PAST NOTES

1995 — ONE

Eve,
hey there groovy chick
What’s up chuck. dude on friday we should Jam
after school cause i was a brain storming And i
think that we should stay after for awhile then
go back to your jomomma’s house but anyway I’m
gonna hook your ass up, ok?
But tell me what you would be sayin for me
before you say it’s OK. hey and thanks for the
Jane’s Addiction. that shit was kewl.
Well I will talk to you
later BaBy.
I love you
bye bye

francis bean

The first note ever passed to me by Cadence Smith. We had been in French class together all year but did not make friends until sometime in the early Spring around the same time I started going out with James Trask, a boy who was a year older than me, but in a grade below.

Cadence was a girl who I had secretly thought of as cooler-than-anything for the whole year and was overjoyed when we began to get to know each other and discover we had a lot more in common than what was on the outside - we both were weird dressers. She was a year older than me but we were in the same grade. We got in so much trouble together our parents eventually banned us from hanging out or even talking on the phone so in order for us to call each other we made up code names to go by if one of our parents answered. I was Courtney and she was Francis (Bean).

In this note, I probably told her I would tell some boy she liked him, or be her wingman. And when I say some boy I mean Stephen Jones. But shhh… And in this note, the Jane’s Addiction reference was about a song I had dedicated to Cadence over the local ‘alternative’ rock radio station: “Been Caught Stealin”. Cadence had just been busted shoplifting (again). I had told her when to anticipate it, but I didn’t tell her what song it was. So it was a thrill to hear the title of the song and her name in the same sentance on the radio, except for that it came on when she was in the car with her mother and she told me her mom shot her the most pissed off look. We had both been caught for shoplifting at the mall that year. We both continued to do it everywhere else though. Stealth stealing skills were a prized trait amongst my social circle.

Our usual routine was to walk into town after school let out and loiter somewhere. We’d either steal or find someone over 18 to buy us cigarettes, hang out at the local pizzaria and split the $2.10 special, two slices and a soda. We always got the squirt of vanilla syrup in our Pepsi’s for an extra twenty five cents. Then one of our mothers or stepfathers (we both had stepfathers) would pick us up and we’d go to one of our houses. We spent hours changing outfits, smoking cigarettes while hanging half out her bathroom window, listening to music in my room, or in the loft area of the barn at my house which we had swept out and brought a boom box to.

I had a video camera which we used contstantly to document our own personal after-school-specials. We’d shoot in an old barn on my mother’s property, out in a field somewhere, or up in my room. There are videotapes of us floating around this earth some place I wish I knew, so I could properly destroy them all in total disregard to posterity. In them we are shamelessly acting like fools, talking like Bevis and Butthead (this was 1994), saying ‘dude’ and ‘man’ too much for our own good, wearing flannels and baggy jeans, slam dancing to nirvana and green day or the ramones, and acting out this kind of Bob Ross meets This Old House send-up, giving fake tours and descriptions of wherever we were at. I really do hope those tapes never surface.

1995 — TWO

Hi I just finished taking my tests, I told
Carl what I had for him, he told me to give
him them latter. I hope that it is not this cold on
friday. On friday I’m riding Dave Bauer’s bus over
to his house, then we are walking over to your’
house. I talked to Frank Bruno, and he said that
he won’t tell Michelle, but he told Jackie. I can’t
believe that Primo is leaving on Monday. Oh yay
that Girl Shannon came up to me this morning,
and said “by any chance did you try to call me
last night,” and I said no, then she goes “my mom
didn’t pay the phone bill so the phone got shut
off.” The teacher left, and everyone is throwing
pappers. I cant believe that you Guy’s got a
port-a-poty, for the party. Well the bell is going
to ring, and I have to go to music

p.s. is Jackie Bruno in school
to-day

James

Wasn’t I lucky to have a beau sending me sweet, eloquent, romantic love letters like this? Ones that run on and on with no line breaks, indents or paragraphs? No clue to when his next thought is starting or the next one ending. Story of his life probably. Poor fellow did not make it past ninth grade. He gave me my first kiss and it lifted me off my feet so much that for a long time I gauged kisses off the level of giddyness he elevated me to with that primitive lip-lock. To “Red Light Special” by TLC at a school dance.

I knew James from around the hallways but the only time I had ever really spent with him was when I was with Primo. Primo and James both lived in town and had parents who could give a flying fuck what their children were up to so a lot of time was passed getting high at Primo’s and James’ with friends. This group included Frank and Jaqueline Bruno, Valerie DiGiovanni, Cadence Smith, Dave Bauer and Carl Udder, all of whom lived in town except for Carl, Cadence and I. We would walk around town from the time school let out until whenever we found a ride home or whatever. We’d eventually find out way to the parking lot behind the local supermarket, where the boys would skateboard on homemade ramps and the girls would smoke cigarettes and otherwise self-destruct sitting against a wall: burning holes in our arms, cutting lines along our wrists with shards of glass or seeing how long one could take getting the top of her palm scratched out at a furious speed by another’s fingernail. I still have the scars. Other townies from school included Joe and James Perezutti, Penny Vachel, Jesse Goodson, Jean Kruger, Ben Schroderman, Steve and Virginia Miller, Ezra Wendell, Scott McCafferty, Casey McKenzie, Jay Cindrello and Mike LaMonte. It was always guaranteed you could find at least two of them hanging in the parking lot in town on any given day. If it was raining, everyone would be at either Valerie’s or the Perezutti’s house. In both houses the basements were the designated areas for illegal activities of all sorts, from drug dealing (that should go without saying) to statutory rape to money laundering.

My house, located far enough away from town according to the perspective of someone two to three years away from even a Learner’s Permit, was to be host to my first party, the first of what would eventually be many more. After my parents recovered from this one at least. James’ was right, there was indeed a “port-a-poty” - my folks planned to refuse entrance to any teenagers in the house to use the bathroom, so they rented a port-a-potty which I did not see any one of my friends occupy the entire night. Primo and James did use it in the beginning of the night; to dispose of a bat they had found and killed with a broomstick in the barn’s loft. We videotaped the beginning of the event, and then I brought out a bottle of tequila I had found in the liquor cabinet (which was promptly emptied out by my mother and relocated somewhere I’ll never know to this day). All I remember is that someone ate the worm, and that the party was a roaring success, if roaring success means establishing oneself at the pinnacle of proper white trash teenage delinquent society.

