For Today I Am A Boy

For nearly five years of my high school sentence (that’s grades seven through eleven), I was all but silent. Most boys wouldn’t make eye contact with me, and I would hear girls giggling at me when I walked by. Not that I blamed them. If I was like them and saw someone like me walk by, I’m not sure I would react very dignified, either. I only ever talked if I had a question during class, which was fairly infrequently. Even if I needed clarification on something, I would hold my tongue and talk with the teacher individually afterward. The people in my class probably thought I had a learning disability. During lunch, I would sit by myself with the meal I had prepared that morning. The promise that I might give them some of my painstakingly-assembled lunch was the only reason why someone might come over to me during the day.

As seniors it was the goal of my classmates to find a date to the pre-graduation ShaBang, an annual rite of passage that at one point probably symbolized the transition into adulthood, but has since deteriorated into five hours of intense rubbing and gyrating of the students’ bodies. It was a wonder that the school board still sponsored it considering how narrow-minded and easily embarrassed the faculty could be. Just as in years past, the ceremony of asking someone to the ShaBang entailed affixing a suction-cup dart with your name on it onto their locker. An unintended side effect of this process was that the amount of darts on one’s locker betrayed their popularity (or lack of). Just as I anticipated, the weeks before the event saw several quivers worth of darts stuck to the lockers of the teased hair and lacquered nails elite; likewise on the lockers of the brutes that called themselves our football team. I’ll admit now that I felt a bit left out. I couldn’t believe that there wasn’t a single person who would put a dart on my locker, not even as a joke. At the same time, though, I still had my own dart in my courier bag. There was still some chance.

She joined our class rather late. Sometime in the middle of grade ten, in fact, because I remember the first time I saw her. Her oversized glasses fell off her face when she reached down to pick up a book she had dropped. I heard the skittering of the frames across the floor and the subsequent snickers from the group of classmates who were huddled around behind her. I was sitting on the opposite side of the hallway reading about atomic magnetism, and was surprised that, for once, I wasn’t the one being laughed at. I had a feeling that, if anyone would understand me, it would be her. She dressed in a similar, bohemian style as I, albeit not everyday. Sometimes she wore stripes of black and red and had her hair up in two pigtails. I wished my hair could’ve been long enough for us to match. I watched as she checked her intricate eye makeup in the small mirror shoved inside her locker. I felt that, one day, she would come and talk to me, but she never did. So I watched her from afar, a Cyrano without a Christian.

I stood before her locker with the dart in my hand. Gaining my footing as if about to launch a javelin, I lifted my arm to fasten the device when she came up from behind me and tapped my shoulder blade.

“Um, hi?”

Hardly a salutation, she was looking for an excuse, a reason for me to be invading her space. I had to think of something. I dropped the dart to the floor and bent over to pick it up.

“Oh, uh, sorry I…”

How pathetic. I couldn’t even talk to her. I retrieved the dart and stood back up. She looked at it and smiled.

“Is that for me?”

I nodded.

“Oh, that is so sweet. Well, you better look your best, because you’ve got yourself a date.”

I winced at first, expecting a slap or at least a soft drink thrown in my face. She quickly looked me up and down, not realizing that I noticed. I guess girls did that, too. I pictured the two of us walking hand-in-hand into the cheaply-decorated gymnasium. She was wearing a crushed velvet corset underneath a flowing lace shawl. Her dress rippled in between her long legs as they breezed across the basketball markings on the floor. I wore a more conservative gown, with silver jewels dotting the hemline. My hairclip had a synthetic gardenia on it, and my collarbones sparkled with stage glitter.

“By the way,” she said through grinning teeth, “what’s your name?”

My name? I looked down at the faux-feather fletching on the dart in my hand. I unfurled the tiny scroll that contained my name. Why was I looking to this goodie-bag dropout to remind me of my name?

“Kim,” I said as if I didn’t believe it myself.