[from the exile on Duck Pond Island]


So now I was in high school, and the jury pool of my peers had greatly expanded. I found out all my shortcomings (including being short) as I tried to find new friends, or even just someone safe to sit next to at lunch. These little things are the height of risk taking the first year in a new place. I remember every social goof I made those days: sitting in the wrong place, talking to the wrong person, thinking I had made a friend only to be betrayed. I took up smoking.

You live with these memories, and for a long time you don’t think about them, then suddenly they come rushing back, in the middle of the night, a sharp pain in your self-esteem.

Her name was Brenda, and she was in homeroom and religion class. She defined “perky” for me, the way Katy Couric does for the fogies on T.V. today. She was lively, funny, sassy, always getting caught at something. She hung with a wilder crowd, but once in a while this was a group that nodded approval when I made some particularly sarcastic remark. I knew kids were going out to movies and basketball games and the like. I got up enough courage to look up Brenda’s phone number and finally, after numerous starts and stops, let the call go through and ask whoever answered if I could talk to her. Cold sweats I would later identify as anxiety attacks swept over me.

“Hello.”

I told her who I was.

“Who?”

I repeated my name, with a nervous laugh. (“Come on, please remember me!)
“Do I know you?”

I told her I was in homeroom with her.( This can’t be happening!)

“What did you say your name was again?”



Now someone with any sense would have quickly hung up the phone, faked the flu for a couple of days, and hope she would forget this obvious crank call. But, mistaking stupidity for courage, I went ahead to ask her out.

SILENCE. LONG--------------SILENCE.

Sister Carola’s description of Jesus hanging on the cross for three long, lonely hours on Good Friday for my sins paled next to what I was going through.

“Why don’t we talk about it in school, okay?”

I quickly agreed, hung up the phone and hid in my room, sure her father would call the cops and they’d come over, sirens blaring, and take me away while the neighbors peeked through the curtains.

Worse. She told her friends.

The next day the whole bunch of them viewed me with looks of non-familiarity with my species. They were, I felt, more stunned than anything.
Brenda just smiled (after, no doubt, someone pointed me out) but otherwise kept her distance. During class-change one of her girlfriends came up and said,

“Did you really ask Brenda out?”

“Yeah."

She giggled, then turned and walked down the hall.