1995 — THREE

Hey Evie babe,
What’s doin wit you nigga?
Anyways, Primo’s coming back on Monday and
coming to school on Tuesday.
I really missed him.
I don’t want to dump Ben cause I care about him
and stuff. But I have like this major malfunction
where I can’t go with out people too long.
I cant commit myself or something. Its fucked up.
Ya know what sucks?
I cant stay after on Tues or Wed or Thurs butt I
can only stay after Friday. See if you can stay
after on Friday. Are you going to Washington?
I’m not. Who are you rooming with?
You know your friend Bartles & Jaymes?
Maybe my friend Aftershock can be his bitch.
That would be chillin.
I like Anne Marie Delgado a lot, but sometimes
she gets too hyper.
Oh yeah – on Monday, Rich Koch came to
Religion class high. He was fuckin wasted! He
was staring at the floor and looking around like
a tranqulized chimp or something. It was fuckin
funny as hell. He freakin broke
my Zippo lighter. The god damn jerk! I had to
spend the whole weekend hanging out with him.
Sat & Sun & Friday night 7:00 – 8:30 because of this
religion retreat thing. Actually, he’s pretty cool, but
boy is he dumb! Well its 11:26 now and I’m sleepy.
So I’m gonna hit the sack. Toodles!

Jackie

Enter first note from Jacqueline. Jackie became my go-to girl for the next two and half years whenever I needed therapy from someone who was going through a girl-to-woman-hood far worse than I could have ever imagined myself experiencing. Jackie was there for me when I needed to talk about my fledging self-mutilation habit, my embarkment into professional truancy, and together we shared gossip flinging days, drug-filled afternoons and holed-up nights in our rooms. We both lost our phone privlidges constantly, and fought with our parents as if it were our last night on earth. Only her father had a lot worse of a temper than all three of my parents combined (mom, dad, stepfather), and he showed his love with his fists and backs of hand. She lived in a violent household of incredibly strict, overprotective and ultra-religious Italian Catholics and she paid the price for her youth daily.

Jackie and Primo were together for most of eighth grade, except during the time he was sent away to rehab; then Jackie began dating Ben, a far more together kid than Primo, with a much straighter act. But Jackie always longed for Primo, as all girls with very tough parents long for the bad boy.

This is the first of many Jackie letters to come. I feel like there are bounds of notes I ripped up and threw away, perhaps to destroy the evidence. I never managed to recover the notebooks she and I kept throughout summer school of ninth grade, the ones we passed to each other via friends or out car/schoolbus windows as she and I were not allowed to see each other anymore by then. But everytime I look back on the notes from her I do have, I am always comforted by the solidarity I found in her during what was the first major torrential period of my (then)short-life.

1995 — FOUR

Dear Courtney,

You are sitting there with
You’r bright gleamy glare
When you cry I hope I’m not
The reason for the trickle in
Your eye
Sometimes I cant feel but when
You talk your words of wisdom
Are always a healer.
I cant live knowing that
Shit in our heads is just
Emotions coming threw so
I decided to tell you
I you

Awe how emotional huh
Well its just for you
Baby are you loving it or what
Well I’m in math
gotta go
So catch you on the outside
Ok.

Francis Bean

Cadence and I were the queens of bad teen poetry. I believe I could start an entire blog of just the volumes and volumes of depressingly awful “poetry” we created for each other in our blind youth. I don’t think it would be fair to ever impose that kind of literary vomit on the world though. Notes written by 14 year olds is bad enough, but I digress. She and I wrote poems about suicide, self-mutilation, unrequited love, bad acid trips, getting drunk and stoned, hating preppy kids and mean girls, and wanting all adults to die. We absolutely abhored our parents for bringing us into our self-diagnosed miserable lives. We never thought about the future, only the present, and because of that we were pretty hopeless and lost to sink in our own brew of winsome and melodramatic adolescent bullshit.

Our best work was our rhyming verse, and here ‘best’ should actually translate to “funniest in retrospect”. We would take entire 45 minute class sessions to pen self-indulgent poems made up of demented couplets, rhyming things like “fuck ass creep” with “hit by a jeep”, and “love me or not” with “sack of snot”.

Our other favorite literary device was the quote. We filled the pages of our homework planners with favorite words of wisdom rather than our assignments. One entire month of my planner was devoted to quotes from serial killers while the bulk of the rest was choice lyrics from bands like Nirvana, Marilyn Manson, Alice in Chains, Pantera, Suicidal Tendencies, Hole and Nine Inch Nails, etc.

Our key emotions during our eighth grade year were anger and sadness. We did not know the strength of the words ‘love’ or ‘hate’ because we had not fully experienced either of them, though that was not to our knowledge at the time. So we ended up either loving or hating everything; there was no in between for us then. Every emotion was intensified to full capacity and our only way to express it was with our severe lack of vocabulary on paper, and it was strictly for our eyes only. I can’t imagine what we would have gotten up to had the internet been around then. Looking back, I am so grateful it was not.

1995 — FIVE

TO: EVE ONLY
well I’m sitting here in Mr. Masters office at lunch
detention. I may not be able to finish the note but
I’ll give it to you anyway. It’ll suck when you leave.
I don’t have mutch to say, but when you leave I’ll
miss you alot. Please don’t forget to give me the phone
# where you will be. Was that stuff really real that
you gave Primo? Well the bell is going to ring so I
have to go.
always James.

P.S. I love you

My last note from James. I was not leaving for good, as it seems to sound, I was only going out of town for Spring break. However, during the reccess, we broke up. Valerie DiGiovanni told me that he had cheated on me several times with Penny Vachel, an overweight schlub who was a year younger than me, a girl who had a reputation for being slutty and dumb. Of course James denied any activity with Penny but I wouldn’t hear it and dumped him cold over the phone. I was sad for the remaining two weeks of vacation though. My first-ever boyfriend, my first kiss, and we only lasted about… two months, tops? I was “so in love”, without a clue as to what love even was.

I remember at the time thinking that Valerie was just lying to me to protect me from staying with James any longer. She was really doing me a huge favor though. He was regarded as scrubby, dirty, poor white trash, and I did have to put up with a lot of my friends making fun of me for going out with him. But he was so cute. He had a face like James Dean under all that grime and clothing that probably hadn’t been washed in weeks. I was slightly angry on the inside at Valerie for telling me the gossip and instigating our breakup but in the end it would have been social suicide had I stayed with him any longer. After we broke up, about a month or so later we were able to still be friends, but I secretly longed for him, though I never again acted on my feelings toward him. He was left behind in junior high to complete eighth grade while I advanced to high school. Then he moved and changed schools and I don’t think I ever saw him again, except once in passing, at the food court in the mall.

1995 — SIX

Eve, my Good Bitch,
Hellooo Babes! Sorry I’m writing on this butt I
have no paper.
So wusssss up G!
That’s kool-mo-d that we don’t have anymore lunch
detention! Yay!
Oh yeah, Cadence was telling me about the $5.00.
I think you guys should just give him the pott too. I
know what you mean about Cadence acting different
but you can’t blame her.
Perhaps I can bogart you a compact at Rite AID!
Anyways – I didn’t wanna tell you when you were
making your decision about dumping him, but I think
it was a good choice.
You deserve better! Well gotta go.

Jackie Marie (your playmate)

Jackie was a master shoplifter. Her parents refused to give her an allowance or even money at birthdays or holidays for some reason. Not only that but they wouldn’t allow her to go on sleepovers other than religion retreats.

