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aleatoryalarmalligator · 7 years

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My Life Story - Part 41

For my fifteenth birthday, I received the guitar I would learn to play on. It was a black and white fender stratocaster knockoff. My father taught me E,A,C,D,G, the minors and a few of the 7ths, how to play the chords on neck, how to play power chords, how to tune a guitar to itself, and how to pick around certain chords, to get the feeling of the sound of that chord without necessarily playing it outright. Everyday after 10th grade I would rush home and play my guitar for several hours before I did anything else. I eventually was able to tune the neck simply by listening to the sounds of the strings.

At school, I was now the official school goth. For years they had been calling me a hippie-goth – whatever this happened to mean, and for years they had been mostly wrong. I would have loved to dress that way, but I simply never had nice clothes. I was usually stuck with t-shirts and jeans. I had been called goth frequently simply for wearing a black hoodie that had the Nike symbol on it which was silly and telling of what a small town Kendrick is. I could probably sort of understand by 10th grade though that I might fit in some superficial idiot's version of what a goth might mean. I threw away all my shirts that were not band related t-shirts. I dyed my hair black, wore enormous amounts of black eyeliner, and lined my eyes in red. I refused to smile at the camera in school, or at all really. I was no longer the gullible silly girl they had known before. I was outwardly passive aggressive and didn't take kindly to being made fun of. Of course, under the tough exterior, I was every bit the timid person I had always been, but I wasn't about to let them know that.

Football games no longer excited me. The smell of bad nachos and the night air no longer seemed made for me. I used to be able to hide from this painful feeling of emptiness when I went to the school events, but it seemed like that no longer worked. I was not distracted by anything. And at the very most, I would look at a specific spot at the school, and I would have these vivid recollections of Zack the previous year, and that mostly hurt. I was also approaching school with the idea that I was going to make it work. I didn't want to do this, and I still was not willing to do homework. But I wanted to see if I could at least become a D student. This might sound like failing to most people, but when you have brought your grade up from 15% to 60%, then the improvement I was looking to make was actually quite a lot.

Ava was gone – to the nice big school up in Moscow to make new friends and then destroy their lives, Katie had new friends in her own class, Jason was gone from school forever – was employed by the elderly to do gardening and physical work on people's homes. Justin and Cody were both gone – I don't recall where the Smiths moved, but they did. It really was just Sam, Zack, Sarah and I. It is worth noting that a boy in the grade above, this mousy forgettable fellow with blonde curly hair, cheap clothes and glasses sat by us too. He was incredibly shy and talked with a strong lisp. He didn't really fit in anywhere, and I guess we were that group of mismatched individuals that had nowhere else to sit. We would all sit together at lunch. It was just this default group. I knew that Zack was probably thinking about quitting altogether, as his sixteenth birthday was that September. And every fiber of my being was totally possessed by his very existence, but I had acquired this cold dignity about me. I wasn't about to let him know that I still cared, or myself when it came down to it.

Now that we were proper high school students, we ate with the juniors and seniors. There was this especially odd looking senior that had just moved to the area. His name was Daniel, but I renamed him Noah for some reason when I first met him, and he was by far one of the strangest people who ever came to Kendrick high school, he had long black hair down to his lower back, glasses, and he was the tallest person I had ever seen – 6'8. He seemed to lumber more than walk, and he reminded me a bit of one of the trees in LOTR. He wore all black clothing everyday, and seemed to struggle with decent clothing that fit. And he had a very friendly demeanor, and a very dry sense of humor and seemed somewhat intelligent. He saw us on the first day of school and decided to sit with all of us. I guess he figured that he might fit in with us the best. At first, I was rude to him because I was anxious and was at this point in my life where I was beginning to feel very defensive and inclusive. But then he must have said something sort of funny, and I laughed. When I laughed, I happened to notice that Zack got this dismayed sad look on his face. I think he had tried to say something, but I had ignored it. It hurt me to watch Zack become sullen and deflated, but also felt kind of good for some reason. I had felt abandoned and betrayed, and now I wanted Zack to realize that I was not simply 'his person'. So I started talking to Noah at the lunch table more frequently. I started debating him about everything he did and said. He didn't seem to mind at all, and took on everything I said with a great bit of care to respond back equally as questioning. While I did this, I was often actually gauging Zack's reaction to the attention I gave to Noah. I could tell it was bothering him a lot. I reveled in his sad blue eyes looking down at the table.

