Category Archives: High School

The Ice Girl

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Here is where we last left high-school Brenna: she’s just been asked out on her first-ever date and now, in the privacy of her physics notebook, she is hastily backpedaling.

On the surface though, everything looks neat and under control. Smooth as glass.

The date goes down like this:

Dill shows up at my house precisely on time. He wears matching shoes because he wants to make a good impression on my parents. I don’t tell him that whatever impression he makes will have nothing to do with shoes and everything to do with whether or not he strikes them as being interesting.

The movie is enjoyable. There is popcorn, which I like. (Soccer season has started, and I’m perpetually starving.) Dill is polite, entertaining, and very much a gentleman. When the movie is over, he asks if I want to hang out for awhile and get to know each other, and even though my interest in kissing has kind of evaporated, I say yes.

So instead of taking me straight home, he pulls into one of the scenic overlooks above the city, where upperclassmen go to flail around in the back seat and grope each other.

I consider this. Even at her most flustered, new Assertive Brenna has a certain coolness, a chilly mantle of calculation. She is self-possessed. She is completely without diplomacy.

“I’m not going to make out with you,” I said. “I don’t know you very well.”

He laughed. “I didn’t bring you up here for that. Really, I meant I want to hang out. To talk.”

He was looking across the seat at me, smiling awkwardly, and he wasn’t even lying. Much.

But Dill is true to his word and doesn’t try to kiss me. Instead, he unbuckles his seatbelt, leans back, and starts to talk. And I spend the next two and a half hours feeling really, really happy. The city looks kind of glorious, lit up below us like a sea of colored sparks, and I’ve been waiting for months to have a conversation with someone who is not my sister.

It turns out that Dill is a lot of fun to talk to. He’s animated and enthusiastic and actually thinks about things like art and religion and philosophy.

There is, however . . . a problem.

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The Real Boy

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By now, it should come as no surprise that Brenna at sixteen is essentially an orderly creature.

True, she doesn’t always do her homework. She has a bad tendency to lose her pens and sometimes she shows up to PE only to realize that she’s wearing one purple sock and one brown one, but she is methodical. Self-contained. She is placid. You’d be hardpressed to hurt her or scare her or break her heart. Basically . . . she is this girl.

Even though she spends most of her time with Catherine, who is perpetually In Love (not always with the same person), she doesn’t believe in things like fate or destiny or soul mates.

When she considers the possibility of a boyfriend, it’s abstract. Which is not to say that she doesn’t think about it. She does, but only in the context of an activity, like sand volleyball. Or backgammon. She views dating as something that might be interesting to try, and also, she wants to know what it’s like to kiss someone. The idea of a boyfriend is appealing in a general way. It is, however, ruled out by the fact that she suspects she may be undatable.

She likes herself—don’t worry. In fact, some days she likes herself quite a bit. But she doesn’t really believe that anyone else will like her. This is mostly because she has a very low opinion of high school boys, but we’ll cut her some slack because so far, her test group has not been promising.

The thing is (occasional crushing boredom aside), she really finds herself very entertaining. She is ironic. She likes 80s horror and Quentin Tarantino and pasting foil decals on her fingernails. She enjoys the color red, but finds orange appalling. She likes Sweet Tarts, coffee, and drawing elaborate pictures of medieval fortresses and panopticons in her physics notes. She doesn’t believe in miracles, she believes in unknowns. When she zones out in class, she dreams the gleaming daydreams of scientists.

These are things she knows about herself. She doesn’t want to change.

But she’s beginning to suspect that if she wants to go on dates, she might have to. She has a hard time imagining that any boy is looking for this—what she is. And she has an even harder time imagining that any of the boys at school have anything to offer that she actually wants. So, instead of scouring her classes for potential suitors, she invents fictional ones. And fictional boys never disappoint.

