“Yeah, like one time we were going to this retreat together, I wrote about it.…”
My mind: retreat? Retreat! You wrote about the retreat? TELLMETELLMETELLME!
My mouth: silent. Nodding.
“Anyway, we were in the van, and I guess we were playing truth or dare or something.…”
The truth or dare game!
“And someone asked if I liked you, but you were sitting right there, so I lied.…”
What? It was a lie?
“And I said that I didn’t like you even though I totally had a huge crush on you.”
With this she burst out laughing, overcome by the humor of this story from her diary. I laughed, too. I mean, what else was I going to do? How do you react to that? When it turns out that Sarah definitely liked you after all, that she admits to lying in truth or dare?
“Wow, that’s… uh… hilarious,” I said. “I remember that retreat.” Oh yes. I remember.
“That was such a long time ago,” she said.
I take a sip of my green tea. “Yeah. Remember how we dated for, like, a day?”
She burst out laughing again—not her two-syllable giggle but an all-out laugh, as if I had just hit the punch line of a killer joke.
“I remember.” She paused, some more laughs bubbling up. “I mainly remember when you asked me out, I think it was at youth group or something, and you were like, ‘Will you go out with me?’ and I was like, ‘Yeah,’ and then you were like, ‘Cool,’ and then you just”—here she laughed some more, the memory obviously reaching its crescendo—“walked away. And I was so freaked out. I’d never had a boyfriend before. I was like, Oh my gosh, Josh is never going to talk to me again! Now that we are going out, we aren’t going to be friends anymore!”
“I remember you, like, disappeared right after I asked you out.”
“Oh yeah, I asked one of the leaders, I think it was Melissa…” She struggled for the last name.
“Bruning?” I offered.
“Yeah, Melissa Bruning came with me to the bathroom, and I just cried the whole rest of the night, and she talked me through it,” Sarah said. She was still smiling, amused by the story even though we were talking about a time when she, it turns out, was crying. Yes, crying. Because I asked her out. That’s a bad sign for your dating life right there, if girls burst out crying when you ask them out.
“So you were worried we wouldn’t be friends anymore?”
“Well, yeah,” she said. “I mean, you literally walked away immediately after asking me out. It was sooo awkward. I figured we probably wouldn’t talk at all if we were boyfriend and girlfriend.”
“You were probably right,” I admitted.
“So when you walked away like that, I could see that our friendship would be ruined if we dated, so I just—I just—” She seemed to struggle with the words to describe our breakup, as if she was having to dump me right now all over again and wished she could call on a BFF to come to her rescue. “I don’t know—”
I threw her a line. “No, that makes sense,” I said. “I was pretty awkward.”
And as I said it, I thought: Probably I still am, judging by the number of girlfriends I’ve had.
“We both were,” she said.
I didn’t recall her ever being awkward, but that’s the funny thing about awkwardness: You can never tell how much of it is in your head and how much of it is real. Because if you ask the other person if it’s real—that is, if she feels it, too—then automatically it is. Because discussing awkwardness is always, well, awkward.
LIZA TAYLOR SMITH
BACKGROUND
Chapter 5
Of all the socially awkward behaviors I exhibited during my transition from homeschool to public school in ninth grade, perhaps the most outrageous was my decision to memorize everyone in the eighth-grade yearbook so I could greet all my classmates by name on the first day of school. And of all those faces I memorized, perhaps the one I was most looking forward to acquainting myself with in real life was that of Liza Taylor Smith.
In her yearbook photo, she had seductively droopy eyelids that reminded me of old photos I’d seen of Marilyn Monroe. These eyes were counterbalanced by a friendly smile. The smile was warm enough to suggest that, despite her beauty, she would be kind to any member of the male species who might show an interest in her, including even dorky former homeschoolers with one leg.
Liza Taylor Smith. I loved how, unlike everyone else, she had not two but three words in her name, as if her hotness could not be described by or contained within the confines of a normal name structure. Was Taylor a second first name? If so, why wasn’t it hyphenated, like Liza-Taylor? So many questions! We would obviously have a lot to talk about when we finally met on the first day of school.
