BING. New AOL Instant Messenger message. I ran over to my old Dell laptop and pried it open.
This was 2002 and Dell was the shit, so no judgment. I opened up my AIM and there it was, a picture of a flaccid ninth-grade boy's penis with the text "So baby, U like?" under it. I slammed my Dell shut and locked my bedroom door. What had I done?
Flashback to one week earlier. I had just started high school and very quickly realized that I wasn't the cool kid. I wasn't even the nerdy kid. I was the invisible kid. I can't tell you the amount of times a group of students would literally crash right through me in the hallway like they were an eighteenwheeler truck and I was a bag of old McDonald's someone threw out the window. You would think that being morbidly obese would make me easier to see, but it somehow acted as a cloak of invisibility. My blubber must have had some kind of magical power. If there had been a sad version of the X-Men I would have been Magneto and all the special-ed kids with superior upper-body strength would have been my students.
Me being undetectable to the human eye made it particularly difficult when our teacher would divide us into groups for class assignments. Usually I wasn't even picked last; I was literally forgotten. I had a teacher ask me once if I was there to check on the air conditioner. So during the first week of school we had a project in social studies class. Our teacher wanted us to pick groups and form our own "societies." After my teacher asked if I was the janitor and I told her I was fourteen, she had me join a group of surfer kids who had a collective IQ of ten and a collective STD score of everything. I tried to make conversation with one of them.
Me: So, you watch American Idol?
Surfer Kid: Aren't you the cafeteria lady?
It was going great. I sank into my chair and prayed that there would be a natural disaster that would kill everyone in my school except for me. That didn't happen, so I just stared at the clock until it was time to leave. That night I went home and decided to do a little research on my group mates to see how I could get along with them. Maybe we had similar interests? Maybe they were closet homosexuals with a fat fetish? It was worth looking into. I logged on to MySpace and began my hunt. My only friends at the time were Tom and Pauly Shore, so I was pretty sure we didn't have any mutual friends. I went to each of their pages and stalked the shit out of it. During my investigation I began to realize something about these surfer kids that I had secretly suspected all along: they were horrible. Every picture they posted was of them shirtless and every comment they shared was a version of: "UR SO FUCKING HOT FUCK ME." Clearly we had nothing in common. The only person who had ever wanted to fuck me was a homeless lady who used to stand outside of Ralphs and tell me I had a "sad face that she wanted to sit on." I kept looking at their pages and started not only questioning how people could be so vapid but also questioning whether God exists. It was a really dark few hours.
The next day I went back to class and sat in my group once again, waiting for some kind of fatal natural disaster. I tried to strike up another conversation, and this time it lasted longer than ten seconds. Unfortunately it wasn't a friendly chat about the weather. It was a tear-inducing indictment against childhood obesity. You know, typical fourteen-year-old banter.
Me: So, what did you guys do last night?
Surfer Kid 1: Got high with my uncle and tried to get his dog drunk.
Me: Fun. What about you?
Surfer Kid 2: Fucked some chick I met on AIM. Me: You guys have sex?
They all looked at me with dumb in their eyes and emptiness in their heads.
Me: Oh. Cool. Sometimes I think about sex. Then I get scared and pray about it.
Surfer Kid 3: I went to the gym. Almost fucked a girl there but she was a dyke or something. Me: You go to the gym? Are you allowed at the gym? Isn't that for grown-ups and handicapped people?