She wants someone wistful and tender (and nicer than she is), but she wants him to be that way in secret. Sentimentality is only attractive if it’s private. She kind of wants to be adored, but not from mountaintops, never over the PA system. She wants shy, lingering glances and wishes made on stars, because nothing appeals to her more than longing. When she considers herself unromantic, she is lying. Did I mention that she is selfish in the way that only teenage girls can be?

It would be both gratifying and very literary to say that my wishlist ties into my first dating experience, but absolutely none of this has any bearing on what happens next.

Dill isn’t like the other boys in our grade. He’s taller than most of them, but not in a gawky way. He has an actual physique. He’s on the swim team and wears two different colored Chuck Taylor high tops and drives a red sports car.

And the thing is, he notices me.

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Grabby-Hands

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Once, I promised you a post of Great Meaning. This was a long time ago.

I promised a story involving personal growth and epic realizations and redemption.

Well, maybe without so much loftiness.

Okay, what I did promise was that I’d tell you what happened when three things finally conspired to shake my wallflower status to its very foundation. We’ve come to the culmination of those Three Things.

Up until now, my entire high school career has consisted of me sitting patiently in one corner or another (thanks to always being the very last person on the roll sheet), watching the world lumber by, and documenting pretty much everything.

What happens next is not on my hypothetical agenda. I could not have predicted it. What I’m saying is, it is so unexpected that it should be fake. It should be an after-school special. It is that thing I didn’t know ever actually happened.

Pugsly is short, loud and wildly good at extreme sports. Later, he’ll go on to compete in the X Games. He is the personal hero of one of my friend’s little brothers and is featured in real-live skate videos. I’ve never actually had a class with him, but we have PE in the same gym and he spends most of the period throwing the volleyball at his teacher. He is out of control. He is—how can I put this?

Pugsly makes Pierre look like a model citizen.

How this relates to me:

In delicate terms, I am what’s known as a late bloomer. More frankly-put, I don’t have a lot going on back there. Or up top. Or anywhere, really. I am diminutive in the sense that I might as well be a twelve-year-old boy. Sometimes, I feel vaguely self-conscious about this, but for the most part, I just go with it. I’m not really in the market for male attention, and there are benefits to being shaped like a very short flagpole—the main one being that I tend to wander through life unmolested. I assume that I am safe.

On this fateful day, I’m standing in the lunch line, waiting to pay the cafeteria lady for my sad gray cheeseburger. Cheeseburger obtained, I plan to meet Catherine by the trophy cases, go out to the courtyard, and spend the next fifty minutes trying to ignore the fact that the day is only half-over. I’m not crazy about this plan, but I’m content. At ease. Metaphorically, speaking, there is circus music playing in my head, and a tiny car, and some trained seals, and a bear on a unicycle. It’s a good place to be.

And then, the thing is . . . Pugsly grabs my ass.*

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This Is Not a Story About Boredom

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Okay, I lied. It totally is—but it is also a story about hope and curiosity and how under the right circumstances, an unsolved mystery can be like a metaphorical lighthouse. Yes, I just said the phrase metaphorical lighthouse.

For awhile now, I’ve had this tidy plan for my high school posts. It involved character development and narrative arc and me making a timeline on a piece of notebook paper and I was going to be very chronological and organized. Those who know me will understand how laughable this is. You will understand that it just couldn’t last.

So I’m taking a small detour, because I’ve stumbled upon something I want to talk about. And by stumbled upon, I mean it was handed to me again and again.

In the last month or so, I’ve gotten a number of emails from people who are currently in junior high and high school and who’ve had some incredibly personal and insightful things to say about a deceptively rough topic: boredom.

A lot of the correspondences involve frustration—people wondering how to stay sane and if it will get better and most especially, how to survive it on a daily basis. These are good questions and to be frank, I have no answers. Boredom is a tricky thing and it comes in a lot of different shapes and sizes. I can’t tell you how to beat it. But I can tell you what I did.

