Page 11 - Asheville NC Revised2

tugging at every orifice, sometimes avoiding black and white girls in hair-tearing fights. Moving with a stiff waddle when other jocks were perfecting a cool macho swagger. Still no one harassed me, a geeky alpha jock wearing makeup. Well, only once, by Brad who, judging by the amount of spit he flipped at me, was a very good friend. “Stinky Dan,” he challenged.
Where was all this natural gas coming from?
“Dan, people aren’t worried about you as much as you think,” said Mom. “They’re always choosing me first at every game and waiting to hear what I
have to say.”
“Maybe,” she said. “That’s a compliment, not a burden. And anyway, believe
me, they’re not watching you every class or every step. They have their own worries. If you’d think about how to help them you wouldn’t have time to think about yourself so much.”
“I’d love to worry about others if I could.”
“If you really wanted to you would,” she said, putting her arm tenderly around me.
“Never mind.” I pulled against her hug, needing to spread my face to separate sticking eyes and not wanting her to see.
The years crowning irony came when the principal roared over the loud speaker on the last day of class: “Dan Langerton wins the seventh grade’s award for most popular boy.”
In my mind I was in complete shambles. In the school’s mind I was the perfect example. I wasn’t about to make any philosophical conclusions in the midst of my terrifying neurosis. However, when I ran into The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield’s classification of the world as “phony” satisfied my deepest suspicions. I read it at least five times in a couple of years.
And then that summer in Vacation Bible School we were studying sex. It was the first I’d heard about it. Amazing. Even more amazing was that the book said Mom and Dad sometimes slept naked together. That they saw each other naked all the time!
All of which is to say that any chance I had for developing a love life in junior high went up in self-conscious and naïve smoke. I completely forgot Paula, Becky and Carol who I had planned to approach as soon as the cootie taboo expired. All three had gone to private school anyway. Still, I was a little interested by tell-tale signs that our school’s head cheerleader wanted to go steady. I wrote and memorized a two- paragraph speech and reeled it off as me and she strolled towards freedom after the last bell. Gossip got back that she didn’t understand any of it. I didn’t try again.