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Your One Stop Shop For Bad Grammer!
Lately I’ve been thinking a bit about old, childhood regrets. I realize that at age twenty I’m not exactly an aged one reminiscing on the days of yore (all though this whole “I Love the 90’s” thing on VH1 is rather making me feel that way) but I still do have regrets. Surprisingly though, there are very few things that I would actually want to go back and change. I mean, sure I would love to go back and smack my middle school aged self around a little for clinging so tenaciously to those god awful bangs, but that’s not precisely the type of regret and change I’m talking about. Foremost in my mind is a girl I went to elementary school with named Jenny Pence. Jenny had the extreme misfortune of being both the tallest and the heaviest girl in school. In the hierarchy of an increasingly cruel school world this was enough to mark her as a “freak.” I was not precisely on the popular end of the spectrum in elementary school (or, you know, any other kind of school) myself but I had my own little group of equally dorky friends and I was fairly happy in that blissful childhood way which was to be so brutally shattered in middle school. Jenny was a bit of a hanger on to our little group. She ate lunch with us sometimes, and I think I played with her at a mutual friend’s house (though I would never go over to hers of course.) We kind of felt sorry for her, and superior for hanging out with “poor Jenny.” God we were smug little assholes. Like most kids I wasn’t above being thrilled to be on the powerful side of the bully/ victim equation. I spent most of my school career being bullied by one child menace or another. Around the time things started heating up with Jenny, I remember spending an entire afternoon crying in my room because Keith Nason and Justin Mann had stolen my backpack and thrown it in a trashcan swarming with bees. So I was slightly pleased to have someone who I perceived as lower on the social spectrum than me. And she was really geeky, so she deserved it, right? Right? As time went by we got less pitying and more mean. Pretty soon “avoiding Jenny” had turned into our favorite game. It cracked us up to see her following us from one spot on the playground to another growing increasingly confused as we pretended we couldn’t see her or hear her. One day we finally got so full of ourselves and blatant that we actually had someone (one of the Sharp twins if I recall correctly) go up to her and ask her why she was so fat. Well that did it, we were so simultaneously pleased and horrified with ourselves that we spent the rest of recess shrieking in horror and running away every time she got anywhere near us. Finally, just before the bell rang, Jenny ran off crying. We went in from recess and all sat quietly and diligently at our reading lessons. About twenty minutes later we all got called out of class by the vice principle. I never did find out exactly what Jenny said or who she said it to but we all had to sit down at separate tables in the library and write down our accounts of what had happened that day at recess. The accounts were collected, we went back to class and I never heard anything about the incident again. Jenny never ate lunch with us again and we were glad. We thought she deserved it for “ratting on us.” No, really, we did, as though eating lunch with us was some privilege you had to earn by enduring our horrible personalities. My god, what little shits. Jenny continued on through the same series of middle school and high school that I did but she pretty much drifted of my radar after elementary school graduation. I knew she hadn’t moved, even in a high school of 3,000 I still saw her around once in a while. Neither of us ever acknowledged the other. I thought about her once in a while, when the seventh grade class thought it would be funny to elect her homecoming princess, for example but I always shied away from the memory of that day. I had my own bullies to deal with after all, let Jenny take care of her own. Now I sit at my computer and google her relatively common name and wonder if she even remembers that day. Is it vain of me to think that she does? To think that someone I had no contact with after fifth grade probably still remembers me with feelings of dislike? I look at all the hits on “Jennifer Pence,” all the wonderful people that could be her; student editor of a law review at UMich, a feminist scholar at Illinois Weslyan, private tutor and Harvard grad, but none of the dates are quite right. I can’t find her, can’t be sure. So I write this instead thinking that maybe one day she’ll google herself (everyone does … admit it) and she’ll see that I’m sorry for whatever I contributed to her share of the horror that is everyone’s school memories. 1:36 a.m. July 18, 2004
“Y’all aren’t from around here, are ya.” - August 21, 2005 |
The Many And Scary Ways They Get Here Quote of the Day
"They have lots of disturbing cross sections of animal reproductive organs"
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