But she did wear make-up, and the only way she could score it was by stealing it from one of the two drugstores in town after school. If she ever got caught, she probably got a severe beating from her father and put on lockdown for a good while, but I don’t remember her getting busted once. She was that good. She carried a big sack of cosmetics in her bookbag, and wore a lot of dark ruddy burgundy-colored lipstick.

The five bucks and pot(tt) mention refers to a shady business transaction Cadence, Jackie and I orchestrated. There was a preppy boy in our grade who had recently tried to ‘come over to our side’. I think he had a crush on all three of us self-proclaimed bad ass bitches, and was trying to make us think he was cool by telling us he smoked pot. We didn’t believe him for a minute, we perceived him as way too straight-laced and cheesy for trying to promote himself as not by exaggerating his drug use to us. Now I can’t remember if we offered our services to him or if he asked us, but we ended up making a deal that we would sell him a nickel bag of grass.

We were not drug dealers, us three. We knew enough drug dealers and burgeoning addicts to buy drugs for ourselves, it was just always around us. We decided straight away that we would not be selling this kid real pot, and to us then, five dollars was a great profit. We could buy own own nickel bag with it and smoke together, we could buy two packs of Marlboro Reds with it, we could buy milk at the cafeteria for a month on that. We could buy three lipglosses and three packs of gum. Out of all of those options, my best guess is that we chose the first one.

Jackie found some marijuana-looking flora in her backyard somewhere, dried it up with a microwave and hairdryer, and it was soaked in Pine Sol overnight. It was put into a little baggie the next day and I passed him the bag underneath our shared desk in science class - I forgot to mention he and I were lab partners. He passed me a five dollar bill back with nervous hands, but it was just like passing notes - our teacher hadn’t a clue a fake drug deal was going on in the third row of his classroom. I wonder if the kids behind us did… Either way, this was near the end of our final year of junior high, and I gave a shit about very little as I felt I was almost out of that place anyway. I had no idea what high school held in store but in my head it just meant bigger and better, and a fresh start. Our class of eighth graders was about 100 kids; when we moved onto ninth grade that number would double with the addition of students from another middle school. And then of course there were the 500+ students in other grades.

Years later, when the victim of our sheisty deal and I had become friends — he had really descended down to ‘our side’, he confessed to me at a party that he knew the “grass” we gave him was fake. Part of me didn’t believe him, and had the sinister hope that he only found out it wasn’t real after attempting to smoke it. As long as Pine Sol doesn’t kill people. God, could us idiot girls really have killed someone by poison? I sometimes shake my head at why I am still alive to this day, after some of the shit we pulled.

1995 — SEVEN

Eve,
This I.S.S. room is freaky baby.
Your Kruster pellets are tasty.
So do you think you want to dump The Kruster?
Cause if you still like him (like more than a friend),
you shouldn’t listen to what everyone says.
But if you don’t, than tell him bonjour! (I think
that means goodbye)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

He must still like you for him to ask you out again.
He probably likes you a lot. But the only problem
is that he’s a SLUT.
Cause – just say he really did do that crap w/ Penny
Vachel. What’s to say he’s not gonna do it again?
And that’s gonna really suck if he does + you’re going
out with him. I think he really likes you, but he can’t
control himself. But I don’t know if I believe any of
this Penny shit anymore. Somethin’ quite fishy is
going on.
Anyways – Primo’s comin home today at 4:30 P.M.
I cant believe all this crap that’s going around now
about me + Tim Russo. Have you heard anything?
If you do, tell me please.
Cause he likes me and he’s telling everyone that I’m
dumpin Ben. to go out with him! That’s fuckin
deranged perception or somethin’! And I think Ben
believes him. What the hell!
I never said I liked Tim. I never even gave him
any reason to think that shit.
PEOPLE SUCK!! Rumors SUCK!!!
And also it’s goin around that I’m dumpin Ben for
Primo. How do people get there freakin info?
GOOD GRIEF!
Well I gotta write Ben a note now. So I’ll be seein
ya Eva babe.
Toodles!

Jackie

I.S.S. = In School Suspension. Where you were sent to sit in a cell-like classroom with one window and subway tiles for walls, all day long, while all your friends were just behind the door. Teachers supervising would rotate shifts by period, and they ranged from Gym teachers to Economics teachers to Paraprofessionals/Hall Monitors to English teachers. I.S.S. was the worst; everybody knew it was better to be fully suspended from the building so you could stay at home. Well, not me actually. My mother would put me to work when I would get suspended (usually once or twice a year by the time I was in h.s.). I would have to clean the house, yard, car, whatever she asked forced me to do. But one thing that was nice was that she would sometimes take me to a movie, so long as it was an educational one. That is how I ended up seeing Oliver Stone’s three+ hour film ‘Nixon’ in the theater.

Kruster pellets = a name we gave to some kind of cereal I brought with me as a lunchtime snack in a Ziploc bag. I think they were peanut butter flavored balls but I can’t be sure. We re-christianed them Krusters after the unfortunate nickname of James. Who I still liked! God knows why. Probably because he still liked me. As I’ve mentioned in here earlier, the only thing I ever thought about was the present. I didn’t realize in a few short months I would be in high school where there would be seemingly millions of new boys for me to crush. Literally and figuratively.

I wanted to take James back but I didn’t. I didn’t want to believe what Valerie had told me about him and Penny but I also didn’t want to be seen as weak for going back to someone whom according to the gossip mill, cheated on me with a nasty chick. So I opted for heartache. I was probably eagerly dying to have another excuse for moaning and whining about something anyway.

Jackie had her troubles with the gossip mill as well. She was kind of like the alpha-female for our little group. There was something about her that raised her above the level of the rest of the girls, she had a sort of all-knowing and comforting presence. She looked like a very young Madonna, ripped jeans, rubber bracelets, tits, swagger and all. I don’t remember a thing about the Tim Russo rumors but they were definitely mixed up. Tim was a jock/white ‘gangsta’ kind of boy, who wore Nikes and basketball jerseys. Why anyone would ever conceive her liking him to be true didn’t make sense. The reaches of Jackies desirability crossed junior high social borders by leaps and bounds.

In Primo’s absence, Ben Scroderman had finally gotten Jackie. I think he always knew deep down that she still had feelings for Primo and if it only could have just worked out she would have gone back to him. Her parents understandably hated the kid and would never accept her spending time with him. Ben never liked me though, I always got that. I tried my best to get on his good side but it never really worked, at least below the surface, so in the end I just pretended he didn’t exist. In notes Jackie would about her either loving or hating him, and I never really read over those lines. I think that because it could never happen, as it was more hopeless romantic, I always still pictured Jackie and Primo as a couple, and I know they always did as well, in that sick, sad, sweet, junior high kind of way.

