STORY TIME
Dear livejournal, were you ever the kind of kid who had to call your mom to come pick you up early from a sleepover? Here is a story about how I was and also about how I was a prick to my friends even at the tender age of fifth grade:
PROLOGUE
Okay so when I was in elementary school I had this friend named Rachel, and she was kind of an unfortunate kid. She was really fat and Christian and just had weird ideas about life on account of her dad barely let her go anywhere outside of her neighborhood. Her grandmother was a preacher on the local public access channel and would say "have a blessed day!" to shop girls and waiters and stuff all the time, and she tried to make all of us Christian using pamphlets and refrigerator magnets re: Jesus. Rachel had a collection of themed Barbies in plastic display cases and wrote self-insert detective fiction on this busted typewriter she had by her bed. Her older sister was constantly pregnant and asleep on their sofa. Rachel was sort of a tertiary member of our clique and we were all kind of embarrassed for her but we ended up at her house kind of a lot for some reason, maybe because her stepmother left cigarettes and wine out occasionally. Her ideas about sleepover activities were kind of off because she was sheltered and included playing house and lip-syncing to her dad's top 40 country and western CDs.
CHAPTER ONE
We're at Rachel's house one night, me and Ashley and Jocelyn and Kelly Liefer who we always called by her full name because 30% of girls born in the eighties are named Kelly. We're all like nine and have no idea about anything so we're watching Tales From The Crypt in the dark until FOX 11 goes off the air and starts showing color bars. When did channels stop doing that by the way. That was neat. Anyway it's like 11:30 PM and the evening has obviously already peaked and we're looking at a good three or four more hours before we come down off our wicked Pepsi buzz and can crash on Rachel's bedroom floor. We're totally out of pizza. My stomach kind of hurts and I'm bored and Rachel is trying to make us listen to some Shania Twain or something, and I start thinking about going home. Walking is out of the question because it's late and far, but I know my mom is going to hate my ass forever if I call her and my friends will tell me I'm gay a bunch the next day if I just leave for no reason, so my scheming nine-year-old head sets to cooking up a shenanigan.
CHAPTER TWO
Everyone is trying really hard to not do Shania Twain karaoke. Kelly Liefer tells Rachel how she broke her ankle once when she was in third grade so she can't stand up for long periods and should be excused. The rest of us are passionately concerned with the color bars on TV, which have not changed in many minutes. I excuse myself to the bathroom, give myself a long look in the mirror, re-tie the bow on the front of the retarded sailor shirt my mom picked out because I haven't yet developed the ability to know or care what I am dressed in, flush the toilet twice, and come back out and silently sit back down on the couch, but kind of away from my friends and I stop looking at the TV and stare at my knees with a countenance of grimness and dissatisfaction.
Kelly Liefer is sharp as a tack and has noticed that I flushed twice. She starts asking me if I have diarrhea, which Rachel hates because she's sensitive about cussing. Everyone is grateful for the distraction, plus diarrhea is hilarious, so the locus of attention shifts from "anything but Rachel" to my ostensible gastrointestinal disease. I just kind of shrug and say that maybe I ate something wrong and continue looking pitiful. I am weaving a tangled web of nonverbal lies.
CHAPTER THREE
We've exhausted all the multiform hilarities of diarrhea and are doing something else. I don't remember what because it was like almost fifteen years ago and I have smoked a lot of marijuana in my life. Anyway we're probably not enjoying it very much and since I have already made my point about not feeling very well I decide to kick my charade up a proverbial notch.
I begin to "hallucinate." I am nine years old and dumber than a bag of hammers so it's as ridiculous as you can possibly imagine. First I start rocking back and forth and murmuring under my breath. Since my trip to the bathroom I have become a master, my friends, of the subtle art of deception and at first no one notices, but I slowly - ever so slowly - get louder with the murmuring and more pronounced with the rocking until somebody goes hey I think something is up with Alex. What I am murmuring is the word "turtle." I choose this word not because it is relevant to anything but because my nine-year-old's concept of a febrile hallucination consists of a random silliness that reaches for "dadaism" but grasps something more along the lines of "a Ren and Stimpy episode I half-remember because my brothers were watching it while I tried to sleep on the couch."
I am straight-up an actress right now, completely finessing the intricate craft of tricking my friends into - I dunno, not giving me a lot of shit for flaking out, I guess. At a certain point it stops being a fake-out and starts being performance art. Like if my exit is somehow awesome enough I'll be excused from the evening's busy program of uncomfortable swaying to Shania Twain and probably a reading of Rachel's gripping, recursive novel-in-progress The Rachel Chronicles, by Rachel (starring Rachel as herself) without catching too much shit about it the following Monday at school.
