The Truth About Washing Behind Your Ears

The Truth About Washing Behind Your Ears

Prologue 

Introducing: My Inner Anarchist

Out of the handful of things I can both wrap my head around and pay attention to over long periods of time, hate is one of the most popular. Why is no mystery to me. I don't like to lie to myself, and the truth is that hate is to human beings as that perfume leeching out of Hollister is to innocent mall goers -sticky, nauseating, and occasionally known to bring tears to the eyes. Accepted as an unavoidable side effect of the human condition, the pain of it is dismissed, and forgotten about as soon as its over. Unless you're a cheerleader, politician, or Donald Trump, in which case humanity does not apply to you, and you're free to shop 'till you drop.

Don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying we -or Donald Trump- aren't deserving of this punishment. Once we get to the point of honestly, wholly hating something, we've almost surely earned it. Hate is nothing but targeted anger, a skill involuntarily learned from experience. It starts with that annoying kid in the first grade shoveling sand into your eyes, or stubbing your toe on the coffee table for the eleventy seventh time in twenty four hours, or when something else along those lines really starts bugging you. Then you refuse to take nap time next to the boy, or glare at the offending furnishing every time you pass by it -and before you know it you're, say, seventeen, and still harbor a healthy grudge against sandboxes or tables or whatever it was that ruffled your feathers all those years ago.

This is all just my theory, of course. I like to think it's pretty accurate, but that's probably because I like the thought of being right even more.

People suck like that.

My debatable expertise stems from the ugly red headed stepchild temper that used to be my defining feature. It would come with the slightest provocation, searing through my insides and burning all the mercy and grace I had to the mere inkling of ashes. In fact it still does, but somewhere along the way I decided it wasn't worth going to prison over, and developed some self control.

"Peaches," said Mrs. Foart, addressing me in a tired voice. Mrs. Foart was always tired, but hey, if my job was reading Dickens to high school juniors, I'd be tired, too.

"Mrs. Foart," I replied evenly. I had no idea what she'd been saying. Too busy inflecting on my impatience for human beings to care about a book I'd already read.

In response, the frail woman sighed the heavy sigh of the perpetually exhausted. Foart was a master of the sigh. She must have seen my clueless answer coming and stocked her lungs accordingly in advance.

"You are free to go." Says the warden to the prisoner.

The dismissal was not a surprise. It was a Friday, fifteen minutes before the end of my final bell, and I was always let out around then. A tradition my father came up with a while back. I started to cram all the stuff I'd had on the stockade we were forced to call a desk into my bag, the stuff being mostly books, mostly of the variety I wasn't supposed to have out. Bending over I could get a unique view of my piers' bottom halves. Ick. Heavily embroidered jean bottoms, clean and pressed as could be, Top Siders with immaculate laces, shiny, unscuffed Chuck Taylor's tucked over spangly leggings. Lots of sequins, lots of buckles, and lots of smoothly shaven skin. All over the spotless and unforgiving brown carpet of the school's classrooms. God, even their feet screamed money.

A glance down at my own lavender converse and skillfully gathered, acid washed jeans was enough to stop that thought from building. There was no difference between me and them.

"Mrs. Foart," chirped a voice from behind me, belonging to a pair of charcoal gray flats. The girl pronounced it 'Miz Fart', a nickname spawned from both the original pronunciation as well as the woman's constant expulsion of gas. "Why does Peaches get to leave early every Friday? Isn't that, like, against the rules or something?"