The men fished out their old wallets with the condom rings. They pulled their wives into domestically violent bear hugs -- those couples aren't ever having more children after the husbands collapsed the fucking birth canals.
The popular crowd crept into the event for free. They duped some clown to steal name tags. ("I only went to this school for eight months," he told me. "I'm just here to check out all the old people smirk.")
I watched the prom queen, at the start of the night, grab her man's collar and drag him away from the registration table. They didn't check in, but I wasn't sure until it was too late. They are the ones who started the whole operation, ushering a total of twenty or so big babies through the back elevator. I'm not starting a confrontation with a 38 year old dressed like a video hoe.
Myself, I was an embarrassment in high school. But I didn't know the extent of my damage then, so I felt all right. For one thing, I was pretentious about my writing. I studied the thesaurus for fun and came into high school puking adjectives down the front of my shirt. "In Lord of the Flies, everything is turned upside-down by the noxious smashed coconuts of sex drives-"
They published my gaudy book reviews in the school newspaper, and I bet my peers cringed. I would believe it if somebody told me my teachers were making fun of me to their friends at the bar and their spouses. I would now if I were them; I would root against myself as the student.
In the ninth grade, there is no benefit to the habitual mispronunciation of words like welkin, facade, cerulean. "Her eyes were orbs, ebony wood." Nor the repetition of "verboten" in a single P.E.A paragraph. I used "sanguine" on a regular basis, and it is a fact that I opened my freshman Lord of the Flies paper with the phrase "their humble tropical abode."
I'm not blaming the teachers. I take responsibility for my shit writing. Why would they want to discourage me? They expected me to get fixed in college.
