In my high school class, the popular clique was run by a quartet of girls whose status as Queen Bees had solidified by sixth months into fifth grade. In a lot of ways, they were the exact same person, only with minor variations on a theme. For that they earned their reputations as Bitchy, Slutty, Sporty and Flakey.
You didn’t mess with Bitchy. Looking directly into her cold blue eyes would freeze your soul on contact. She had two pronounced dimples on either side of her mouth where the devil left his mark when he squeezed the cheeks of his
spawn. One of my best friends in grade school, a girl who would later go to Oxford and is quite possibly one of the smartest people I know, still shudders with fear at the mention Bitchy’s name. My friend, a member of the Girl Scouts until the ripe old age of 18, used to routinely relate to me fantasies in which Bitchy would die a slow and painful death. Bitchy once shared with the class that she would never date a person of color and would probably spit on a gay if she became aware of “its” presence. In a slice of delicious irony, Bitchy’s favorite book was Alice Walker’s
The Color Purple. At our high school reunion, I learned that Bitchy had become a pediatric nurse.
Slutty had been my best friend in the fourth grade. We were co-leaders of a girl gang whose purpose was to defend our turf from obnoxious boys on the playground. About a year later, we both spouted the beginnings of breasts. After that, for her at least, boys became less obnoxious. She wound up having an abortion in the eighth grade. At reunion, she looked like she had downed a fistfull of Xanax. We chatted awkwardly and she told me that she still lived with her mother and four cats in our hometown. I wanted to travel back in time to the fourth grade to warn her younger counterpart that it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to cram a lifetime of sex and booze into next eight years. It’s typically more practical to wait until college for that level of recreation activity.
Thinking back on it now, I probably had a crush on Sporty, but was too dense to realize it at the time. I won’t even go into a description of her athletic prowess because I’m sure I’d embarrass myself by revealing just how sports-retarded I am. Suffice it to say, she was All-Star Everything. Sporty ensured that our junior class beat the seniors by a landslide in the annual Powder Puff football game, the first time this reversal of fortunes had happened in fifteen years. (The two games she played in, by the way, were the only “football” games I’ve sat through in their entirety in my whole life.) She didn’t make it to reunion, so I’m not sure what happened to her. I hope she still has those cute freckles.
But this - this is a story about Flakey.
Due to the cruel fate of alphabetically assigned seating, Flakey sat next to me in class for eight seemingly endless years. I’ve mentioned before that I’m not a touchy-feely person – a fact that, in spite of my repeated insistence, Flakey never caught onto. She would pull lint off my sweaters during class. She played with my hair. When she was feeling particularly buff, she used to ask me to feel her thighs, and would grab my hands and make me grope her if I resisted. You might be thinking, “Why would anyone ever complain about that?” but seriously, this girl had the personality of Paris Hilton.
Flakey had enough brain cells bumping around in her head to make it into honors classes because that particular threshold was fairly low in my school system. For example, a teacher once asked her what Native Americans used to defend themselves against colonizers. She answered that the Indians threw corn as a weapon. Similarly, Flakey regularly argued with our physics teacher about whether we
really knew whether gravity
truly exists. When I wasn’t laughing at her, I wanted to staple her head and hands to the desk.
Our senior year, I got my revenge.
A few weeks into the first term, I burnt the crap out of my mouth gulping hot tea at a book store. It took ages to heal. At various times during the day, I would find myself swallowing dead skin (I know it’s gross, but bear with me here.) Then one afternoon, in the aforementioned physics class, the entire top of my mouth peeled off in one transparent sheet of skin. It was kind of cool looking – it even had those ridges you can feel on the roof of your mouth with your tongue. I looked at it for a little while, not quite sure what to make of it, and then I realized what must be done.
“Flakey!” I tapped on her shoulder. She had been chewing the ear off the boy sitting on the other side of her, who, no doubt, appreciated her attention as much as I did.
“What?” she asked.
“I have a present for you. Look at this!” I had been hiding the skin in my left hand and thrust it in front of her.
“What is it?” she asked, because I'm sure it really didn’t look like much at first.
“It’s the skin from the roof of my mouth. It just peeled off in one sheet from when I burned it last week. Touch it!” and I pushed it at her again.
This information elicited the desired result. She started shrieking like a fucking banshee. Our physics teacher stopped lecturing. I was labeled a trouble-maker, but managed to escape a trip to the principal’s office - I think he secretly understood the desperation that had lead me to thusly provoke her wrath.
In any case, I got what I wanted out of the whole ordeal. The teacher reassigned my seat so that I spent the remaining months of my senior year free of Flakey’s constant badgering. He did, however, put me next to James The Chronic Masturbator as my punishment. But hell, at least James kept his hands to himself while he was getting off.
(PS - Flakey is now getting her Master's degree in Talking to Butterflies, or something equally fruity. I can't remember what she said, exactly.)
