(Alternative Title: High School Is Life’s Way of Giving You a Record Low to Judge the Rest of Your Life By)
I was the only Goth chick in a tiny agrarian high school. Students occasionally drove to school on their tractors. Most of my classes took place inside an ag barn. It was like if Jethro from The Beverly Hillbillies showed up in a Cure video, except just the opposite.
I purposely chose the Goth look to make people avoid me—since I was painfully shy—and I spent every free period and lunch hiding in the bathroom with a book until I finally graduated. It was totally shitty.
The end.
UPDATED: My editor says that this is a terrible chapter, and that she doesn’t “even know what the hell an ag barn is.” Which is kind of weird. For her, I mean. “Ag barn” is short for “agriculture barn.” It’s the barn where they teach all the boll weevil eradication classes. I wish I were joking about that, but I’m totally not. You could also take classes in welding, animal husbandry, cotton judging and cultivation, and another class that I don’t remember the name of, but we learned how to build stools and fences in it. I’m fairly sure it was called “Stools and Fences 101.” None of this is made up.
UPDATED AGAIN: My editor says this is still a terrible chapter and that I need to flesh it out more. I assume by “flesh it out” she means recover a bunch of awkward memories that I’ve invested a lot of time in repressing. Fine. My ag teacher told us that once, years ago, a student was hanging a cotton-judging banner on the ag barn wall when he fell off of the ladder and landed on a broomstick, which went right up his rectum. The idea must have really stuck with my teacher, because he was forever warning us to be constantly vigilant of any stray brooms in the area before getting on a ladder, and to this day I cannot see a ladder without checking to make sure there aren’t any brooms nearby. This is pretty much the only useful thing I ever learned in high school. Oh, and I also learned firsthand how to artificially inseminate a cow using a turkey baster (but that was less “useful” and more “traumatic,” both for me and the cow). This is what we had instead of geography. It’s also why I can never get the blue pie when I play Trivial Pursuit.
UPDATED AGAIN: My editor hates me and is apparently working in collusion with my therapist, because they both insist that I delve deeper into my high school years. Fine. I blame them for this whole chapter. Please be aware that you’ll probably have horrible flashbacks of high school when you read this. You can forward your therapy bills to my editor.
Let’s start again. . . .
Pretty much everyone hates high school. It’s a measure of your humanity, I suspect. If you enjoyed high school, you were probably a psychopath or a cheerleader. Or possibly both. Those things aren’t mutually exclusive, you know. I’ve tried to block out the memory of my high school years, but no matter how hard you try to ignore it, it’s always with you, like an unwanted hitchhiker. Or herpes. I assume.
Since I went to high school with all of the same kids who’d witnessed my peculiar childhood, I had already given up on the idea of becoming popular and perky, so instead I tried to reinvent myself with a Goth wardrobe, black lipstick, and a look that I hoped said, “You don’t want to get too close to me. I’ve got dark, terrible secrets.”
Unfortunately, the mysterious persona I tried to adopt was met with a kind of confused (and mildly pitying) skepticism, since the kids in my class were all acutely aware of all my dark, terrible secrets. Which is really not how secrets work at all. These were the same kids who’d witnessed the Great Turkey Shit-off of 1983, and who all vividly remembered the time my father sent me to our fourth-grade Thanksgiving play wearing war paint and bloody buffalo hides instead of the customary construction-paper pilgrim hats the rest of my class had made in art class. These were the same classmates who owned yearbooks documenting my mother’s decade-long infatuation with handmade prairie dresses and sunbonnets, an obsession that led to my sister and me spending much of the early eighties looking like the lesbian love children of Laura Ingalls and Holly Hobbie. I suspect that Marilyn Manson would have had similar problems being taken seriously as “dark and foreboding” if everyone in the world had seen him dressed as Little Miss Hee Haw in second grade.