After a while I perform an incredibly long, slow slide off the couch and flop dramatically onto the floor, now jabbering a stream of free associations in an unnaturally deep voice. I will not see The Exorcist until several years later but when I do it will seem strangely familiar.
CHAPTER FOUR
Obviously Kelly Liefer et al are not buying this for even one minute, because it is ridiculous. Rachel, however, is a sweet girl who does not socialize outside her immediate family much and she is gravely concerned. To my delight, my savvier friends start to play along with me and are clustered around in a worried little circle and going HEY ALEX. HEY. HEY ALEX CAN YOU HEAR US OH MAN WHAT IS WRONG WITH ALEX. THIS IS SO BAD WHAT IS HAPPENING TO OUR FRIEND ALEX RIGHT NOW RACHEL AND SINCE THIS IS YOUR HOUSE IF SHE DIES IT IS MAINLY YOUR FAULT
Meanwhile I have commenced twitching like an epileptic and looking around frantically like I'm seeing things. I keep having to cover my giggles with coughing and babbling. I am pretty sure that I am a genius at this point. I'm feeling good about this going home business. Finally, in a moment which will shine in my memory until the light of my existence winks out* forever, which will continue to make me chort and have difficulty swallowing the food/beverage/semen in my mouth whenever I think of it, Kelly Liefer - that beautiful bastard, in a voice so quavery and panicked that I almost choke on my own tongue - announces, "I think she needs to go to the HOSPITAL!"
Forty minutes later my angry mom comes to pick me up and I spend the remains of the night watching a Weird Al concert I taped off cable or some stupid shit. TA-DA
*like a candle in the wind
EPILOGUE
For some reason I suffered no social consequences for this charlatanry, and remained friends with Rachel for several years until we found out she had a lot of racist opinions about Asians, which is weird because our hometown is Asian as hell and most of our friends were Japanese or Korean. I am not sure why I decided to tell you that
Anyway
Rachel I am so sorry about what I did to you & about your basic life; I hope that you went on to university and discovered orgasms despite your mildly unfortunate circumstances
Rachel I am seriously sorry about this
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
LIKES: oversleeping, grapples
DISLIKES: foot blisters, corporate hegemony
SEXUAL ORIENTATION: n/a
PROLOGUE
Okay so when I was in elementary school I had this friend named Rachel, and she was kind of an unfortunate kid. She was really fat and Christian and just had weird ideas about life on account of her dad barely let her go anywhere outside of her neighborhood. Her grandmother was a preacher on the local public access channel and would say "have a blessed day!" to shop girls and waiters and stuff all the time, and she tried to make all of us Christian using pamphlets and refrigerator magnets re: Jesus. Rachel had a collection of themed Barbies in plastic display cases and wrote self-insert detective fiction on this busted typewriter she had by her bed. Her older sister was constantly pregnant and asleep on their sofa. Rachel was sort of a tertiary member of our clique and we were all kind of embarrassed for her but we ended up at her house kind of a lot for some reason, maybe because her stepmother left cigarettes and wine out occasionally. Her ideas about sleepover activities were kind of off because she was sheltered and included playing house and lip-syncing to her dad's top 40 country and western CDs.
CHAPTER ONE
We're at Rachel's house one night, me and Ashley and Jocelyn and Kelly Liefer who we always called by her full name because 30% of girls born in the eighties are named Kelly. We're all like nine and have no idea about anything so we're watching Tales From The Crypt in the dark until FOX 11 goes off the air and starts showing color bars. When did channels stop doing that by the way. That was neat. Anyway it's like 11:30 PM and the evening has obviously already peaked and we're looking at a good three or four more hours before we come down off our wicked Pepsi buzz and can crash on Rachel's bedroom floor. We're totally out of pizza. My stomach kind of hurts and I'm bored and Rachel is trying to make us listen to some Shania Twain or something, and I start thinking about going home. Walking is out of the question because it's late and far, but I know my mom is going to hate my ass forever if I call her and my friends will tell me I'm gay a bunch the next day if I just leave for no reason, so my scheming nine-year-old head sets to cooking up a shenanigan.
