Showing posts with label Memories. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Memories. Show all posts

Sunday, September 02, 2007

More Stories from Adolescence


As middle-schoolers went, I was not the most well-endowed. In fact, I was built like an 8-year old boy. In the seventh grade I had been asked to go to the Homecoming Banquet by an older boy, and, since I wouldn't have been old enough to go otherwise, my mother let me go under the condition that I wear my older sister's Homecoming dress from a few years prior. The dress required that I get a strapless bra, and the only one we could find to fit me was extremely padded. I persuaded my mom to let me get it. The bra had detachable straps, so I of course wore it to school every day once Homecoming was over.

One morning, I was sitting in Mrs. Yeager's math class taking a test when I felt something snap. I looked around to see if someone had hit me with something, but when everyone looked as if they were concentrating on the math test, I went back to work. Mrs. Yeager was walking up and down the aisles as we quietly worked. Then, to my horror, she stopped, picked something up off the floor, held it up in the air and announced "Who's is this?" It was my bra strap! The elastic strap had shot across the classroom! I ran over to her, snatched it from her hand, threw it in my backpack, and died the humiliating death of a flat-chested seventh grader.

Friday, August 31, 2007

Memories from Adolescence


In third grade, Freddie Denham told us he'd had sex. We all believed him, of course, for several reasons: 1. We didn't know what sex was 2. Freddie was the oldest kid in class, and seemed as worldly as any 3. He was one of my best friends, and I assumed he wouldn't lie to me, especially about something so serious. When asked by one of his fellow classmates "how" he'd "had" it, he responded with a story that goes a little something like this:

"I found a condom on the ground at the park that was full of rainwater. I picked it up, slung it around, and some of the water got on me."

That sealed it. Who could dispute it? I didn't know what a condom was, so I certainly wasn't going to. It seemed Freddie really had had "sex". And we all just went on thinking it was true, until Danielle Wingo caught wind of the story and told Mrs. Platt, our teacher.

Mrs. Platt spoke with him privately about the whole thing, and assured those of us that knew the story that he had lied to us, and that we shouldn't be talking about things like that anyway. Freddie came back to the classroom crying, and we all knew at once it had been a scam.

Even so, up until high school I believed what Freddie had told me about not holding your eyelids open really wide and bending over because your eyeballs would literally fall out of your head.


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