On my way into work this morning, I was digging around my stupid little brain, trying to remember some of the funnier stories from my colorful youth. I'm getting sick of all this "ahh death cry wah I suck" stuff, so in the meantime, I have to jump back a bit in time.
As I mentally ticked down the list of idiotic adventures, I noticed that the better majority of them involve one other person. Seizing that theme, I realized this girl was the original partner in crime, and our stories are many and stupid.
I met Jaime S. at the kindergarden orientation when I was 4. Because my mother was anxious to kick me out of the house as soon as possible, I was a year younger than everyone, except Jaime. She and I had a love/hate relationship all through elementary school; I loved her and wanted to be just like her, and she hated me and beat the piss out of me every chance she got. This is only a slight exaggeration. In truth, Jaime and I got on well enough sometimes, but mostly, she was aggravated that her father, who was an exceedingly kind man, made her play with the poor kid from the other side of Vine Street. So, Jaime and I spent the first 7 years of our friendship alternately at war and in love. It happened, though, that our worst days were always spent together.
When we were 5, I sat on her living room floor with her when her mom walked out the door to supposedly go to a doctor's appointment, and didn't come back. When we were 8, I was sitting in her bedroom with her when her mom came back with a bag of groceries and a puppy, like nothing had ever happened.
She was there with the childish comfort that involves no words when I came back to school for the first time in two months after my Pop-Pop died.
By 7th grade, she had mellowed out some, and I'd toughened up a bit. Now, though we fit into extremely different crowds - she the trendy, pop princess and I the little alt-rock girl with weird shoes - we managed to remain good friends, and became ring leaders of our stupid, little neighborhood gang of sorts.
It was right around this time that we realized that between my ability to fast-talk my way out of anything, her family's weight in the town (it was a small, WASP-y town and her dad pretty much owned half of it), and our combined nerve, we could do and get away with just about anything. It started innocently enough - backtalking in class, stupid pranks and petty vandalisms in school that we though were hilarious, but we eventually escalated into things that could have really easily hurt people, though they thankfully didn't.
Being the idiot and foolhardy girls we were, it's not entirely surprising that by 9th grade, not only were we smoking pot and stealing our parent's beer like the rest of the cool kids, but we were also fucking around with various phamaceuticals. Namely, Vicodin.
One of the dumbest fucking things I ever did in my life was bring a ziplock bag full of Vicodin into school, and fucking count it on the back table in Computer Apps class with Jaime in 9th grade. Naturally, at the end of class, we were cornered by the teacher, who unsurprisingly asked what those little white pills were.
"Tylenol," I spat, without missing a beat. "I have really bad cramps."
Now this woman was either seriously naive or incredibly stupid, or both, because she didn't hesitate for half a second before asking if she could have a couple for her headache. I, in turn, did not hesitate for half a second before giving her some. She also didn't so much as glance at the pills before swallowing them, or else she may have noticed the "VICODIN" stamped across the side.
This fucking haunts me. A: What if she was allergic or something? We could have killed her. B: It's not many people who can stay cool on 20mg of Vicodin in the middle of the day. She had to have been fucked up.
She must have caught on pretty quickly that those pretty little pills were not, in fact, Tylenol. I guess she didn't want to call attention to the fact that she took two unidentified pills from 14 year old girls, because she never gave us up. We did, however, fail Computer Apps. [edited: it has only just now occurred to me that perhaps the 27 year old teacher knew EXACTLY what they were, and that is why she took two and didn't give us up, and maybe we failed Computer Apps because we were fucked up on Vicodin most of the time.]
It seemed that the most serious of things we did were the ones we always got away with. But when we did stupid shit, we ALWAYS got busted. We put condoms on all the water fountains for no reason that I can remember today, and got in school suspension for 3 days. Some 8th grader ratted us out with a quickness. We stole answer keys to tests, enlarged them, and put them on the school bulletin boards. We got out of school suspension for a week. We stole the volleyball team's ridiculous looking uniforms and dressed up the knights in the hallways with them. (Yes, there were real knights of armor in our hallways, our school had weird mascots and weirder decorating tastes.) Two weeks of detention, and suspension from the softball team. In 8th, we cut up the brand new, unwrapped cheerleading uniforms so that there were some conveniently placed holes in the shirts, and I got kicked off the squad. Back to 9th, we got into a fight with a girl from a neighboring school during a game and both got kicked off the softball team, and I off the cheerleading squad.
Jaime was also the first person with whom I ever got arrested, and I am sure that she is phenomenally proud of that. It wasn't anything too serious at first, a stupid curfew violation. We got caught walking back from her latest crush's house around 12:30 (curfew in my town was 9:30 during the school year, back then). However, matters were not helped by the fact that we had enough pot between us to be charged with intent. They took us back to the little Mulberry-esque station, and asked our names and vitals and bra size and all that good stuff. I used the completely made-up and random name that I'd been using to lie to people since 5th grade - Blue Nelson. (Dude, do not ask me about this, because I have no fucking idea and I know it's really fucking stupid.) Jaime, however, knowing that her last name could possibly dig us out of this, gave her real information. Upon realizing whose kid she was, the glorified rent-a-cops were more than happy to let us go, provided someone came and picked us up. Since we didn't want to get in trouble with our parents, Jaime called her grandmom, who could drive, but was so fucking senile she couldn't remember much beyond the last hour or so. "Gammy H" picked us up, and we never even had to tell her why we happened to be at a police station at one o'clock in the morning.
I just read that Jaime's gammy died a couple years ago. I wish I'd known, I'd have sent some flowers. Jaime and I fell apart after 9th grade, going to different schools and running with different crowds. I haven't seen hide nor hair of her since graduation, and no one else I've talked to has seen her since freshman year of college, even though most of them went on to the same college as her. I always keep my eye out on friend's facebooks and myspaces for her...I'd love to reminisce some of this shit with her. Where ever she is, I hope she's ok and she still remembers not to sweat the big stuff, cuz it's the small stuff we'll always get fucking busted for.
