"They Really Like Me."

The other night as I was falling asleep I was thinking about my sophomore year English class. I had a first year teacher who tried to spice up our old-school English department. She was young, naive, liberally minded and added a dash of cayenne to her class which I am sure didn't sit well with the blandly-seasoned tenured teachers. We were suppose to read Julius Caesar by Shakespeare but since she thought there were far more interesting plays to read, her classes instead read A Midsummer's Night Dream. She found a production of it and took all that wanted to attend on a field trip. It ended up catching up with her because on the end of the year test, which was a cumulative review of all of the sophomore English curriculum, there were questions about Julius Caesar. So what did she do? She feed us a cliff's version of the play so that we were equipped with the answers for those questions. We read interesting essays that I had never heard nor have I heard of since of about futuristic societies where no one was allowed to talk about their feelings. She also read aloud a controversial essay that she wrote in college about the differences between men's and women's views of intimacy, which put the class into a palpable agonizing silence.

But while I was drifting off to dreamland the image that came to my mind was an assignment we were given to write an essay using an old picture of ourselves. We were to describe how we felt, what we did, and what made us interesting at that stage of life. I brought in my seventh grade picture. I don't know why I chose it, but it was probably because it was the only picture that I could find at the last minute. I remember writing my essay and bringing it to school the next day with the picture attached. This particular picture was not one of my best. I had a navy blue and white horizontally striped shirt, a shell necklace, crooked bangs that split unevenly into two parts, with the rest slicked into a partial barretted updo that was soaked in hairspray.

In class that day a move of social annihilation was happening as this young teacher was calling on students to read their essays. Many silent prayers were offered that my name wouldn't be called. Then it came. "Rebecca, will you read yours?" I remember swiftly and nervously as the words that I wrote escaped off of my tongue. When I got to the sentences about my shiny slicked back hair and how I was so afraid to ever get a tardy so I ran from class to class almost always being the first one in the room, there were eruptions of laughter. The class laughed and laughed as did the teacher. I remember swelling with pride about my essay. My heart did a little lift off as the thought crossed my head "they really liked it." There are few times in my life that I have had that feeling and this was certainly one that was memorable. I was thinking about a situation recently where I had the same heart swell, and it took me back to my 15 year old self. I think those little times of validation that one feels "they really like me" make an impact, especially to an awkward teenage girl.