It took me about 15 years to realize it, to realize my own unpopularity in high school was my own fault and my own responsibility. It was my responsibility that I learned to look busy and preoccupied all the time. It was my responsibility that I looked at the floor when I walked. It was my responsibility that I rejected home room for student council so that rather than being social I could be busy. It was my responsibility that I avoided staying after school, that I avoided getting to school early, that I avoided the cafeteria. I still hate cafeterias and buffets and food courts. Eating is terribly social; but I still don’t like it with strangers. I made myself altogether inaccessible but to a few people. It’s funny how long it took me to realize that I did it to myself. It was a healthy realization even if it took a long time. I don’t blame myself much either. We always do the best we can.

At 16, my mother taught me to drive. At 17, I got to use her car to go to school. I would show up at school about five minutes before the first bell. A little less than five minutes, if I could manage it. I would drive to the milk store first and get a coffee and then go sit in the park and only with just enough time left would I drive to the school to park in the student parking lot and run through the side door to my first class. Mom’s car was a Hyundai Pony. It didn’t help my popularity, that’s for sure. A Hyundai Pony never qualified anybody as cool. But I loved having the car. I perfected my inaccessibility by being invisible. At lunch I got as far away from the school as quickly as I could and for as long as I could until my first class after lunch. As much as I loved the freedom, the liberation, of having a car, I didn’t ditch. It wasn’t in my nature. I think, perhaps, I ditched an afternoon of classes once. I felt so guilty, I didn’t do it again. When I got to university and realized that there were only about 18 hours of class a week, and that my freshman compatriots would often skip class, it took some getting used to. Still, I learned it quickly enough. I also learned reasonably quickly to drop some of my walls and to be more accessible.

I happened to have the radio on again today and they were just playing INXS’s ‘Need You Tonight’. After class, before I went home to study (more likely than not), I would jump in my mother’s uncool car, and drive around. A lot. And quite far. I had favorite back roads in the country on which I could drive really fast – well as fast as you could make a Hyundai Pony go. My most favorite roads were abandoned and had the kind of quick humps that caused your stomach to jump inside your body. And almost always on my runs I was listening to Kick or to the Lost Boys Soundtrack. Those two CDs still remind me of my mother’s smoky-smelling car, of high school, and of my 3:30 speed. There was even a girl, Raquel – yes, I know, but that was her name – and I knew her car, and I knew her license plate (I still remember it), and I never talked to her in five years, but I would sometimes drive around hoping to see her in her car. And sometimes I did. And when I did, I did exactly what I always did: nothing. Sometimes, I even drove past her house. “Slide over here, and give me a moment…” Passing her house, I might slow down, but just a little, and then I would keep going. I kept a very secret life in high school.

For something completely different, I finally made it in Google images. World domination is just out of my reach. Hwaa-ha-ha.

SS