When people think of homeschooling, they often picture a child sitting at a desk in the kitchen, the mother teaching multiplication tables by scribbling numbers on a blackboard magnetized to the refrigerator. There are plenty of approaches to homeschooling, and people homeschool for many different reasons, but ours functioned less like a one-student classroom and more like an independent study.
At the start of the school year, Mom would give me my textbooks, one for each subject. She would divide the number of pages by the number of days in the school year, and those would be my daily reading requirements. That was basically it. So I learned to be self-motivated. In elementary school, I would get up at 7 AM and not come out of my room for breakfast until I was finished with all my schoolwork for the day. That’s why, when I was approaching my first day of public school, my natural inclination was to borrow a yearbook from one of my friends at church and start memorizing the facts. Because that’s what I knew how to do. It had always been my approach to school. Read. Memorize. Repeat.
Back in elementary school, during the finish-all-the-work-before-breakfast days, homeschooling seemed so much better than traditional school. By the time Tony got home at four in the afternoon, I’d already been building forts in the bushes for six hours. Then I hit middle school, and my friends in the neighborhood started telling me about the glorious adventures they were having at public school: PE class. Dances. Pretty girls. Everywhere. Suddenly homeschooling didn’t seem so fun anymore.
Mom and Dad weren’t so excited about the idea. Christian school, maybe. But public school? It was a well-known fact among Christian homeschoolers that public schools were bastions of gangs, drugs, teen pregnancy, rap music, pop culture, secular humanism, witchcraft, and body piercings.
Mom, Dad, and I would sit around our smooth, laminate kitchen table after dinner, arguing about whether I should be allowed to attend public school starting in ninth grade.
“Joshua, if you go to public school…” Dad lowered his voice in case Matthew or Luke was listening from the family room. “Your English teacher might ask you to read pornographic novels.”
I was very curious to know what exactly a pornographic novel was, but decided it was better not to ask.
“And you’ll probably be invited to join a gang,” he added.
“In your first week,” said Mom.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll be sure to wait until offers come in from all the gangs before I make my final decision.”
Mom’s face dropped.
“I’m kidding!” I said. “Look, I’m not going to join a gang. Obviously.”
“They will peer-pressure you,” said Mom.
This I did not doubt. Nor did I doubt that there were gangs, or that I would be asked to join one. These were facts that homeschoolers like me took for granted. The pope is Catholic. Bears poop in the woods. Public school kids are in gangs that deal drugs.
But to me, the benefits outweighed those risks.
“I can resist peer pressure. But in homeschool I don’t have the opportunities I would at regular school. I really think God wants me there.”
Also: I wanted to go to public school. I wanted to be on the newspaper staff, to attend school dances, to meet hundreds of
pretty girls. But for my parents, what God wanted was more important than what I wanted. And God was more difficult to argue with, since he wasn’t sitting at the table with us. So I played the God card whenever I could.
“We’ll pray more about it,” said Dad.
Eventually, and after much more prayer, Dad joined my and God’s side, and Mom was outvoted.
Having been indoctrinated my entire life about the dangers of public school, I walked through the heavy doors on my first day feeling how I imagine an American spy would feel upon entering a terrorist training camp for four years of deep-undercover work. I had a panicky fear in my chest that was screaming, You do not belong here! You are going to say the wrong thing! Your whole cover will be blown!
Before first period, I glanced quickly in the locker below mine as a student opened it. He was a few grades older than me, so I didn’t feel confident saying hi to him, but he lived in my neighborhood and I knew who he was. Anyway, I looked into his locker for the sole purpose of finding out which area he was using to stash his drugs and weapons. Not to determine whether he had drugs and weapons, mind you, but merely to determine where they were, because there was absolutely no doubt in my mind that he, like most students at public school, hid both drugs and weapons in his locker.