1995 — EIGHT

Eva babe, (my bitch)

Hey baby! What’s doing man?
I cant believe your parents did that shit to you.
What bitches!
I kinda know how you feel. My parents are reel
bitches too.
Especially my dad. Ask Cadence, she knows very
well. My dad beats the shit out of us, even my mom.
Its not like an every day thing or anything, but when
he gets pissed he gets many, many, pissed.
I have brusises on my head and on my thigh from
Friday morning. I snuck out w/ Cadence and Primo,
and my brother’s room went on fire so when she
went to get me I wasn’t there. She called the cops +
everything. They checked me for drugs + alcohol too.
Cadence’s mom checked her. Primo just ran home.
It sucked.
Anyways – my parents are so strict. I haven’t had a
friend over this whole year. And I’ve only been to
someones house like twice. The reason I wasn’t
allowed to go on the Washington trip was cause they
didn’t want me to sleepover.

The only time people are actually at my house is
when they just show up or something. Then I gotta |
hear my parents shit when they leave about,
“They shouldn’t just show up and expect you to be
there” … bla bla bla bla bla bla fuck you.
And so on + so forth.
My brother’s allowed to do anything though, he’s
spoiled fuckin rotten. My parents a long with the
rest of the family always tell me how much they cant
stand me and then they wonder why I am so deeply
depressed.
If they only knew how suicidal I am, I wonder
what they would do. Or if they knew I was an
alcoholic and do drugs. Or maybe how I puke up
everything I eat except for at school. They don’t know
fuckin shit about anything.

Anyways – so what did you do when you stayed home
on Monday? How was Washington? I called you, and
there was no answer + then I remembered you were
trippin, I mean, on the trip. I wish I could call you
now. But its hard when your phone’s ripped out of
the wall.
Well I gotta go now, I’m sleepy. I’ll have nice
dreams about you hunee.
C-ya tomorrow!
Oh yeah give Beezlebub a kiss on the ass for me.
Bye Bye

Jackie (your bitch)
P.S. oh yeah, do your parents favor your sister
or anything?
I just wanted to know…

I was secretly so jealous I wasn’t present for this escapade. To me, anything involving the cops was exciting. That was before I ever had to deal with the cops, really, aside from mall ones. I wanted to run through the woods with the local fuzz hot on my trail, and I knew my fast little long legs would have been able to outrun them as well.

I never had a sleepover with Jackie once during our entire friendship. It just wasn’t allowed. I don’t know why her parents were so overprotective, and why they didn’t realize their staunch way of parenting was actually making Jackie want to act out more. And I was really sad she wasn’t even allowed to go on the school 5-day end-of-year field trip to D.C. She would have made the perfect extra roommate for the group of girls (Bobbie Sue Heller and Kirsty Scholtz) I was sharing a hotel room with. We were short one person so they stuck us with this straight and narrow but chill girl Andrea Walden and we told her if she ratted us out on any of our late-night hotel room antics we would gag her, tie her to the bed and leave her there. And amazingly enough, our room was somehow exempted from any adult supervision whatsoever. There was a girls floor(6th) and a boys floor(4th) at the hotel. Somehow, they had forgotten to book our group on the girls floor, so we got placed last minute with the boys, two floors down. The importance of that bit of information was that there were only female chaperone’s on the girls floor, and male chaperone’s on the boys floor. Due to some kind of law that worked in our favor, the male teachers were not allowed to come in our room, they were only able to knock on our doors when it was time to fetch us. And none of the female adults ever bothered to check on us two floors below them. My junior high school was just one big enabler.

Bobbie Sue had stuffed several Tampax and O.B. tampon boxes full of pot and other drug paraphernalia because she knew, she said, no one would ever pry into a tampon box while searching for contraband. We put towels at the foot of the door, opened all the windows and took the batteries out of the room’s smoke detector. We were also really big on body spray’s from Bath and Body Works so there was a lot of peach scented mist going around as we clam-baked the bathroom of our suite. I really missed Jackie on the trip. Cadence wasn’t allowed to go because she was on academic probation, and forget about Primo’s father paying the $200 or whatever it was for food and travel expenses. We got to go on a party boat to have dinner and dancing and Kirsty and I ditched our class to fraternize with a group of kids from another junior high school in Long Island, NY. All the three of us roomies brought back as gifts for people were Washington D.C. shot glasses. My mother threw away the one I had kept for myself in my room.

I have no idea what Jackie could have been referring to in the first line of the note. The part about not believing what my parents did to me. At this time in my life it could have been anything; all these years later I feel guilty for putting them through such trying moments, and I love them even more for it, and also for not murdering me, which is what I would have done if I’d been in their places. But because of all that lovely melodrama I displayed, my offspring will probably put me through ten times worse because Karma’s a bitch.

Beelzebub was our little Satanic voodoo doll that we converted from a plush Troll doll who’s eyes lit up when you squeezed the belly. We wrote offensive words and phrases all over his body, stuck safety pins in his ears, nose and lips and god knows what else we could think of to make him uglier. The end result was a very scary looking pink haired troll. One day, one of us discovered the battery pack for his light-up eyes, located in a box that was revealed if one opened zipper running down his back and pulled out some white fluff. Then one of us got the bright idea to remove the batteries and use the casing as a stash box. We immediately thought that was the best use for the doll, and were thrilled at the brilliance of our new way to conceal drugs. As if we had really pulled one over on everyone else. He was passed back and forth between Jackie, Cadence, Bobbie Sue and me, from home to school like a slambook. And pretty soon, our little doll had grown to establish a presence at school, a persona of his own. People would want to hold him, write on him, put a ponytail in his hair, etc. and we loved having a little freak Satanic mascot for ourselves.

Thinking back on things I probably told her that I indeed felt as if my parents favored my sister. How they could have ‘prefered’ one child over the other at the time is understandable; she was a six year old angel and I was a 14 year old heathen. It was very Welcome To The Dollhouse with her and me back then. A child in a ballerina outfit who could do no wrong, paired with an obnoxious and clueless teenage girl. But it was way different then the kind of favoritism Jackie’s brother had over her. He was only a year younger than she was, but she was treated as if she was five years younger than him. He was just as big of a stoner, a skateboarder, a pervert, hung out with the same group as us, but he was the golden boy of the family and she was practically a step-child. Jackie’s behavior was an extreme measure for help to her folks who seemingly cared very little about her well being. Only it never worked. I always felt I never knew what to say to her lots of times when the subject of her fathers temper came up, and it only got worse over time. I had fights with my parents but I was never nursing cuts or bruises (that I can think of) too often. There were times when I remember chasing and being chased by my mother around the house, one of us wielding a broom or a vacuum if my memory serves me correctly. We did more swearing and yelling in my house for the most part. Door locking, door slamming, door unhinging, that kind of thing. My room was a windowless, crooked ceiling’d, mess of too many blinking Christmas lights and floor to ceiling marker scrawls, posters, magazine pages and covers, fake flowers, dead flowers, detention slips, and photographs. You name it, I probably taped it to my walls. Layers and layers eventually grew as I ran out of white space, and after I moved out, the entire room was torn out of the house during a renovation, to make room for a new one which my sister occupied while she was in high school. And once again it was covered in posters, art, Christmas lights and self-expression through wall decor. Now its been painted over and has been designated to be the guest room in which I sleep when I visit.

