If You Want To Write An Angry Letter, Use A Sparkly Green Pen

Everyone facebook creeps. You do it. I do it. Your dentist does it. That creepy old lady from the cafeteria who yells at you for only buying a banana as your breakfast? She totally does it.

We’re all facebook creepers. And guess what. It’s okay. Because how else would I have found out that the girl I wanted to be in 7th grade had a baby?

In 7th grade, I started the IB Program, also known as Six Years of Hell. No seriously. It’s just a hell of a lot of work for a little piece of paper you get to wave around. And you’re not even guaranteed that paper. You have to pass an assload of exams at the end of the six years and write like five trillion papers, including the longest one which you write during the summer. Yeah, I voluntarily signed up for that.

So anyway, I decided to go through the Six Years of Hell and went to a very ghetto fabulous middle school. I don’t know how many of you have seen Bring It On: All Or Nothing (don’t judge–we’re in a very loving place right now, bitches) but my middle school and high school looked pretty much like those. I was Hayden Panettiere. Only with brown hair and not as idiotic.

We had a choice of electives, which were classes we could pick. It felt so mature and grown up. I chose Orchestra because I played the violin for 5 years prior to that and I figured my mother knew it would be a good experience. Only she failed to realize that only losers were in Orchestra. All the cool kids were in Chorus. And in 7th grade, man, I wanted to be cool. So I convinced my mom to let me switch out of Orchestra and in to Chorus.

Chorus was a huge class. It had 7th and 8th graders in it. Karen was in it and we all know how she turned out. Or for those of you just joining us, I’ll give you a one word recap: bitchy. We sat in rows and the biggest deal was who got to sit by Karen. Karen’s best friend, Lauren, was automatically granted a seat on one side but God Almighty did we fight over that other side. Of course it was subtle, the little gibes you hear in movies and think “who says stuff like that?!?”. Well, we did. Tess, Heidi, the twins (Ellen and Elizabeth), and I nearly killed each other over it. In retrospect, who gives a shit? But the day Chorus came around, expect bloodshed.

Sometimes Karen wouldn’t want one of us near her. This happened the most when Karen decided to be best friends with an 8th grader. She became BFF with Ashley. Ashley wore a green varsity jacket from Aeropostale and it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. She was in my PE class and I’d see her walking hand in hand with her gorgeous boyfriend. She epitomized cool. And she was so awesome she managed to put good old Karen in her place quite a few times. You see, Karen thought her social stock would rise with her friendship with Ashley. It did. But the problem was, Ashley got nothing in return except Karen’s attempts to undermine Ashley’s relationship with her boyfriend. Ashley evidently had a problem with this and made it clear in a very nasty note written during Chorus class. In bright green sparkly pen no less. Because if it doesn’t sparkle, you know she won’t take it seriously.

I was amazed at how ballsy Ashley was. I couldn’t fathom standing up to Karen (although I did a semester later, when I realized that Karen’s attempts to control my life and produce conformity just weren’t working for me–which sounds much better than the fact that I mostly did it because she deemed me uncool because the guy she liked liked me. Yeah, sorry about that K). Karen’s reply to Ashley wasn’t nearly as good. For one thing, she failed to use a bright sparkly green pen. For another, Ashley was completely right and hell hath no fury as a woman scorned. I really wanted to be just like Ashley after that.

After a year of Chorus, Ashley went off to high school. Except she didn’t continue on in IB and decided to try her luck over at the Normal Kids High School, where cheerleaders actually did rule the school and the parking lot looked like a car show. I kept on in IB and never really saw her again until I added her on facebook like ten minutes ago because she commented on Lauren’s status.

Ashley had a baby about two years ago. I was shocked. No, I’m still shocked. This girl was going places. She didn’t take crap from anyone. And now she’s a 20 year old mom? It’s insane. It creeps me out. The girl who fought back against Karen had a baby? I still can’t believe it. Now she’s stuck back home instead of living the life she wanted. She wanted to get out of the South. Most of the people I know wanted to get out of the South. Not because they didn’t love it but because it’s a hole. It’s what everyone fights with. It’s home but if you stay there too long you’ll never get out.

I didn’t mean to end this on such a low note. I was all happy and peppy and then I thought about all the talks I had with these girls from back home how we were all going places. We weren’t all going to go to the same college. We were going to leave the South. Maybe I didn’t expect to live in NYC but I didn’t expect to stay home. I didn’t think any of them would have gone to that one school. Maybe they’re all happy. I hope they are. And I hope we all get to live those fabulous, glamorous lives our 7th grade selves planned out.