When I first realized I was a weirdo
When I was around 5-years-old, I lived in El Paso, and I can remember starting preschool. I was in a class that was at least half Mexican. Most of them didn't speak English. My teacher taught the English speakers some basic Spanish words so that we could communicate with our Mexican classmates. There was this one chubby Mexican girl who sat at my table--there were four kids to a table--and she fascinated me. She was just so sassy. She had straight, shoulder-length black hair with bangs cut straight across her forehead, she usually wore neon-colored stretchy shorts, and she always carried a little pocketbook around with her. She didn't speak a lick of English. I used to watch her whenever she would take her tinted chapstick, which came in a lipstick tube, out of her pocketbook and apply it to her lips. She did this many times during the school day, and I delighted in it every time. She would purse her lips and apply the chapstick in a complete circle, making at least five revolutions before smacking her lips once and putting the tube back into her pocketbook. I marvelled at this, was absolutely mesmerized, and anxiously awaited the next application. For that reason alone I looked forward to going to school. Whenever she was absent, I felt incredibly dejected. I used to try hard to impress her with my Spanish vocabulary, but that entailed repeating the same word over and over again until she became annoyed with me and would yell, "Si, si! Dios mio." I didn't so much have an obsession with her as with her ritual chapstick application. I'm not sure if that's less creepy or more.