My first lesson in originality.

I was awkward in sixth grade. Really awkward. I had braces and that weird half-child, half-teenager body that we curvy women were blessed with at the age of 11. I felt like a monster in sixth grade, too tall, too bulky, too zit-y, too totally, totally uncool. I have an official school picture of myself with dishwater brown shoulder length hair, a beaded necklace that I loved because it was rainbow colors but hated because it was choker, and a white t-shirt with three little lizards where the breast pocket would have been if I had bought it out of an LL Bean catalogue instead of those middle school fundraiser booklets that charges you $35 for a nature-themed t-shirt and promises to reserve an acre of the rainforest in your name. I wanted to be remembered as the adidas-track pants wearing, lizard t-shirt, rainbow choker kid, because that was cooool. Nevermind that choker necklaces make me feel like I need to puke. I suffered for beauty.

But I had friends! I guess. I had 3 friends, one girl and two guys, although I’m pretty sure now they thought I was a total loser back then and could have done without me. I think I was their hanger-on that they tolerated because my girl friend was actually pretty cool and liked doing guy stuff like snowboarding and skateboarding and re-making Blink-182 music videos. This usually entailed someone climbing onto a roof with a snare drum and banging on it for 2 minutes, and then some random artistic shots of beleaguered stuffed animals getting pulled along on a skateboard by a jump rope and neighborhood kids throwing those little spark-poppers on the ground. I don’t know, I was never there. I always watched them later. One time for Christmas we exchanged gifts at Ledo’s Pizza and they all got me cool stuff like a Star Wars Compendium and a walkman, and I got them all….wait for it….matching stuffed lizards. What was I thinking? I don’t know. I do know I labored over those Christmas gifts for weeks. It is SO. HARD. buying Christmas gifts for two 12 year old boys who listened to Snoop Dog and whose favorite card came was Bullshit.

Have you ever heard of Bullshit? You split the deck up with however many people are playing, let’s say 4. On your turn, you put cards face down into the middle pile, and say “3 Jacks,” or whatever it is. But you can lie. You can say “2 eights,” but really put down an Ace and a Seven. If someone around the table thinks you’re lying, they say “Bullshit!” and you have to flip the cards over. If you were lying, you pick up all the cards in the center. If you were telling the truth, the person who called Bullshit on you has to pick them up. Whenever I am playing a game, no matter what it is, I always reach a point where I’m tired of playing and don’t care about winning anymore, so I ruin the game for everyone. It’s my thing. When we were playing Bullshit at Ledo’s Pizza the day of the stuffed lizards, I put down 15 Aces. I just wanted to eat my triple bacon pizza and get the hell out of there so the guy friends could go hang out with the girl friend in peace and I could go home and watch CATS for the 30th time.

Awkward.

I used to say things, too, that were borrowed from other things because that’s easier than thinking for yourself and risking being original and thus being rejected. All those 80’s sitcom clichés, like saying “who died?” in a room of sad-faced people and “you fell out of the ugly tree and hit all the branches on the way down” were how I communicated. Verbally, that is. I found journals a while ago that me and the girl friend used to use to pass notes (no cell phones) and I can’t believe how funny I could be when I could write it down. We were smart note-passers. We had an entire composition book that looked like all our class composition books, so it only looked like we were helping each other study or something. I found it, and was really encouraged by what I read. It made me think maybe I wasn’t totally as awkward as I assume I was. But then again, I’ve always expressed myself better in writing.

Mom says I used to write her and dad letters when I was angry or sad or mad about something and leave them on their pillows. I remember resolving to keep a log of all the terrible things they said to me to have hard, written proof with dates and verbatim quotes for my final angry-letter magnum opus. They were going to find a hole burned through the middle of their bed and at the bottom would be my Letter of Wrongs Done. I think I kept it up for three weeks and only had two entries, like “dad made me feed the cat when he was sitting and the table NOT DOING ANYTHING” and, after digging the log out of a pile of detritus in the middle of my floor, “mom said I was a SLOB!” I gave it up when I realized I would never have much of a case.
But verbally I was like a lava floe of awkward. Searingly embarrassing and impossible to predict the flight path. Which brings me to my first lesson in being original.

One morning I got on the bus and everyone looked dreary. Well, sad. But it was about 6 in the morning, and no middle-schooler looks chipper at 6 in the morning on a Wednesday. Then I got to school, and we all sat in the cafeteria for about 15 minutes until the bell rang and we were released to our homerooms. I saw pockets of kids around the cafeteria looking sad, some were crying. A lot of the kids were people I knew in my classes, in my grade.

At my locker, my friend Heidi’s locker was right next to mine, and she was crying. It was time to get to the bottom of this. And so I pulled from my Arsenal of Awkwardness and said, “who died?”

Our classmate Jessica died. I hadn’t really known her that well. Her appendix had burst the night before and she was dead before the ambulances could get her to the hospital, because we lived in horse country and the nearest hospital was 30 minutes away. And that was the last time I snarkily asked anyone who died.

That was a changing moment for me. I think this was the moment I really became self-aware. I remember praying that Heidi didn’t hear it as a sound byte I borrowed from a sitcom, but a sincere question that I’d heard someone had died and didn’t know who. I remember holding back my tears until I got home and immediately running up to my room to create a set of self-imposed interaction rules, like “now we’re only going to listen to people and say the absolute minimum of words in response,” or “before we say it, let’s decide if it’s a good idea to say.” I was so altered and saddened by my own foot-in-mouth awkwardness that I went home and wrote a set of rules I knew I needed to follow from then on, a manifesto that no one ever saw but myself. I found them when I was cleaning out my room when I was 20 and my parents moved to a suburb. They went something like this, and please keep in mind I didn’t have any internet top 10 lists of Things You Shouldn’t Say to help me, and never discussed it with any of my friends, since they were 12 and busy making music videos:

1. Only say it if you really mean it.
2. Don’t try to make people laugh anymore because it doesn’t work.
3. Wait and listen for the whole thing before you say something.
4. If you don’t know, just say you don’t know.
5. If you like a boy, just don’t talk to him. Just ignore it.
6. Only talk about what you know about from now on.
7. If you didn’t think of it, don’t say it like you did.

And there was more of the same. Basically I was about 25 rules saying “Don’t Say Stupid Shit” that I kept writing over and over and over, like a punishment for being so flippant in the face of a death anyone with an appendix could suffer at any time. Hell. I could die that death. And the angry god I believed in at that time was probably plotting it for me, because I handled it so callously. It can be so very painful when you finally become self-aware. Now, when I go home and dig out my old yearbooks I always end up looking at Jessica’s picture.

My mom gave me a sympathy card after Jessica died that still makes me cry to read it. But I still never know if I’m crying for her or myself.