still i am learning

In eighth grade we weren’t allowed to have a dance because like five years before us there were these two best girlfriends who liked the same boy and they somehow also inadvertently wore the same dress and one of them had boobs and the other one didn’t, and the boy wound up liking the one with boobs, because that’s just how the ball bounces (so to speak), and apparently the existential despair of the flat-chested girl was enough to put the kaibosh on not only the best-friendship, but half a decade’s worth of eighth grade dances, too. Mrs. N___ told us that.

Mrs. N___ told us a lot of things, weird stuff about vaudeville and how she dated Alan Alda in high school, and I never doubted her for a second but I don’t know if I believed that story even then–not because it sounds like an arbitrary reason to stop having dances (which it is, but I went to Catholic school and arbitrary doesn’t faze me one bit) but because how are you not going to know what your best friend is wearing to the eighth-grade dance ahead of time? “Well, Jesus,” I said, careless and profane in a smug, know-it-all, thirteen and a half kind of way. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.”

It occured to me this morning, halfway to my office and out of effing noplace and like getting the punchline a dozen years after the joke: Mrs. N___ was a) no idiot, and b) up in everybody’s business one hundred percent of the time. She told us that story with a motive. She meant it as a cautionary tale.

Because me and my very best friend in eighth grade? We liked the same boy, too.