I had to take 9th grade algebra over again and I was the only 10th grader that had been held back. I was quite uncomfortable being in a class of younger students, many of whom I couldn't stand, but this discomfort actually made me pour into my math lessons more so. This was the first class I didn't have any of my friends around me, all there was was me, the lesson and the bookwork. And it was strange, but in the absence of anyone who really knew me, I felt prompted to do a better job. It was almost as though some of my poor attitude had been showing off. I started getting all my assignments done, and I started really trying. Mrs. Rush was at first incredulous and surprised, but eventually after a month or two of this, she called me to speak to her after class. She told me that she was very impressed and surprised by my improvements. She hadn't seen it in me honestly, and though I was not naturally good at math, I was of reasonable intelligence in the subject if I set my mind to it. This was probably the first honest schoolwork related compliment I had received in several years, since 5th grade, and coming from a teacher who couldn't stand me the previous year, this meant a lot whether I wanted to admit it or not.

I was also doing better in my science class. I started paying attention to the lessons, and found that I really enjoyed science. I instantly understood chemistry. It wasn't actually too hard to understand how atoms worked, how they created elements, and how elements formed together in this equation. I liked looking at the world around me and imagining it not as whole things, but as several atoms all working together. In a sense, I remember feeling like this new realization took the magic out of everything. I looked at Zack's eyes and realized that perhaps they were just a bunch of tiny fragments. How could an element found everywhere explain the existence of so many things I loved. How could science explain why Radiohead was so beautiful, why I felt contradicting emotions towards people? I was very puzzled, and didn't know how I should feel about ruining my religious faith in art like that. Science killed the mystical. But I paid close attention nonetheless because it was valid and interesting, and I really started to care about my education. Other classes, I still failed. I didn't like our new English teacher. So I didn't often times do her assignments. And history was still too boring to stay awake for.

I was listening to a lot of Smashing Pumpkins around that time. I am not terribly into them now, but whenever I hear the song 1979, I get this sickly strong remembrance of this time in my life, the way my converse looked in the grass, Zack trying to get my attention, the way my locker smelled, the way Sarah walked down the hill, and the way the sun looked to me in those days.

After a few weeks of intentionally ignoring Zack, I grew deeply sorry. I had pushed him too far away at some point, and he stopped eating at our table suddenly one day. As Noah continued to talk to me, I watched Zack walk away. I felt sick to my stomach, realizing what I had just done. Was I about to get real with myself and just admit I still had feelings for the guy? No, I wasn't about to do that, but I wasn't going to lose him either. However, I never did get much of a chance to coax him back. The next week, as I was going about brainstorming whatever it was I had to do to be his best friend again – the one he used to sing Best Friend by Queen about, I discovered that Melissa had decided to come back to Kendrick high school again. They were dating, and it was easy for me to sometimes forget that. I think her return was some kind of temporary thing they did for fun, but it completely ruined my attempts to make up for my betrayal. Watching them together was strange. They seemed to have their own world, and when Zack was around her, I no longer existed, and I felt very strange about that. I would silently mope, but I could never tell anyone what was actually wrong. Eventually after several weeks of personal despair and this vague annoyance at myself that extended to Noah, since I had in some strange way intentionally used him to put him between Zack and I, Melissa and Zack skipped together and got caught doing it. Rather than face detention, Melissa split school altogether. Zack took the detention. All was well again.

The detention room was extended off the main school office, and it faced a window. For some reason I could never figure out, it was the same room where they kept stocked up sodas for the pop machine. They literally put the bad kids in the room with endless amounts of soda and candy for the venting machine. Why they did this, I will never know. At first, I thought it must have been some kind of test, to see what kind of virtue the detention kids had, but there was no test to it. Zack filled up an entire backpack with soda and candy. We also visited him at lunch break through the window. We had to continue to duck from the office ladies, who sensed someone was looking into the room and through the window and at one point I had to take cover right below the window, as an angry office lady, sure of her intuition gazed out with clueless suspicion.

That Friday, Sarah and I decided to skip as well. I felt I was doing a really good job at school, and I needed a break. It felt right for us to skip, and it felt like my personal right to do so. I urged Sarah to skip with me. Sarah came down to my house that day. I wanted to do things that were constructive and fun on our day off. It would be like a more personal extension of our education, the way I saw it. Anybody worth knowing, as I figured it, had never skipped a day of school. My father was playing music again, and he had bought some speakers and set them up in the 'other room' (I had moved my bedroom upstairs again and this was now what we called one of the rooms I had had when I slept downstairs) with his bass guitar. Sarah and I went in there, and we tried to write a song. I played two chords back and forth, with no particular style or speed. Sarah tried to find the notes on the bass that went with the melody I was strumming. It never sounded right, nor could I really get into what I was doing. The song was beyond lame, but we tried to make something out of it, playing it for about half an hour before giving up.