1995 — NINE

Dear Eve,
Even though I wont get in trouble I’m shaking to
Or will I
Please don’t bring up my name OK
Well I don’t know what we’re gonna do Wheres
Bobbi Sue.
Why hasn’t she been in the hall is she gonna get
kick out I hope not
Well this shit is really getting to me
Mr. Capasuto’s gonna chew my ear out tomarrow
Saying that it is my doll and shit
What if they ask you’r
Parents if it’s your doll
And they recognize it
What the hell will happen then
luv ya
C.S.S.

Our Satanic troll mascot got us busted. This is the story that Bobbie Sue, who was in possesion of the doll at the time, gave me: In class, she had left Beelzebub on her desk unattended while she went to get a book. The teacher, Mr. Capasuto, randomly went to look at the doll and tried to make its eyes light up by squeezing the belly. He quickly realized that the eyes were not flashing and assumed faulty batteries. He turned the doll over to check the battery pack and discovered (less than a nickel bag of) marijuana. When he held it up in front of Bobbie Sue, she told him the doll didn’t belong to her.

Right after Cadence passed me this note in French class at the end of the day, I got called down to the main office. I can’t remember now if the principal himself came to get me, if a paraprofessional came, if a cop showed up outside my classroom, if my name was called over the PA or what. I just remember being led into the principals office and that the door seemed to magically shut by itself behind me. My parents were there, as well as a cop. They interrogated me until after school let out for the day.

They really threw me for a loop by first bringing out one of mine and Jackie’s notebooks (that [lots of]other people had contributed to as well). We had let Primo borrow it while he was in rehab to keep him company. He had managed to lose it upon his return and it fell into the wrong hands. (Note: the rehab didn’t work.) It was filled, filllllled, with offensive poetry, from limerick to haiku, about sex, race, death, suicide, murder, drugs, alcohol - things that would make any parent want to send their kid to military school or a convent. Amazing as she is, my mother to this day still has that notebook somewhere because she actually thought the offending material was funny. Anyway. The school officials freaked out at the books content, and made me feel pretty ashamed of myself. But what could they do besides lecture me? This was five years before Columbine; today if school administrators came upon a notebook like that, well, I would feel very sorry for the kid who misplaced it, regardless of his intentions.

At one point, the principal shouted out to my parents, “How could you deny she’s a drug addict? She has pot leaves drawn all over her books and clothes!” Immediately I jumped to my own defense at his claim. The ‘pot leaves’ he was refering to were these many-petaled flowers I used to draw all over everything. My parents came to my aid as well, telling him, no, thats not really what a pot leaf looks like. And I smirked at his cluelessness as I was redeemed for not being stupid enough to put pot symbols all over my style of dress and school notebooks. However, I was stupid enough to get caught with a miniscule amount of pot encased in a satanic troll doll, and in a Drug-Free school zone to top it all off.

Here is a poem I wrote about it at the time:

I had a troll once
She held my most valuable
tresure inside
my most beautiful
possision
I lost her to a nasty
warthog
In a everlasting battle
my own kin was destroyed
and nobody cared
Inside my troll was a
Glorrius treat
A Hairy Pig
took it away
With it I lost my Friends
my heart
and my high
never to be seen again
only to be used as evedence
In a court of law
Sometime in the near future
Oh God
I miss my troll

Come back Bezelbub!

I was so pissed at Bobbie Sue for ratting me out. I don’t even think that was my pot in the doll to begin with. It didn’t matter though, my parents knew the doll was mine, and I took full responsibility for it. It was such a small amount, and I was under the age of 16 so no charges would be filed anyway, but I was suspended from school until the end of the year, and banned from The Eighth Grade Dinner Dance. There wasn’t much time left till graduation, so I wasn’t missing much, but it felt like my little world crashed around me. I was told I would be taking all my final exams from the principals office, and only after school hours. When I left school that afternoon, I saw Valerie and Cailean Mullen in the girls room right by the main office. They looked at me, but didn’t say a thing, nor look too friendly.

I could have passed blame onto Jackie or Cadence, or even the original rat, Bobbie Sue, but I wouldn’t have done that to my friends. I wanted to, to take some heat off myself, but I didn’t. Still, no one talked to me for a while after that, and not just because I wasn’t in school. I don’t know for how long my phone privledges were taken away for but I feel like it didn’t ring for a while after they were given back. It must have been less than two weeks from when I had gotten kicked out to graduation day. The big Moving Up Ceremony. I didn’t plan on attending, after being kind of crushed about not being allowed to attend the dance as I loved dressing up. And then I remember being told I could go. After not seeing my friends for so long, I didn’t know what to expect. In my blown-up and overexagerated perception of teenage drama, I think I felt like I would never have any friends ever again, and to await a beat-down from everyone in the back parking lot afterwards.

Our graduation was held in the high school auditorium. Not our first time in the high school, but our last time as junior high students. All of us were to gather in the cafeteria and get into our homeroom groups. Before roll call, while we were all milling about, I saw several girls I knew in the rear, emptier area, huddled around a desk. I walked toward them reluctantly. They looked up at me as I approached, and all scattered save for Jackie and Cadence. Jackie’s make-up bag was opened up on the desktop. She was applying silver Crayola glitter glue to Cadence’s eyelids. “You want some glitter?” she asked, holding the little squeeze bottle toward me, and that was it. I knew we were all best friends forever and nothing would ever change that in the whole great big wide world. Also I was blown away by her resourcefulness with the glitter glue. I know now they were wearing glitter everywhere in the 70s and 80s but at that moment when she offered me some, I was thinking here she had gone and invented a revolutionary cosmetics technique all by her little brilliant self. After that, the three of us started to be the girls wearing the silver glitter on our eyes and cheekbones. A year or so later is when the whole glitter body and face makeup really took off but by then we were over it! That whole time we were putting craft glue on our faces - we’re lucky it was non-toxic. Seeing as we were girls who had snorted crushed smarties off their cafeteria table after spreading out halloween candy bounty at lunchtime, we were never too careful with what we put in or on our bodies. To say the least.