CHAPTER TWO
Everyone is trying really hard to not do Shania Twain karaoke. Kelly Liefer tells Rachel how she broke her ankle once when she was in third grade so she can't stand up for long periods and should be excused. The rest of us are passionately concerned with the color bars on TV, which have not changed in many minutes. I excuse myself to the bathroom, give myself a long look in the mirror, re-tie the bow on the front of the retarded sailor shirt my mom picked out because I haven't yet developed the ability to know or care what I am dressed in, flush the toilet twice, and come back out and silently sit back down on the couch, but kind of away from my friends and I stop looking at the TV and stare at my knees with a countenance of grimness and dissatisfaction.
Kelly Liefer is sharp as a tack and has noticed that I flushed twice. She starts asking me if I have diarrhea, which Rachel hates because she's sensitive about cussing. Everyone is grateful for the distraction, plus diarrhea is hilarious, so the locus of attention shifts from "anything but Rachel" to my ostensible gastrointestinal disease. I just kind of shrug and say that maybe I ate something wrong and continue looking pitiful. I am weaving a tangled web of nonverbal lies.
CHAPTER THREE
We've exhausted all the multiform hilarities of diarrhea and are doing something else. I don't remember what because it was like almost fifteen years ago and I have smoked a lot of marijuana in my life. Anyway we're probably not enjoying it very much and since I have already made my point about not feeling very well I decide to kick my charade up a proverbial notch.
I begin to "hallucinate." I am nine years old and dumber than a bag of hammers so it's as ridiculous as you can possibly imagine. First I start rocking back and forth and murmuring under my breath. Since my trip to the bathroom I have become a master, my friends, of the subtle art of deception and at first no one notices, but I slowly - ever so slowly - get louder with the murmuring and more pronounced with the rocking until somebody goes hey I think something is up with Alex. What I am murmuring is the word "turtle." I choose this word not because it is relevant to anything but because my nine-year-old's concept of a febrile hallucination consists of a random silliness that reaches for "dadaism" but grasps something more along the lines of "a Ren and Stimpy episode I half-remember because my brothers were watching it while I tried to sleep on the couch."
I am straight-up an actress right now, completely finessing the intricate craft of tricking my friends into - I dunno, not giving me a lot of shit for flaking out, I guess. At a certain point it stops being a fake-out and starts being performance art. Like if my exit is somehow awesome enough I'll be excused from the evening's busy program of uncomfortable swaying to Shania Twain and probably a reading of Rachel's gripping, recursive novel-in-progress The Rachel Chronicles, by Rachel (starring Rachel as herself) without catching too much shit about it the following Monday at school.
After a while I perform an incredibly long, slow slide off the couch and flop dramatically onto the floor, now jabbering a stream of free associations in an unnaturally deep voice. I will not see The Exorcist until several years later but when I do it will seem strangely familiar.
CHAPTER FOUR
Obviously Kelly Liefer et al are not buying this for even one minute, because it is ridiculous. Rachel, however, is a sweet girl who does not socialize outside her immediate family much and she is gravely concerned. To my delight, my savvier friends start to play along with me and are clustered around in a worried little circle and going HEY ALEX. HEY. HEY ALEX CAN YOU HEAR US OH MAN WHAT IS WRONG WITH ALEX. THIS IS SO BAD WHAT IS HAPPENING TO OUR FRIEND ALEX RIGHT NOW RACHEL AND SINCE THIS IS YOUR HOUSE IF SHE DIES IT IS MAINLY YOUR FAULT
Meanwhile I have commenced twitching like an epileptic and looking around frantically like I'm seeing things. I keep having to cover my giggles with coughing and babbling. I am pretty sure that I am a genius at this point. I'm feeling good about this going home business. Finally, in a moment which will shine in my memory until the light of my existence winks out* forever, which will continue to make me chort and have difficulty swallowing the food/beverage/semen in my mouth whenever I think of it, Kelly Liefer - that beautiful bastard, in a voice so quavery and panicked that I almost choke on my own tongue - announces, "I think she needs to go to the HOSPITAL!"
Forty minutes later my angry mom comes to pick me up and I spend the remains of the night watching a Weird Al concert I taped off cable or some stupid shit. TA-DA
*like a candle in the wind
EPILOGUE
For some reason I suffered no social consequences for this charlatanry, and remained friends with Rachel for several years until we found out she had a lot of racist opinions about Asians, which is weird because our hometown is Asian as hell and most of our friends were Japanese or Korean. I am not sure why I decided to tell you that
Anyway
Rachel I am so sorry about what I did to you & about your basic life; I hope that you went on to university and discovered orgasms despite your mildly unfortunate circumstances
Rachel I am seriously sorry about this
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
LIKES: oversleeping, grapples
DISLIKES: foot blisters, corporate hegemony
SEXUAL ORIENTATION: n/a