in-high-school-cum-drug-dealer. You weigh eighty-five pounds, and look about as dangerous as a paper plate—it is this, your utterly unsuspicious appearance, that secures you the position. You are given the adorable nickname “Alextacy.” At restaurants you continue to receive children’s menus. Chatting near the DJ booth, with the makings of a felony in your plastic purse, you are frequently asked by unshaven gentlemen carrying crates of records whether it isn’t past your bedtime. It is.

In the mornings you wake and call a taxi, for the bus comes FAR too early.
“Area High School,” you tell the driver.
The walk to your locker is long and lined with staring faces. You are wearing six-inch platforms and false eyelashes. You are wearing something made of Evian wrappers, or pants with legs the size of teepees, or have sequins glued around your eyes and goggles in your hair. Makeup that looks lovely by the wee-hour light of an abandoned steel factory looks garish under fluorescents at seven-fifteen. Your pupils are the size of small satellites, and though you have a ready explanation for this phenomenon, no one sees the optometrist three times a week.
Sometimes you wonder if you are missing out on something, the High School Experience that your classmates, the ones who spit on you as you walk to math class, seem to enjoy. Dances, teams, and legal extracurricular activities. You like dancing! You are pretty sure you would like not being spit on. Not quite enough, you decide, to stomach the company of the spitters. This is the only wise decision you will make this year.

To be continued…