1995 — TEN

Hey Eve,
I’m in God Posse school now and I’m in studyhall.
Some dude, teacher, man, boy is talking about the
bible. duh.
Rachel’s copying my homework, Andrea’s reading
some hair magazine. And Fran Marie just got moved
to the very back. And Candice Bacci’s … well… just
Candice Bacci.
Oh, now he’s talking about the Jews missing some
boat. This is not for me.
Anyways – Jean Kruger told me that you got your
phone taken away.
That SUCKS!!! What is it with parents and phones
!? @*!&
Oh yeah, some chick hooked me up with some
Warlock Satan dude in Epiphany.
He’s 18 and his name is Kevin Blake.
He’s cool. He’s like one of those high priests or
something in witchcraft and he like has a bonding
with Satan or something. He calls me every night
but we’ve never seen each other yet. He might be
coming to meet me at the school today cause I’m
stayin after today. Hey I just got a lightbulb!
Maybe one day you can stay after when I stay
after and I can get one of my drivin friends to pick
you up somewhere in town. Then we be hangin! We
gots to find a way to get together man I miss you!
Oh about Primo – don’t let that skoonie read the
notebook! That would screw us if he did. Also, the
notebook is coming to an end so if you want, I’ll
get us a new one… um…
So have you stayed drug-free this year so far?
I have so far.
But on next Saturday I’m gonna blow my record.
Me, Fran Marie, Ryan + John got sum plans and
want you to come. You don’t have to do it if you
don’t want to though.
1 more thing… Why does Primo want to see the
notebook so bad all of a sudden. Is he still going
out with Dee Dee?
Well, I gotta run. I’ll be back though. Toodles!
- Jackie

As if it would protect her from anything, Jackie got sent to Catholic school that Fall. So did a couple other girls from our junior high, the ones she listed. She wasn’t too friendly with any of them except for Francine, whom we all loved when she showed up as a new kid in the middle of eighth grade. She was a thug girl but she liked all of us dirtball alternative kids. We referred to the new place, Chapel Of The Holy Cross, as “The God Posse”. It was a small, rustic (in a barn or something), co-ed country-style school with a mix of students from all around the county.

I never met Jackie’s High Priest, but I didn’t want to. He was from Epiphany, another Catholic high school in the region. I told her that he sounded cool and all, but I was a little intimidated by the idea of an 18-year-old Satan-worshipper who had been in Catholic school for going on four years. That to me was some heavy shit. I didn’t want to think about any prospective virgin sacrifice lines the guy might have been working on. We were fourteen and would both lose ours later that same year.

I never met Jackie in town for that excursion she mentioned. I didn’t even know she had any “drivin friends”. Her house was not in town, but it was a very short walk through a cornfield from town, so she could always get home. My house was several miles out of town, so I always had to have a ride or a chance to get on the late-bus from school, which I absolutely deplored. It wasn’t like taking your normal bus that went down a planned route. The late-bus sort of went where ever the kids on it lived, and in a nonsensical order. When I took the late bus, sometimes I wouldn’t get home till six or seven o’clock. I somehow worked it out so I could call a parent from a pay phone and wait in town and lean against a wall, rather than sit on the bus and be driven around the entire school district with kids I didn’t know.

Jackie dumped Ben on and off over the summer, and had a fling with Primo, but when September came around and we knew we wouldn’t be seeing Jackie in the hallways of the high school, Primo cut his losses and started to hook up with other girls. Jackie went back to Ben again for two seconds, but they broke up because she never really got Primo out of her heart/mind in full. The boys were were civil to Jackie, respectively, as friends while hanging out, but never to each other, and Ben hated Primo a little more than Primo hated him I think. They stayed away from each other as far as I can recall.

Primo really wanted to see volume II of our new notebook, but we hadn’t had a community notebook since I got suspended - the one in our possession now was strictly for us chicks. I’m assuming I’d written to Jackie about Primo bugging me to see it; since we had let him borrow the old one, he must’ve thought he had indelible notebook rights. Even though he had lost the profane poetry one, he thought it would be OK for him to read our new one. I almost let him but luckily I waited for Jackie’s confirmation on the negative so his eyes never perused it. This time, its contents were strictly letters between the Jackie and me. We liked the notebook format because we could write for as many pages as we needed to, and to have it all in a book to go back and refer to was handy. Our notebook was like our own confessional. There was no way Primo was getting his hands on it. I really wish I knew where those notebooks all wound up, cause if I had any still, you would have read the contents by now.

About her question - I probably stayed drug-free, at first, being that school had just started and I hadn’t fallen in with the even-worse-kids in addition to my already bad-example-friends. But a few months in, after I started meeting older classmates and the half of my grade that came from the other junior high school, I don’t think I was straight for the next two and a half years.

1995 — ELEVEN

Eve,
Whats up, OK I’m sorry It wasn’t my fault,
he got me drunk, + one thing led to another, Oh
God, it was horrible. Just kidding.
Anyway, I wouldn’t mind bein’ wrapped
in plastic with you babe, wanna come back to my
pad and get down!!!
Just kidding, anyway, nothings wrong with
your shirt opening, just kidding, I don’t like freak.
Anyway, even if we did go out, I wouldn’t
want you to pay, I wouldn’t let you pay for like a
movie or somethins.
Anyway, when you get home, call me. If its
past 11:30 ring once + I’ll call back. It would be
mad butter g-funk home skillet g-money q-ball
bad homefry. Type person. Anyway.
I’ll miss ya.
Gabe.

I met Gabe when all the skater/metalhead/goth/juvenile delinquents from both junior high schools in the district found each other after we converged under the big ninth grade umbrella that September. We were easily identifiable to each other by our wallet chains, skate sneakers and wide-leg Jnco jeans. Vic had gone to the ‘other’ junior high, and when my friends saw the percentage of gangster verses dirtbag from the other school, we realized that we had clearly come from the more rock and roll side of the school district. Our dirtbags outnumbered their dirtbags, I guess one could say. With regards to the whole class, it was as if some whole mods vs. rockers turf war had been started, unofficially, with the merging of the two JHS, except it was gangsters verses alt-rockers. Ninth grade started for me two years after Kurt Cobain shot himself, two years before Tupac was shot and three years before Biggie. It was around that time in the middle that I realized that according to the crowd I chose, we were more likely to kill ourselves rather than each other. Which over the next couple of years, I saw firsthand in my own town - the rock kids overdosing, or shooting themselves, the rap kids stabbing mad, and in one god awful case, stomping someone to death.

Gabriel was sweet on me, as if that wasn’t clear enough from this note. The shirt-opening reference was to this polyester thrift-store shirt I had, which the buttons of would pop open on their own, and I wouldn’t know unless I looked down ever so often. There was no reason for this other than it having a too-loose button hole - I totally stuffed my bra throughout high school. I am going to claim the fifth on the plastic wrap reference, though it could probably be chalked up to my being a fourteen year old tease on the cusp of being a complete whore, and that’s all I can say about that.

Gabe was adorable and hysterical and amazing and we clicked so well, but I just didn’t like-like him. What a gentleman he was to offer to pay for our date, if we’d ever had one. I should note right now, hi if you are reading this. He and I still know each other, and he went from being the sweetly nervous boy in this note to being this total player who lays girls out now. I have no idea how it happened but I couldn’t be happier for him. He’s still a big teddy bear no matter what anyone says. He could probably kill someone with his bare hands if he were mad enough though.

