“Oh, I’m sorry. . . . Could you repeat that last part?” I asked. “I can’t hear you through YOUR GIANT FUCKING BIRD HEAD.”
Lisa huffily pulled the bird head off and seemed to be working up a lecture, but I really couldn’t stomach the thought of someone in a bird costume telling me I needed to be more focused on fitting in, so I locked myself in the bathroom. After a few minutes Lisa halfheartedly apologized through the bathroom door, probably because she realized that her hands were still covered in thick bird wings, and that I was the only person in the house who could help her unzip her costume if she needed to pee. Yes, it seemed cruel, but these are the risks you take when you choose popularity over opposable thumbs. It’s probably also why Big Bird is always so fucking nice to everyone. You kind of have to be nice if you know that you’re trapped in a costume, and that your bathroom breaks are at the mercy of people in the vicinity who own thumbs. Honestly, if we ever run out of straitjackets, we could just put crazy people in old mascot costumes. Plus, if they escape from their mental institutions they’ll be just as hindered as anyone in a straitjacket, but way less scary. And instead of shouting at terrified children at the bus stop, they’ll just look like charmingly bedraggled Muppets who are lost and need a bath. Everyone wins. Plus, I think I may have just solved the homeless problem. (Editor’s note: Nope. Not even remotely.)
Even so, the words of my sister were still ringing in my ears the next day at school, and I decided to make an effort to fit in. And that’s how the peer pressure of a sibling in a bird costume led to me getting my arm stuck in a cow’s vagina. This is exactly why peer pressure is such a terrible thing. Frankly, this entire chapter could be an after-school special.
The weirdest thing about my getting a cow pregnant when I was in high school is that I wasn’t even enrolled in that class.1 I’d taken most of my required classes in my first two years of high school, so I filled my last two years with easy electives. I enjoyed art, but I’d already taken the only three art classes my school offered, so my art teacher allowed me to make up a new one. I chose “Medieval Costume Design,” but I got bored after the first six weeks and switched it to “Sequins! The glitteriest buttons!” Then my art teacher pointed out that the school didn’t actually have a budget for sequins, and that I probably wasn’t ready for an advanced sequin class if I was under the impression that they were buttons, so I just stopped going. Instead I was assigned to be an office aide, and I spent the noon hour manning the front desk of Mrs. Williamson, the temporary receptionist of the junior high next door, who spent her lunch hour drinking in her car. She was a nervous, divorced woman who always left incredibly raunchy novels in her top desk drawer, and who once told me that house cats will eat their owner within an hour of their owner’s death. She disappeared less than a month after I started (I suspected she’d been fired, but I admitted that it was possible she’d been eaten by her own cats) and had been replaced with an answering machine, so no one really seemed to care anymore whether I showed up or not. I’d taken to spending that hour crouched under Mrs. Williamson’s abandoned desk, reading whatever lascivious books she’d left behind, but I’d just finished her last book the day before (a V. C. Andrews novel with the really graphic parts underlined), so I was in no hurry to get to the junior high office. Instead I dallied in the ag barn, slowly packing away the power tools and arc welder.