SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

I am completely and unequivocally into football territory. Paige Winslow and Madison Chaffee, sitting on the aluminum bleachers five feet away, don’t notice me.

In world history last year, we studied the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. Mr. Figge explained what de-Stalinization was, how leaders like Stalin would be expunged from the country’s history so completely that their faces were literally erased from photos. That’s what Paige and Madison have done to me: They’ve de-Stalinized me. I still remember when we all played together at the pool, diving under for plastic rings, riding together on field trips to Pioneer Farm, but they don’t. Friendship with me turned out to be the kind of embarrassing accident that happened when you were little, before everyone found their place in the social hierarchy.

They assume that I hate them. That I am deeply jealous and want to be them, but that since I never will be, I’ve channeled my envy into scorn and hatred. It is a valid assumption and generally true. But wrong in my case. I don’t want to be them any more than I want to be one of Twyla’s burnout buds. I don’t think my life is tragic and that it would be golden if I was popular. I just think they are exactly who they were raised to be since their parents named them Paige and Madison and it is irrelevant if I hate them or want to be them.

I smile and shrug. Paige and Madison have no idea what I am shrugging about any more than I would understand them if they shrugged at me. It would just be a chance to huddle with my friends and get that delicious feeling that comes from whispering about someone who is not like you with someone who is like you. I understand. I truly do. I would like whispering with someone who is like me. But no one is.

I think it is because my sizzle doesn’t match anyone else’s. I want something to happen so bad that it sizzles inside of me. It never stops, but it also never fits any of the choices presented. Maybe because there is only one you are ever allowed to talk about: college.

“Which schools are you thinking about?” everyone asks, like they are taking each other’s temperatures, seeing whose sizzle matches theirs. But, even when I try, I can’t make myself care about colleges. About next year. Not when there is so much to pay attention to right now.

At the end of practice, the players all get in a circle, bump fists, yell, “Pirate Power!” and run to the locker room. Paige stands up on the bleachers and calls out, “Tyler! Ty-Mo! Are we studying after school today?”

Tyler turns, yells back, “Yeah, sure! I’ll meet you at your car!”

The instant Tyler’s back faces her, Paige bites her knuckle like she wants to eat her entire arm. Or Tyler Moldenhauer. Madison fans herself to show that she agrees that Tyler is unbearably hot.

Tyler pivots back around. Paige yanks her hand out of her mouth; he yells, “I’m starving!”

Paige answers, “I’ll pick up tacos, OK?”

Before he can say anything else, Tyler’s glance hits me. I hold up my water bottle and wave it at him to show that I’m drinking fluids like he told me to. He doesn’t acknowledge me in any way other than a pause of half a second before he looks back at Paige and yells, “Cool!”

Half a second is exactly long enough for me to be sure that he has seen me and that he could care less.

I loved you from the first second of your life.

Big freaking lot of good that did me.

I close the page without saying good-bye or GTG and think about unfriending him. But why? So I can join Mom in pretending that I haven’t spent most of the past sixteen years thinking about him? Oh, except, unlike Mom, I would then have two people that I can pretend I am not thinking about. Two people who, according to her, I am supposed to hate and must erase from my consciousness.

It’s impossible to make yourself not think about someone. Who’s one of the top three figures everyone knows from Russian history? Maybe Rasputin. Maybe Catherine the Great. But, for sure, everyone knows Joseph Stalin.

De-Stalinization. Didn’t even work for Stalin.