I knew I didn’t want to “go out” with him, but I knew I did want to have him as a friend. I didn’t know back then how to tell boys I didn’t like them without just cutting the communication lines completely and never talking to them again. I didn’t want to do that with Gabe. I wanted to have friends who were boys, but in most cases, what I didn’t know then, was that all the boys who wanted to be friends with me actually would have dropped the friendship to go out with me in a second if I’d consented. And then I would have never talked to them again after we’d inevitably break-up. It wasn’t until I was about 16 or 17 that I sort of got a clue about the hidden agendas of an occasional friend who was male. If I really valued someone as a friend, I had to control myself and never, ever hook up with them even if I felt the slightest urge, because I knew once we crossed that line we would never have the same friendship as before. In retrospect, I can’t believe I actually made a smart decision, and am so grateful I did, because we are still friends to this day.

How could anyone forget the “ring once and I’ll call you back” technique for talking on the phone at all hours of the night in a one-telephone-line house after parents fell asleep? You could have this work with two people in an evening as well - one rings once, the other rings twice. I have absolutely no clue what life would have been like for us if we’d had cell phones then. Wow. I can’t even imagine what high school would have been like if computer technology and the world wide web were at the level they are now. To us at that time, computers were mainly for doing essays, term papers and book reports, or playing some low quality game on - forget about instant messaging or even email. That didn’t come until about a year or two later, and three years before it really gained even half as much mass popularity as it has now. I had it in my house at the end of my sophmore year in high school, but it was on a free Web TV that my mother had been given from work, so it was a rather weird introduction to the internet - seeing it on my TV from the couch in the living room with a wireless keyboard. It made it into more of an entertainment experience then for getting information or using it to communicate with people in real time, but I still did. A year after that was when we got the internet on our computer, with dial-up, so I could clog up the phone line of the whole house for hours at once. And you’ll notice later that the notes will decline around that time. That’s probably a good reason for why there is no section for senior year notes - I don’t have any. Not only was I making as few appearances at school as possible that year, but most all of my written corespondance had turned into email by then (1999).

1995 — TWELVE

Tutti Frutti are you serious about Carl?
Because if you are joking with me you are an asshole!
Anyway what did Carl say? Did he say he was gonna
break up with Jackie or that he was going to cheat
on her? Why the fuck would he ask me. When?
Tonite on the phone if he calls? ‘cuz if he asks
I’m gonna say no. And if I don’t say No there is
no way I’m gonna say yes! W/B, -eve

Eve: Yes, I’m serious about Carl, he has it all
planned out. Tomorrow he’s gonna call Jackie
and their going to town. He’s gonna get her
really stoned which I don’t agree with because
its my weed. He’s gonna fuck her and and if
she’s good he’ll keep her. If she’s bad he’s
gonna do it again to make sure. Then he’ll ask
you out after school. He said one time at James
Hill’s house he thought you would have let him
fuck you, like you were looking at him all sweet
but then you started talking about how he was
goin out with Michelle and she’s one of your best
friends. Oh and he said he kissed you one when
you were going out with James the Kruster. So
he says you like him and you’ll say yes cause
you cant resist him. W/B – Primo

Primo, he is such an asshole. Damn! I never
discussed any of that any of that w/ him and I do
NOT like him and I would never go out with him!
Please tell him that so he knows his skank ass
little plan isn’t gonna work! I did kiss him once
but duh, that was only just a kiss. BFD. It
meant nothing. And not to mention Jackie will
be pissed and when she finds out, the only one
Carl will have a chance at fucking is Rita
their dog. –eve

So you weren’t gonna fuck him? That dick lied.
Don’t tell Jackie. I’ll make Carl tell her because I
got him on Black Male. I’ll make him apologize
for saying you were gonna fuck him. Ok cool.
Later dude. You kissed him though. Fool.
- Primo

This is the only note in the collection in which I appear. I think it might actually be the only note in which Primo appears (he wasn’t much for paper and pen). I am pretty sure we were passing the page back and forth during detention, because I don’t recall having any classes with Primo that year. This note needs a lot of ‘splaining. First of all, Primo’s nickname was Tutti Frutti. I have no idea how that came to be. Carl Udder was a grade below me, a townie, and one of James’ and Primo’s good friends. Total stoner. He was also a total white gangster, but we did not discriminate, and if you were a dirtbag inside, or underneath your basketball jersey, you were still a dirtbag. I suppose now would be a good time to interject with a common small town high school walking contradiction I have seen more than my fair share of: The Racist Thug.

The RT is a white male who was born and raised in the country, and who probably has family members who belong or belonged to the KKK. I can only speak for Northeastern RT’s, because I have no idea what this would translate to in the South. And yes, the KKK can be found in NY State, those fucktards can be found everywhere. Now let me get to the point of what the RT is all about. The RT is someone who dressed in the 90s hip-hop style of baggy jeans or shorts hanging off their behinds, exposing boxer shorts, white unlaced Nikes, oversize sweatshirts or basketball jersey’s, and a (possibly backwards) baseball cap. The RT listens to only rap music, plays basketball video games nonstop, watches BET, speaks as if they were brought up in Bedford Stuyvesent, Brooklyn, but “fuckin’ niggers” is not an uncommon slur to hear from the mouth of an RT. The RT is completely obvlivious that they give zero credit to the sources of the style they bite, and that zero credit goes into the negatives when you consider how deeply, and unabashedly, they are racist.

The RT was brought up in a multi-generational home of racists. Whether its on the surface or not, the family of the RT probably has a patriarch who is proud to state he “doesn’t mind black people” but “sure hates niggers”. And because it has always been this way for these ignorant people, the elder family members don’t even realize their sons have completely adopted so many aspects of hip hop culture - they have no clue their sons are modeling their wardrobes from The Wu-Tang Clan, their lingo from Tupac and their pastimes from Shaq. The families have absolutely no connection to what is going on with black youth culture in America so they don’t know any better. Obviously, that is no excuse.

Anyway, Carl was a full-on white gangsta, a blond haired, blue eyed, pale faced, freckled RT. I would have never hooked up with him. Not only did I not like blonds but he was younger than me and I wasn’t into that. I only liked older boys (and I cringe at what a cliche I was just as hard as you probably do). I foggily remember kissing him in James’ basement, but the memory is as clouded as the room was with smoke. I don’t know what Jackie was thinking getting involved with him, but she must have been really bored in The God Posse. Carl lived in town so it would have been a geographically convenient fling to maintain, but I don’t seriously think anything culminated from his shady scheme.

Luckily, Primo kept him from pestering me and I never had to hear about any of it ever again. Carl made it to ninth grade the next year but he didn’t stick around for too much longer after that. I saw his sister waitressing once at a diner a few years later. She looked tired.