Here is an admission: for most of my life, I thought people who got bored were just lazy thinkers. I’d always been able to entertain myself, either with a book or a story I was making up, a long run with the dog or an impromptu living room dance-party with my sister. People who got bored just weren’t trying hard enough.

Then I started high school and boredom became my number-one hobby.

When people find out that I was homeschooled by hippies/gypsies/raised by wolves, a lot of times they’ll ask if public school was a big adjustment. I always say no. I tell them I adjusted well and adapted quickly and kept my head down.

And that’s true.

But there’s also another true thing, and anyone who’s ever worked with animals in captivity will spot the signs immediately.

Brenna at sixteen is restless—a fidgeter. She tears up looseleaf paper like a neurotic hamster and chews the erasers off her pencils and picks apart the layers of her pressboard desk. If she were allowed up out of her seat, she would pace just as tragically as the tigers at the zoo. She begins to wonder whether or not it is possible to die from boredom. Literally die.

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The White Trash Club

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Today, I’m finally going to talk about something that happened to me (as opposed to describing events that took place in my general vicinity). As far as Spanish class goes, this story is actually kind of commonplace. To be expected. About average.

And it cements every tiny, fragile piece of resolve I have.

Up until now, I haven’t said much (anything) about Spanish. This is because I hate it. Not the language, just the class. I hate it so much that in the course of my 10th grade journal-keeping, I mostly pretend that it doesn’t exist.

There are several reasons for this. Mainly, it is both agonizing and deeply boring. For one thing, I am surrounded by half the basketball team and most of the wrestling team And for another, Pierre.

Perhaps you will remember Pierre from that time he licked my face. This is certainly what I remember him from. The interesting thing is that despite the gross, wet indignity of having his tongue touch my cheek, I do not actually dislike him.

Even though he can be a total jerk, I still see his antics as a game, and this gives our interactions a strangely competitive quality. His job is to crack my veneer. Mine is to not respond. When he crouches next to my desk and starts panting in my face or rifling through my homework, I stare back at him blandly. When he makes fun of my shoes and asks me if I had Wonder Bread and margarine for lunch, I tell him no. I tell him I only eat my Wonder Bread with Karo syrup. I do it with a straight face, even though I have never eaten Karo syrup in my life and the one time my health-conscious hippie mother bought white bread, it was for a papier mache recipe.

Socially speaking, I have very few natural talents.* But I’ve got one or two, and my best trick is recognizing where someone rests on the power continuum. Pierre is somewhere near the bottom—wherever it is that class clowns generally fall—and it seems probable that he wouldn’t constantly act like such an ass if Pharaoh and Trout and the other sports-boys ever congratulated him for anything else. I may be relatively new to the social dynamics of teenage boys, but I know pack animals when I see them. Pierre is loud, unpredictable, and disruptive, but he is not an apex predator. And until the day he breaks character, I am secure in the idea that I know exactly what I’m dealing with.

The other player in this weird little non-drama is Valentine. She’s taller than me, with long blond hair and pale sled-dog eyes. She wears heavy black eyeliner and boys’ jeans. She’s sexy, but not particularly feminine. She’s scary in a thrilling, austere way. And by scary, I mean that I kind of want to be her.

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The Second Thing

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Well.

Well . . .

Well, it’s been quite awhile since I sat down and wrote a good solid blog post. What was the hold-up, you might ask?

Here is the short version: I turned in the latest revision of Book 2, then fell into a sleep resembling something out of a fairy tale only my hair didn’t look as good and I was wearing mismatched socks. After a week or so, I woke back up, made the bed, did the laundry, and now things are starting to return to normal.

There’s still work to do, of course. Next will be line-edits and copyedits, and hopefully a cover reveal pretty soon here, but things are definitely moving along. Also, I put this on the calendar weeks ago and then when it actually rolled around, I completely spaced it—but The Replacement came out in the UK yesterday! It has a British book-birthday! I’d somehow gotten used to the idea that it would be released there in the future and then failed to grasp that the future is now the present. This is an example of how I am very bad with time.