Though I was intimidated, I had made up my mind that I would try to befriend as many of my fellow freshmen as possible. And it would be easy since I already knew who they were. As I walked down the hall, I called out their names and waved at students I recognized from the yearbook. I’d spent so long looking at their photos that they had become like celebrities to me. The school hallway was like a red carpet before the Academy Awards. I shouted first and last names with glee, waving frantically, getting that OMG-a-celebrity-just-waved-back-at-me rush whenever my greeting was returned. I scanned the halls most earnestly for that one particular face, that perfect face with the droopy eyelids and inviting smile, the face of Liza Taylor Smith. But I didn’t see her en route to first period.
As I said, it felt like I was going undercover. Not only because I was new to public school but also because I was an amputee wearing a prosthesis, a device that is made to look like something other than what it really is. There is a deception there, and as with all deception, the implicit mission is to keep the secret, to not let anyone find out. I wore long, long shorts—so long you might think they were pants—exposing just a few inches of ankle in between my shoe and the shorts. My artificial leg was covered in foam molded to the shape of my real leg, and that foam was covered in a rubber “skin” matched to my real skin tone. I wasn’t too far along in puberty yet, so there wasn’t enough hair on my right leg to make the shins look mismatched. To the casual onlooker who passed me in the hall, I reminded myself with every step, my leg would look real. No one could tell. No one would know. My secret was safe.
Yet despite my very best efforts to walk smoothly, when you have an artificial hip, knee, and ankle joint on one side, you’re always going to have at least a slight limp. An upperclassman stuck out his leg in front of my feet as I walked by him on my way to lunch. I tripped, letting my books fly as I put out my arms to break my fall.
His friends laughed.
“You ain’t no pimp! So don’t try and walk like one!” he yelled, exchanging celebratory high fives with his entourage.
I lifted myself up to a push-up position and rolled my weight onto my real foot so my prosthetic knee straightened out behind me. Then I brought my real foot between my hands so I was positioned like a sprinter before a race. Pressing from the muscles in my real leg—my fake one of course provided no assistance in these situations—I stood up. Not to face him. I didn’t look back. I kept my eyes on the ground, bending over to pick up my books, feeling my lower lip quiver.
I made a quick glance around the hallway. Had Liza Taylor Smith seen this? That would be just my luck. But no, fortunately, she was not around. She did not see me fall. This incident would remain a secret from her. As for the people who had seen it happen, there was no way to tell if they had figured out I had a prosthesis. I put my head back down and kept walking.
Later that first day I had Honors Biology class, where the teacher, Mr. Glick, taught us about the nine phyla of the animal kingdom. As he spoke, I saw other students jotting down the names of the phyla in their notebooks, but I had never had to listen to someone and write down what they were saying (at the same time!) before. I had always learned from reading books in my bedroom. So I didn’t take any notes.
On the second day of Honors Biology, Mr. Glick said, “Take out a sheet of paper for…” He literally paused for dramatic effect. “Our pop quiz.”
Around the room, there were several audible gasps. Three-ring binders were snapped open to slide out notebook paper; at other desks, sheets of paper were torn out of spiral-bound notebooks with a zzzzzzip. I clicked open my own three-ring binder and pulled out a sheet, the paper shaking in my hand as I set it on my desk. I was thinking: a “pop quiz”? What is this? What’s going on? Why didn’t he tell us about it ahead of time?
“Please close your notebooks and textbooks. At the top of your paper write your name.”
I wrote my name slowly, doing my best to keep my pen from shaking.
“Now write down the nine phyla in the animal kingdom.”
I was screwed.
I had not taken any notes. I had not listened carefully. I had not known it was important or, for that matter, even known how to learn that way. It was so unfair! A pop quiz… with no advance warning! Public school was a rip-off! I was going to fail out and not get into college and end up destitute and living on the streets.
Finally, one of the phyla popped into my mind. I remembered it because it was a cool-sounding word: “nematode.” I thought some more, and two additional words from the lesson added themselves, shakily, to my handwritten list:
Arthropod.