1995 — THIRTEEN

Eve,
Hey beautiful. What is up. My queen, motha
of the earth-n-shit. Any way. Me +
my dad got into such a big fight last night. He was
being such an asshole. He fuckin got pissed at
me, because my bed wasn’t made.
I was like, what the fuck, I’m goin’ to bed now
anyway, he said well that’s not the point, I was
like then what the fuck is And he said, watch
your mouth. I just said whatever, and he
fuckin grabbed the fire extinguisher and threw it
at me. I swear, I was so scared, I thought it was
gonna hit me, but I turned + it only got me in
the arm. I swear he’s gonna kill me one day,
any way, back to more important stuff, whats
up nothing much for me, I think it would be so
snazzy if Jarrett and Cadence went out, and then
if me + you went out, the four of us could hang, it
would be so groovy its out of sight. It would be a….
Psychedelic Freakout!!
Don’t ya think?
After 1st period meet me by Mr. Black’s office,
if possible.
Later man,
Gabe

p.s. keep it real G-chill

I don’t think I went on one single double date in my entire four-year span of high school. Well… that’s sort of not true - I went on a single double date in eighth grade, which didn’t get covered in any of the notes posted here. I was going out with Jarrett for about two minutes, and Kirsty Scholtz and Stephen Jones went with us to the mall and a movie. No recollection of what I saw but I do remember making out with Jarrett a lot. I know that in ninth grade Jarrett liked Cadence, but she wasn’t into him in the same way that I wasn’t into Gabe. We liked them on a strictly platonic level.  Poor boys, I hope we didn’t lead them on too much or anything. We couldn’t help being irresistible with our little lunchboxes, short plaid button-down dresses in clunky mary janes with kinderwhore lace ruffled white socks and plastic baby barrettes.

I was amazed at the size of Gabe’s father whenever it was that I went over to his house for the first time and met his folks. His dad was tiny compared to Gabe. I mean, at this time, Gabe probably hadn’t spent too much time in his new taller self yet, so he wasn’t well-equipt enough with his body to understand its capabilities. But even if he reached that point sooner than later, I don’t think he would have ever raised a hand to his own father. Not that I can recall at least. And his father had some temper as well, from what I heard in Gabe’s next day reports. He shared a lot in common at home with Jackie, and the two of them were also good friends and note-sharers as well.

On another note, how much does the word “whatever” piss parents or other forms of authority off? Sooooooooo much. They really do not like to hear ‘whatever’ as a retort. The year this note was written was the year after the movie Clueless came out, which skyrocketed the popularity of the brief write-off. And then it made its way onto the daytime/late-night trash talk shows, like Ricki Lake, Jerry Springer, Montell Williams and Jenny Jones, where one could hear a fifteen-year-old methamphetamine-addicted mother of two throw it back at her abusive alcoholic boyfriend/mother/stepfather after being called a slut. For Gabe’s father, it was the boiling point at which he had to throw the fire extinguisher on him.

I remember meeting people by Mr. Black’s office. It was placed at a major four-way intersection in the hallway, right by the library, the auditorium and the boys and girls bathrooms. In the center of the intersection was a painted white brick column and a large garbage can where underclassmen would congregate, as their lockers were generally placed in two of the connecting hallways. This exact same set-up could be found a few hundred feet down, at the end of one of those hallways - except it was right outside the main office and was where upperclassmen and obscenely popular underclassmen would congregate. You could also say that the different areas of classrooms helped this arrangement - for the most part, the 11th and 12th grade classes were on one side of the school and vice versa for the 9th and 10th graders. But that layout theory could easily be thrown out the window when one realizes that very often the ages of students were mixed because of failing classes or getting left back. I was in 9th grade math until I was a junior, for example. I think senior year I was also in three gym classes to make-up for all the years I never attended. I don’t know what I would have done with myself if I didn’t graduate on time because of gym. Fast forwarding a little bit - I didn’t even know or think I was going to graduate on that fine June morning of 1999. I skipped rehearsal, didn’t pick up my robe and cap, and slept in because I honestly didn’t think it was going to happen. My mother came into my room with the phone and woke me up, telling me one of the administrators was on the line. It was my favorite one, the one whom everybody hated for the first two years of her writing our detention slips, but loved eventually after realizing her liking you was almost a status symbol and that she was actually cool, deep down. I took the receiver from my mother and sleepily answered hello. “Eve!” she hollered. “Get up! You’re graduating today!” “No way,” I said, shocked. “Yes, get dressed and get down here NOW!” I probably squealed with glee before even hanging up the phone, and jumped out of bed to get ready. That was a pretty awesome moment. My final average wasn’t even like, a 66 or anything, one above FAIL. I think it was 84 or something? So to actually graduate high school was amazing for a girl who made a point to make monthly visits to the main office and get her attendance reports printed out so she could know exactly how many days she had left to skip miss in a certain class. By the end of the year I had used up every single one of my 31 allowed absences per class. I still have so much of that outlook in me today, which isn’t really a very sensible mentality for an adult, buuuuut then again in the end i guess it comes in handy when at your future corporate office job you have to use a human resources online attendance program to schedule and manage your requests for personal, vacation & sick days.

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.

1995 — FIFTEEN

Eve,
Whats UP chick, I completely and totally
understand where you’re coming from. I can
wait until your head clears, because I really like
you too. But I would wait for you, only be cause
youre so special. I wouldn’t wait for any normal
person, only…
EVE THE GODDESS OF KNOWLEDGE,
ANYWAY,
I’m kinda slow, so you might havta drop
hints if you’re ever ready for me.
Anyway, as long as we’re talking that’s cool.
But I’m gonna see you out of school, so, maybe
that’ll settle shit out. Gotta go.
Hugs N’ Kisses
Gabe.

I let Gabe down easy even though I suppose I had led him on by giving him his first kiss. I told him I wanted to just remain platonic but I would let him know if my feelings changed - even though I was pretty certain they would never. It was one of the first times I saw true potential in a boy as a close friend , at least since I was four or five, when my two best friends were boys, and remained as such until second grade, when I formed a little clique of three other girls because I finally had found ones I liked, who returned the sentiment my way. From there on I only really bonded, even associated, with girls. Only once I got to high school did I really begin to garner genuine friendships with boys. Gabe and I would stay gabbing on the phone to each other until we’d fall asleep still on the line. And after the idea of “us” ever coming into fruition was out of the picture, our friendship became closer and stronger. He became my rock, as much as I loathe that cliche phrase, for the duration of my high school career.

He was pretty much always single thoughout the first three years of school, and in contrast I was a complete, unabashed slut. He was always there for me, thoughout every boyfriend, every hookup, every breakup, get-back-together, rape scandal, rumor, nasty bit of gossip, fight, party, punk rock show, trip to the mall, capture the flag game, ride to school, everything. But finally, during senior year, he began to date a freshman girl, as slutty as I was when I was her age, and I swear to god, I never saw him ever again.

It was sad. All that time bonding together and as soon as he got some pussy he was OUTTA there. OK that may sound bitter but I’m just being sarcastic (and blunt) and I’ve never resented him for that shit ever, and he knows it. We talked about it years later. I understood his position completely and would never hold a grudge over some high school thing like that. I did miss him that year though, our last year of this life experience together and there I was, moving far away the very morning after graduation. I had wanted to spend more time with him but looking back I realize I’d had all that time from him, during which I never would have given him what he really needed/wanted. I could never be that selfish with his attention, I know what we have is more deeply rooted than that. I know if we only lived in the same town again, he would be there for me just as much as he was then.