Here is another: literally months ago, I said I was going to talk about how I stopped being completely passive—specifically these three defining things that happened in close succession. I’m going to talk about the second thing now, but since it turns out that the posts themselves are not remotely in close succession, you have to imagine these events taking place within days of each other.

The second thing that happened did not happen to me. (Not that Dweezil getting yelled at happened to me—it just happened near me. But, you know.)

First though, to set the stage for my next mini-revelation, we have to go back in time.

A few weeks before the second thing, the Hobgoblin pulled me out of the lunch line one day and told me he was worried about me. I assumed that he must be confused, misled by my timid demeanor or my silence or the fact that I was standing in the lunch line alone waiting to buy two slices of terrible pizza—all of which could be construed as very worrying things. I hastened to assure him that I was fine. I was spectacular. I was fan-freaking-tastic. Really.

He regarded me gravely, then told me that I needed to stop hanging out with Irish.

I was immediately gripped by crushing despair. Or, what passes for it in Adolescent-Brenna World. So, moderate perturbation.

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Dweezil (Alternately Titled: The Time I Almost Got Yelled At)

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As promised, news and announcements are taken care of, the contest is all squared away, and it’s time for another high school post!

Looking back over my First Semester Ever of public school, I’m beginning to notice a pattern. We might call it a pattern of inactivity. Or, we could just be honest and say that sixteen-year-old Brenna is wildly, tragically passive about a whole parade of highly unacceptable things—watch-theft, face-licking, etc. In a perfect world, I would cue the voiceover and say, “But that’s all about to change . . .”

Unfortunately, this is the actual world and profound transformations don’t happen by the end of the episode. However, I will make allowances and say that it’s all about to change a little. This is because of three things that happen in relatively quick succession and today, I’m going to talk about the first thing.

Some quick background: there are 24 boys on my bus route, but I only like three of them. Irish, naturally. And Trip, because he’s slow and sleepy and once SugarRay (who can be a total jerk) slapped him in the face and made him cry, which was very embarrassing for everyone involved and then I felt sorry for him.

The third one is Dweezil.

Dweezil is fifteen, with dark shaggy hair and half-closed eyes. He’s skinny and sullen-looking and most of the time he doesn’t wear a coat, even when it’s obscenely cold out. I like him for various reasons—how flat his voice is, how completely tasteless his jokes are, but mostly I like that on days when Irish would rather sit with SugarRay, Dweezil will sometimes flop down next to me and not ask first if it’s okay. He never talks to me, but I like the way he nods sometimes and doesn’t quite make eye contact. I like that when he tells jokes, he includes me in the audience. On his radar, I am completely, perfectly neutral, and that is the most relieving thing.

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Gatsby

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The story I am about to tell happened because of Hemingway. But it wasn’t his fault.

In English, we’d been reading The Old Man and the Sea for almost a week. For those unfamiliar with this particular book, it is 96 pages long. Also, we were on the block system. In case you don’t feel like doing the math, I’ll break it down: we were reading the same 96-page book for an hour and a half every day.

I finished on the second day, but complied with the mandatory Reading Time by bringing another book. M was not amused. She wanted to know where my Hemingway was. Then she sent me to go get it.

At my locker, I just stood there, looking at the inside of the door. I’d taped up pictures because other girls taped up pictures, but mine were sepia-toned and not quite right—postcards of Albert Einstein and Marilyn Monroe. They coexisted more or less peacefully with my locker-partner’s shrine to Brad Pitt.

I was standing there, seething over M, when Gatsby came down the hall toward me.

This is what I wrote about him a year later,* when we had the same history class, but I’m including it here because here is as good a place as any and sometimes you just need to know about a person:

First, about Gatsby. He is 16, and has black hair and blue eyes, and his teeth are crooked from being kicked in the mouth so many times. He’s not very big, but his body seems angular and tough, like if he were already grown up. He smiles a lot, is always nice to me, and sometimes tries very hard in class, although mostly not.

