Good evening! I invite you to grab a cup of tea or some pretzel rods and settle in for a tale of heartbreak, shopping malls, and personal growth.
Rejection under a disco ball
When I die, I will not go gently into that good night. This is not because I’m brave and strong, but because I’m dramatic and loud. When I know my last breaths are nigh, I hope to have the strength to make some sort of gesture — maybe raise myself up and shout “OH LIFE, HOW I’VE LOVED YOU” and then quietly laugh at my own ruckus while I drift into the infinite sleep, all the while my family stands around rolling their teary eyes.
What’s wrong with a little theatre in your life? If you want the full human experience, you can’t escape the intensity of human emotions. I find that leaning into it and adding a little soundtrack in your head makes it somewhat more manageable.
I learned this at a young age. My parents could, no doubt, list off incidents even earlier than those I remember, but the first dramatization I recall involved betrayal and rejection under a disco ball.
It was 1997. Although I was only 7 or 8, I was already a worldly child. I had been in the theatre, I had done the sports, I had home schooled and regular schooled and once I lost a baby tooth inside of a donut. Things had happened, and I was no stranger to strong emotions. So when I met Chad at the skating rink, I knew love when I felt it.
I was a regular attendee at the USA Skating Rink in first grade. They had Christian night on Mondays, and my mom took me to meet my friend Lauren there each week for wholesome exercise. Back then, my best tricks were skating fast enough to win a free Pepsi in the nightly races, and slamming to a stop at the DJ booth. I was working on a new skill, though — flirting.
Oh Chad, you and your chestnut bowl cut and your beady eyes and your lime green pacifier necklace. He was a year older, and the wisdom of life experience practically poured off of him like incense smoke. Neither I nor Lauren could help but fall in love with him.
Week after week we saw him at the rink, and it became clear that the attraction went both ways. Chad clearly enjoyed having two young babes gushing at him over his pizza slices and nacho platters. He would return my adoring gaze with sparkling, flirtatious eyes. If he were old enough to know how, I’m sure he would have winked. Unbeknownst to me, he was sending the same signals to Lauren when I looked the other way.
One night, while Lauren and I were skating laps to Spice Girls, our interests in Chad collided. Lauren revealed, in passing, that Chad had taken her to the prize booth with him while he cashed in his tickets for a rabbit’s foot. They had then taken the rabbit’s foot over to the tables where private and romantic discussions ensued. I begged Lauren to tell me what they talked about, but she wouldn’t reveal her secrets. I felt left out in the cold. But I still wasn’t convinced that all of those flirtatious glances my way meant nothing.
“Come on,” I said, pulling her off the rink. “It’s time we settle things.”
Looking back, I can see that Lauren was just being the best friend she knew how to be, under the circumstances — the circumstances being that she betrayed my trust and snatched away the love of my life. Instead of blatantly explaining that she and Chad were boyfriend and girlfriend and saving us all some time, she cowered behind a false oblivion and let me drag her over to Chad, who was hanging with the dudes.
“You have to choose one,” I said. “Choose one of us.”
Lauren giggled nervously, while Chad smiled nicely and said, “Sorry, but I’m with Lauren.”
The nice thing about a skating rink is that, although you’re confined to a 25x60-foot space, you can really gain speed on the rink and get the feeling that you’re creating a vast distance between yourself and your past. I swooped around and around leaving my lost love and my ex-best friend in the dust while tears streamed down my face. As I skated, a song came to my mind.
Chad and Lauren just walked through the door
Like a queen and her king
Oh what a birthday surprise
Lauren’s wearing his ring
It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to
Cry if I want to
Cry if I want to…
It wasn’t my birthday, but it could have been. It might as well have been. I knew, even at a young age, that to say it was my birthday on the night of this betrayal gave the story a little more impact.
Years later, I would deal with a similar crush triangle. By 2001, Lauren and Chad were mostly forgotten, although occasionally I would recall the sting of rejection. Mostly, though, I was preoccupied with the hell that is middle school.
Something happens in the summer between 5th and 6th grade — or maybe it’s the culmination of dozens of tiny things. Hormones, body hair, allowances, changing periods between classes, getting your period between classes. At my Christian school, we were too polite and god fearing to look these things straight in the eye, so each of us were left to solve the riddle on our own.
