1995 — FOURTEEN
SCHOOL SUX DIX
Eve,
Dude, I’m so——>ooo sorry about w/b.
Everytime I do, I don’t see you and I end up throwing
them away! anyways… how am I supposed to find
your locker when I cant even find my own? Fool!
My math class kicks ass: Cailean Mullen,
Cadence Smith, Stephen Jones, Jill McCartney,
and a bunch of hippies and headbangers are in it.
There’s this fine guy named Sonny McKay
in my class. He has long hair. Yummy! He’s
always stoned. He rocks. Anyways… My pubes
are a-flamin!!!! I think we should get going on
this zine deal, ya know? Like, soon.
No Eve, I will not give you back your notes.
I’m giving them to Mr. Cassavettes. I’m concerned
w/ your feelings. Fuck NO! Just kidding! Anyway,
I’m a spermicidal maniac baybee.
C-YA, W/B
Valerie DiGiovanni
(schmuck)
I love this woman. Love love love love. To this day. We are still friends. We went without actually seeing each other from about 2000 to 2006 or 7 but that’s not important. We’ve maintained the friendship through the phone, email, an obnoxious amount of MySpace comments and talking over instant message. I don’t know why we hadn’t gotten together in that long, but we can both be pretty flaky, so when combined, our ability to make plans usually self-destructs. But its never mattered because we have had one of those kinda relationships, that are few are far between, which always pick up exactly right where you left off. No matter what, no grudges for going too long without speaking, no drama, no bullshit, just understanding.
We didn’t get along too well right off the bat though, in the eighth grade. She first laid eyes on me in homeroom. Because of our last names, I was seated right next to her and Primo. I forever thought she was about to kick my ass at any given moment, for no apparent reason. She was a softball player, and feared for she could wipe the floor with you. She was the one who thought of all the best (read: creative) mean names to make fun of me with, and for that, she had my respect. But one day, and I don’t remember what it was even about, I (meekly, at best) stood up for myself and talked back to her. She was stunned, because no one had really done that with her, but especially not some skinny little new girl with weird clothes. And from then on, our bond with each other was sealed and we grew to have a deep and sustaining friendship. Sure we had our ups and downs throughout those years, and some of them were a little too drug-fueled, but I wouldn’t take a moment back.
Damn, this note is from before she even came out! She’s a big homo. No one really had any idea or clue she liked girls when we were in the ninth grade. At least I didn’t. I didn’t catch on until we were juniors. Or, I should say, I was a junior. Valerie was expelled from school when we were sophomores, for a multitude of reasons that I’m actually not too sure of and wouldn’t want to misrepresent. She was basically asked to not return.
Mr. Cassavettes was our “Group” counselor, the guy in the Guidance Counselor’s office whom we would meet with once a week to talk about how godawful we were to our parents, ourselves, and each other. I don’t know how, but one of my probably cry-for-help-sounding notes to Valerie ended up in his hands and he called me down to his office to intervene. I was slightly death-obsessed so I’m sure my note made plenty of references to wanting to either die or kill people. Pre-Coumbine (I graduated from high school in June of 1999, the year it happened that April. It really makes me wonder. I would have never really killed myself, or anyone else, but that didn’t mean I didn’t think about it. All the time. I didn’t have access to weapons or the ingredients or skills to make a bomb, or really, the desire to. Once Primo tried to sell me a hot pistol I don’t know where or how he obtained. I actually thought about it for a good minute, because he was making a deal for me seeing as he really wanted to get rid of it. I think he was trying to sell me on the self-defense pitch. But I declined, telling him the temptation to blow my brains out would probably get too strong knowing I had the ability to, so that transaction never conspired. I was also scared shitless of guns and cold metal in general. Thank goodness.
There were a few different Group divisions, and some of them were deemed cooler than the others, for the status of the people in each group on the fucked-up factor. For example, I made it into the upperclassmen boys group by the begining of winter that year, which was dreamy for me, because it was filled with all the best connections for drugs in the school and all from cute older boys with cars. That was a step-up from the underclassmen boys group, full of gents with whom I could actually have a chance to hang out with if I wanted to. Valerie and I had started out in the all-ages girls (there were less bad girls than boys) group, which allowed us to meet some of the older girls - social climbing for us lowly freshman. I remember the very first day of school, when Cadence and I followed two upperclassmen into a locked girls room that they had pried open the door to with a school ID card. They taught us how to break into so you could smoke in a high school bathroom - fanning the smoke around us to lessen it, the importance of carrying a small aerosol bottle of some kind of Designer Imposter’s perfume, how to not let the cigarette “canoe” while inhaling at lightning speed during the two-minute break between classes, and also the importance of sharing. I don’t know how we did it every period, meeting in one bathroom in particular, with the threat of hall monitors at any moment, with six girls plus backpacks in one stall, with no time to not be late to our next class. And how we did not notice that we absolutely reeked of cigarette smoke was only because we were lessening our sense of smell every 45 minutes. How this all went on so much without us being on permanent suspension for smoking was beyond me, but in those days school security was a lot more lax then it is now. I don’t know if that was luckier for us or not, in terms of what we were able to get away with. At the time, sure, we had free reign over the school and the morons running it, but in retrospect, our futures were melded and bad habits fostered by that negative environment and in some cases, ruined.
