Lola, Lolita

Gina's post made me think about high school this morning as I dashed about frantically braiding hair and brushing teeth. I don't remember, in high school, ever having the feeling that there was something I wasn't getting.

I remember being on the outside and thinking that was the way it was supposed to be.

My high school, tiny and rural as it was, had the same breakdown as all high schools do. The beautiful (always beautiful, even if they aren't) fake blonds. The football jocks. The music nerds. The smart kids. The burnouts. The artists. etc. But the thing about graduating in a class of 92 is not only did you watch most of these kids get crayon tips broken off up their noses in second grade, but the star quarterback is just as likely to be hauling the set around during Joseph as bullying people behind the Ag shed.

I go back home to watch my little brother play basketball and I wonder why I sweated (literally) so much in high school. The girls I wanted to be--not be like, but BE, with their permissive, extravagant parents, perfect skin, cars, and older boyfriends--are no longer so lovely. What's more, when I look at pictures, they never were. And the look of discomfort and unhappiness wears itself into their faces year after year.

I straightened my hair every damn day of high school, but it was still brown. I tried to dress the part, but I was always wrong. I valued the wrong things--good teaching skills instead of permissiveness, and I wanted the student council to actually do things. Luckily I was talented enough to overcome the spite of the band director and managed to carve out a nook for myself called "every single god damn music group we had to offer." As I discovered when I got to college and found people a little more like me, it wasn't the music I was passionate about. I enjoyed it, yeah. But it was a place for me to hide. A place where competancy and not some phastasm of popularity ruled.

And looking back on it, I wonder--does anyone ever feel like high school is the golden years of their life? Was KC, whose breasts I would have killed for my junior year, any happier with her dumb klutz of a boyfriend and her tremendous fear of pregnancy than I was with my insane crush on some redheaded kid who was out of my league? (I later discovered that her horror of getting knocked up was so immense that she would only ever let her boyfriend have anal sex with her. This suddenly made her bad posture make a lot of sense.) Were they scared of losing their place on the top? Were they lonely?

To say "where am I now, and where are they" sounds like asserting my superiority. That's not what I mean. What I want to say is: I am happy, truly happy, with the person I'm becoming. I'm where I want to be. And that makes high school worth it, in a way, because I discovered who I didn't want to be.