My class was small enough that I had been to every girl’s house at least once at some point during elementary school. But in sixth grade, that didn’t mean shit. In sixth grade, there were new rules about who would be invited to which Friday night soiree henceforth. Rivalries and grudges formed out of thin air. One day, having grown bored of marbles and kick ball and swings, the girls in the sixth grade class though of a new fun game to play at recess. We formed into our cliques and walked past other cliques scowling threateningly for no apparent reason. This was how we occupied ourselves for 40 minutes.
Before sixth grade, my small, relatively new private school had been housed in different church buildings throughout the city. At one point, it was in my family’s church, so that I was in the building six days a week, and could run upstairs on Sundays and peak inside our empty classroom with all the empty desks holding Five Star binders and textbooks in wait. By the time sixth grade rolled around, the school had raised enough money that it built its own big building on the outskirts of town. It was the first time we had lockers, and also the first time we had room for new students.
This is how my life journey took me to Alecs. Dark hair, dark eyes, oily skin, a little skittish. A real dream boat, he was. It was easier for me to connect with the new students, because they didn’t have the collective power of cruelty. Even though I had been there all along, I was an outcast, like the new people, which was something to have in common.
That year, I stayed close with only one original classmate, and that was Courtney. Historically a darling, blonde sweetheart with big, round glasses that took up half her face, Courtney had grown into her own cattiness over the summer, but was also not quite in the circle with the rest of the girls. She and I formed a bond that was founded on trips to the mall, where we would buy 99-cent milkshakes at Friendly’s and spend our allowances on weird colored Nikes and Adidas shoes at Lady’s Footlocker, where they were on clearance, probably because of their resemblance to Easter Eggs. In the evenings, we’d retire to our separate homes and watch Seventh Heaven while discussing plot developments over the phone.
At some point, Alecs started interfering with our phone time — on both ends. He’d ring us up separately to chat about the day, or what his mom was making him for dinner. I was less nervous than I was back in the Chad days, because I could tell Alecs was nervous himself. He was always eager to impress, so much so that it annoyed me. One afternoon, I sat at the computer playing Minesweeper while talking to him on the cordless phone, when the discussion turned to bands. Always the music snob, I assured him that he wouldn’t know the groups I liked.
“I bet I do,” he said.
“Oh, well… some of my favorites are Lifehouse, Nickelback, and…” I looked down at a stack of catalogs. “Nordstrom.”
“Yeah yeah, Nordstrom is so good.” Alecs said. I rolled my eyes, accidentally clicked on a bomb, and started a new game.
At school or at the mall, Courtney and I would compare notes and laugh. “He’s so desperate!” we’d say, not realizing that it was kind of an insult to ourselves.
Young girls like to do everything together because it’s safer that way, so one day, simultaneously, we decided that we both liked Alecs. I don’t know what it was about me as a flirtatious child — maybe I came on too strong — but I was again rejected by my crush in favor of my friend. Alecs focused his attention on courting Courtney, and I retired to the basement with my Michelle Branch CD.
Much like that night with Lesley Gore long ago at the skating rink, I felt Michelle’s words speak to my unique circumstances.
So I'm a little left of center
I'm a little out of tune
Some say I'm paranormal
So I just bend their spoon
Who wants to be ordinary
In a crazy, mixed-up world
I don't care what they're sayin'
As long as I'm your girl
I pretended not to mind their mean sixth-grade relationship, but secretly I wanted to be with Alecs. He was cruel like all boys, but kind of soft sometimes. Part of me suspected that Courtney was aware of my affection for him, and that this made him all the more appealing to her. Like Oscar Wilde said, “There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.”
One evening after school, Courtney called me to tell me how Alecs had stopped her on the way to the bus. There was a present for her in his hand.
“He got me a diamond necklace,” she said. “From Kay Jewelers at the mall.”
My heart sank. I asked, would she be wearing it tomorrow?
“NO!” she laughed maniacally. “I fed it to my dog!”
I hope for the cocker spaniel’s sake that this was a lie
Alecs did not return to our school the next year, and eventually I left that place behind, too. I broadened my horizons at public school, and gradually met people that I could jive with — people who, like me, wanted nothing more than to stand around wearing two belts at once while watching high schoolers play Misfits covers. Happily, I disassociated from my shitty private school experience and considered myself better off than the rest of those suckers. I wonder if Alecs felt that way, too.
The only other time I saw Alecs, he was wearing a large quantity of gel in his hair and selling watches at a mall kiosk, right across from the Kay Jewelers. I passed by undetected and returned to my post at the mall’s movie theatre concession stand, where I contemplated how nice it was to know that, with time, all rejections hurt a little less.
xo
Katya