Mollusk.
After that: nothing.
I sat there, pen unsteady, breathing shallow, struggling to recall anything else I’d heard Mr. Glick say. I thought about animals I’d seen at the zoo, at the aquarium. I knew plenty of animal names, but not their phyla.
“Pencils down, please.”
And just like that, the quiz was over. With only three out of nine answers on my paper, my best possible score was a 33 percent. My life was headed for ruin.
A few weeks later, Mr. Glick would reveal that the pop quiz did not count toward the final grade. It was just a lesson, he said, on the importance of taking notes and reviewing them before class. Well, Mr. Glick, lesson learned. I started taking notes after that quiz. Never again did I score so low on a quiz or test.
But the most significant event for me romantically on that first day was what didn’t happen: I did not meet Liza Taylor Smith.
Chapter 6
After school let out, I was talking to two guys I knew from the yearbook, Ryan Eckhart and Craig Johansson, while also looking around for Liza Taylor Smith. Was she out here on the sidewalk anywhere? Maybe she had gotten a haircut. Maybe she didn’t look like she did in her yearbook photo, and that’s why I hadn’t recognized her.
“Question,” I said to Ryan. “One person I haven’t met yet is Liza Taylor Smith. You know her?”
“Liza Taylor? Of course. Hottest girl in our class.”
I nodded. “So… is she nearby anywhere? Do you see her?”
Ryan searched the groups of students. “Uhhhh… no, she’s not here.”
“Bummer. I really want to meet her.”
“Yeah? Just watch for a big group of guys who are all trying to talk to her. She’ll be right in the middle.”
Craig added, “Or look for the girl with really big, you know.” He cupped his hands in front of his chest, and I realized that he was talking about… Liza Taylor Smith’s breasts! I was shocked. I had never, ever discussed any girl’s breasts before. To hear this guy talk about, well, female anatomy so openly, without even lowering his voice, as if he didn’t care if anyone ov
erheard him, made me tense up uncomfortably.
I left Ryan and Craig and talked with a few other groups of students, mostly girls, none of whom included Liza Taylor Smith or her apparently noteworthy breasts. Finally, Mom pulled up to the curb. Later, at dinner, when I told her about the kid who had tripped me, she started crying. Public school was everything she had been afraid it would be.
After a week had passed and I still had not been offered drugs or gang membership, nor had I seen a single weapon fall out of a locker or a backpack, I started to wonder if maybe homeschoolers were wrong about some aspects of public school. Because actually, most of the students I’d met had been pretty nice. Public school students were, for the most part, nice people who were very similar to me, other than the fact that they had two legs and talked about girls’ breasts.
That was the good news. The bad news was that I still had not crossed paths with Liza Taylor Smith. I realized we must have had different walking routes between classes. Which wasn’t that surprising. Our school was an enormous web of interconnected wings, hallways, and stairwells that crisscrossed like highway overpasses. So I started varying my routes between my locker and class, trying to increase the likelihood I would bump into her. And whenever I was in a crowd, like at lunch or outside after school, I would ask around to see if anyone had seen Liza Taylor Smith nearby.
After two weeks of this, I had pretty much given up hope that we would ever meet. That’s when I received the Letter.
It was handed to me by Lauren Baker, a well-known member of Liza Taylor Smith’s entourage, who happened to sit beside me in Spanish. Lauren was a pretty, aloof girl who generally deemed me worthy of only a slight smile and nod when I said hi to her.
That was one thing I had learned about public school. It was a place with places: a well-defined social hierarchy in which everyone knew his or her status. That was weird to me—I’d been taught not to buy into stereotypes, because stereotypes are shallow and untrue and everything. But all the high school stereotypes you hear about in popular culture seemed to be true at Harrisonburg High School: The quarterback of the football team dated the cheerleading captain. Guys with sports cars had hot girlfriends. The really, really smart students wore glasses and had acne.
We Should Hang Out Sometime Page 3