We were then hungry, so I decided to make a cake. The problem was that we had no eggs. If I had been savvy and had known what I know today, I would have went down the the pop machine down the road to buy a can of pop, which works as well as eggs do in making cakes rise – a little trick you learn when you are vegan. But I didn't know this. Instead, I got frustrated and decided to add way too much sugar and way too much oil, which I thought might somehow make up for the eggs in some way. What came out of the oven forty minutes later was the most disgusting cake that I have ever tasted. I couldn't even eat cake for about a year after that gross creation, and the mere thought of this cake used to make me gag. All in all, the day was depressing and gross. The sun was going down, and there was this existential empty feeling we both had. We never made a delicious cake, and we never wrote a good song. I started getting this sick empty feeling, like there had to be more to life, but in the end everything was pointless like this. Had Ava been there, we might have had a great time. Those days were over, and I had a greater love for Sarah than Ava, but still. Sometimes you need that freaking nutcase to make your days go by. This was such a lame day, perhaps the lamest day of my life. I was trying to heighten life somehow by skipping school with Sarah, but in the end it made me sick to my stomach.

I was more than certain that Sarah and I would get away with skipping school. We hadn't actually been caught, and though it seemed suspicious, it wasn't out of the ordinary for us to catch the same cold at nearly the same time, seeing as we were close friends in a small school. The weekend would pass, as it had for years, and I knew that the teachers and office women would forget about it over the course of the weekend and we would be free to go on as if nothing had happened. I had literally gotten away with skipping school over one hundred times, and I had very little fear of anyone catching me and punishing me accordingly. So when I walked into school and casually checked into the office to confirm that I had been sick on Friday, the office lady said something blatantly rude and knowing that she knew that Sarah and I had skipped school together. I told her that she couldn't prove it, and she should mind her own business. I probably shouldn't have said this to the feisty mean redheaded office woman, because she immediately went to the principal and they set out to get Sarah and I into trouble.

This event really got out of hand. My father showed up, Sarah's mother Carol showed up. The principal explained what corrosive and futureless bums Sarah and I were getting to be. Even though my father and Carol both couldn't stand one another, they seemed to form a sort of bond around punishing Sarah and I in this one specific occasion. I didn't get it at all. I had always thought Carol to be more or less looking out for me. She knew my dad beat me up no more than a year ago. Why was she working with him? I personally felt betrayed and incredibly mistrustful of all of them. They talked about how Sarah and I had changed over the summer. My father's suspicions of my drug use had been renewed.

Sarah and I were both pulled out our last hour and sent to the office. Everyone looked at us with cold stares. Redhead looked into my eyes and smirked viciously. I built myself up and got ready for a battle. The old principal was gone, and in his place there was a new principal named Mr. Conover. He looked an awful lot like Hoggle from Labyrinth. I was taken into the office, and between my father and Mr. Conover, I was asked questions about what I thought I was doing and what I wanted to be when I became an adult. Every time I tried to answer the both of them would shout right over me that I was wrong. It wasn't terribly loud, but it was useless trying to explain myself. I tried to explain that I couldn't imagine a life that would be meaningful unless I served music or art and that I didn't want to go to college at all. I wanted to form a band and travel the world. My father and the principal told me my dreams were stupid and couldn't happen. They told me I wasn't good enough to be anything like that, and I needed to be realistic. The principal explained to me that he played bass guitarist for decades and he had never become famous. I tried to explain to him that I wasn't interested in MTV, or having a hit or anything like that. I didn't care if I had more than a few thousand loyal fans, I just wanted to be a part of music.

Basically, they both just tossed me back and forth, knocking me down to size, until I just started saying empty rebellious things like they wanted me to. I didn't want to admit it, but they had succeeded in making me semi ashamed of myself and I really wished that I had said nothing. I promised myself never to tell people openly what I wanted. It seemed like everyone was a fucking expert ready to tell you what you could and could not do. And I knew my night was going to be a bad one. This little ordeal was only the beginning. Carol angrily took Sarah home. My father was in a rage when we left the principal's office and I tried my best to hold my head high. Redhead gave me one more mocking smile, before my father insisted that we go talk to some of my teachers to ask them what my grades were like. Nobody was in their classes anymore, since school had gotten out while I had been trapped in their little shame game, and this made my father even angrier. I was actually half hoping my math teacher of all people could still be in her class. She of all people might actually vouch for my improvements in her class, which was really quite extraordinary since I hadn't had a decent math grade for nearly five years. I tried to explain this to my dad, but upon hearing it, I realized that he actually was not happy to hear this. The look on his face actually was more angry. He wanted me to fail, so he could knock me down.