[In History] he always has something to say, and usually it is something so desperate and passionate and indignant that I envy him for being able to say it, like no one was going to laugh at him for caring so much.

Gatsby is a hard boy to explain to someone who hasn’t met him. Even hard to explain to the people around here, who know him. He’s rough and loud, but in a way, still very gallant.** I like him very much, in the only way I can. I like him in the way of a small girl in the back row of 4th hour History, watching closely, but never saying anything.

That day though, I didn’t know anything about him. I was still unacquainted with his character, his eccentricities. I was only a very quiet, very cautious girl looking at a stranger, limited to what I could see.

And what I could see did not look good. He was holding a red paper Coke cup against the side of his face. When he stopped at his locker, he opened it with a little flourish that was supposed to make me laugh. One eye was swollen part-way closed.

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The Curtis Brothers

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Being almost-friends with Irish meant inside jokes and laughing all the time and singing harmony to “Yellow Submarine” and getting written up for stupid things like how many times we sharpened our pencils, and feeling like I actually existed. But it also meant spending a fair number of mornings sitting alone next to an empty chair because he was hungover or missed the bus or just didn’t feel like showing up to class.

I missed him on the days he didn’t come, but I wasn’t one to take his absences personally. I considered them to be the result of a kind of social impasse. He was not the kind of boy who felt obligated to attend Geometry on a consistent basis just to see a sometimes-friend, and no matter how many times he invited me to come with him, I was not the kind of girl who ditched class.

I started to notice the times I spent alone, though. It’s a strange phenomenon, but when you are used to being alone, the outside world starts to blur into the background. Alone means no intrusions, no distractions, and the page in front of you is the realest thing.

But when you are sometimes not alone, it gets hard to slip back into the trance you inhabited before, staring at the board while everyone else is giving each other French manicures with Wite-Out and flicking paper footballs. The sense of isolation was still there, but it had stopped being comfortable. It was with great reluctance that I came to a realization: I needed some more almost-friends.

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Telling Stories. Or, Brenna Talks Ethics (sort of)

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Lately, I’ve been thinking about high school. (That’s a joke, by the way—I rarely stop.) Specifically, I’ve been thinking about the problem of what I want to say and how I want to say it.

There’s no legal precedent that says a person can’t write about another person. If you change names, blur faces, skip the libel and the defamation, it’s well within your rights. But that’s the legal stuff. The ethical concerns are more complex, and those are the ones that matter here. It seems presumptuous to turn the spotlight on someone else. Worse, it seems like bad manners. People feel exposed, even if no one can see them standing there.

Little Sister Yovanoff said, “I was reading your blog about Irish the other day. I was thinking how there are maybe five people in the world who would see it and even know who you were talking about.”

And this is the truth. No one will recognize the people in my stories. No one is going to stumble upon an isolated anecdote, then turn to a friend or a coworker and say, Stop me if I’m wrong, but I think that’s you.

But people will recognize themselves.* They’ll see their likenesses, hear their own voices coming from someplace else. The more personal the story, the more likely they are to recognize themselves, even seen imperfectly through someone else’s lens, and that recognition can’t ever be counteracted by aliases and clever nicknames. Someone might read a particular story and remember how the moment felt. It might not always feel good. I know that, and it raises some very important issues about responsibility.

Here is the thing about telling the truth. To write about someone honestly, I think you have to love them a little, even though loving is not the same as knowing. People deserve to be handled with care, and I have a responsibility to be careful, and also to be honest. And yes, that’s scary. (I have spent most of my life avoiding responsibility.)

When I can, I tell people what I’m doing, let them decide if what I’ve written is okay, or if it’s too much.** It’s not perfect, but it’s the most workable solution I’ve found. Of course, another solution would be to stop writing about other people, but that comes with its own set of problems. What I’ve found is that writing about yourself and writing about other people are not always separate. Because the thing is, sometimes your stories are also their stories.

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