When we got home, he shouted at me as loud as he could for nearly an hour. He attacked everything about me. He shouted at me for doing drugs, said I was lying. I tried to scream back, but my voice was nowhere near as loud as his was. He told me I looked ugly and like a goth freak who slits her wrists. I tried to explain to him that the only differences I had gone through in the last year was that this had been the first time in my life where I actually had built up a sense of self worth, and the first time I had ever had a goal in my entire life. He continued to verbally and emotionally abuse me, till basically it just became the same as it always had been. My covering my head crying and shaking uncontrollably doubting everything I said and feeling worthless and weak, while he leaned over me screaming at my head, the same old picture we had been posing for for years. He took my cd's from me as an attempt to punish me further, and told me I wasn't allowed to be a 'goth' anymore.

Sarah's mom had also thought that perhaps music was making Sarah into a bad student, so she attempted to take Sarah's music away, but Sarah looked at her straight in the face, with the look of 'Really Mom?', and she had taken a step back. What we had done was probably worthy of getting maybe a few detentions, but they gave both Sarah and I three days of in school suspension each. I didn't get my cd's back for several months. My father tried to make me change my make up when I left for school, saying I looked like an ugly clown. I actually refused to take the make up off, and told him that even if he made me, he really couldn't control how I wore my make up as soon as I got to school. He threatened that he could, but I knew that was probably one of the emptiest statements he had ever made.

When Sarah was in detention, we visited her in the window. And at the end of the day, she probably walked out with fifty dollars worth of candy and soda. Then it was my turn. Sitting in the office, I got to listening to the office women talking. Adults really weren't all they were cracked up to be. They gossiped about other teachers. They talked about one of the teacher's weight. They then moved on to the football stars in the school, talking about which ones were 'fine looking'. I listened around midday as April, the girl in the class below who had often hung out with Jason, came in because her drunken father had stumbled in insisting that April had stolen cigarettes before school.

April screamed at her good for nothing and clearly drunken horrible father denying that she had taken the cigarettes. I had a feeling she had stolen her good for nothing dad's cigarettes, and even though April and I were not friends at all (she had walked up to me on the first day and told me that my new look made me look like a clown as well), I sort of rooted for her and felt bad for her. The office women were eating this altercation up, siding with April's dad, even after he threatened to beat the shit out of her and called her a worthless little bitch. The office women were sick. They were getting into it the way dumbasses get into wrestling. They wanted to see someone get taken down, and they didn't care if it meant facilitating abuse within the actual school in their own office. April was sent to another room to calm down.

April, though a crude and unfriendly creature whom I had little in common with, she being into ICP and fart jokes, really did have it rough, and I had to respect that she was doing the best she could to get through life, same as I was. She suffered from bipolar disorder, and these kinds of situations were brutal to her ability to function – I could recognize that she had been intentionally antagonized until she snapped. And that's what the institution of education wanted to do to people like her and I, make us snap and cause us to wreck our own lives. That way, we never would have any credibility and the social order would have 'the other' to look down upon and nothing would change. The office women were beaming with excitement for the rest of the day. It made me want to gag, just thinking about what horrible people they both were.

I got ahead in my math lessons, and managed to get sixty lessons done in advance. That way, I wouldn't have to do any math until late November. Why I had never thought to do my homework this way was beyond me. It was actually quite relaxing and enjoyable. I realized how much I enjoyed doing my homework in this nice little room, with a window before me open to nature. It was quiet and I could be alone. I failed to really understand how this was a punishment for me.

At lunch break, Zack came to visit me. He and I put our hands together through the window. We made faces at one another like children. He picked flowers and set them in the window ledge outside. And whenever the office women came to look in, he would duck. When they weren't looking he would come back up again, and blow me a kiss, before rattling something outside so they were compelled to look for him again, in which case he would drop to the ground again so they couldn't see him. I couldn't believe that these women could not understand that they were not able to see a good portion of the window area. It was a poor man's version of the ending of Benny and Joon.

Naturally I walked out of the class with fifty dollars worth of soda and candy same as my fellows before me. Anyway you could rob or fuck over the establishment, it was your solemn duty to do so. And for some reason, nobody ever followed up or accused Zack, Sarah or I of stealing. Jason had done it last year, and we couldn't possibly have been the only ones. I felt nothing but good since I now didn't have to do math for the rest of 2004 just about and I had Reece's Pieces to eat galore to eat and wash down with endless cans of Cherry Pepsi.

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PART 1 - http://tinyurl.com/l8xbvg8

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