Sally Hameister, badass.

I really should hate my mother.

She screwed up any chance I might’ve had of becoming an important writer by giving me what can only be described as a normal childhood. Such. A. Jerk.

My favorite memory of her is from when I was four years old and my family was living in Shaker Heights Ohio in a 1925 colonial that had been completely 1975’d. It had gold shag carpet throughout and a kitchen in shades of bright orange, avocado green and “have a nice day” yellow. It was in this house that she and my father had these epic dinner parties that started with casseroles and cocktails in the dining room and ended at 4 a.m. with people strewn around the living room in plaid polyester hiphuggers and varying states of consciousness.

The parties always seemed to start after my bedtime, so my memories of them are only what I could hear…a combination of music and conversation punctuated at fairly regular intervals by my mother’s laughter. It was a full-on, throw-your-head-back joyous cackle that sometimes began with a little scream. There was almost a rhythm to them….chatter, chatter, chatter, cackle, dull roar, cackle, shush, whisper-yell, “Shut up, Tom,” and it would start all over again.

Essentially what happened during those years is that my mother’s laughter became my lullaby. It would hitch a ride upstairs with the smoke from her Virginia Slim Lights and get caught up in the slats of my canopy bed.  The combination proved intoxicating, and maybe it was the lack of oxygen to my brain, but eventually, I would fall happily off to sleep.

After four years in Ohio, we moved to Aurora, Colorado, to a house right behind the tennis courts in a glamorous new subdivision, “The Dam West.” In the summertime, mom and all the neighborhood tennis ladies would whip up a batch of peach daquiries and go to what they called “the hang.”

There, still in tennis dresses from their earlier matches, they’d reserve the next day’s court and catch up on the latest divorces. From our house at the other end of the court, the women sounded like a gaggle of snark-infested geese. My mother’s giggles would always rise above the cacophonous fray, echo across the court and come through our screen door. It was, I think, the first version of Mommy GPS

Because my brother and I adored her, my mother’s laughter became a commodity in our house. Scott, older and wiser than me by two years, could elicit laughter from her with stunning precision. I was too young to really understand all the nuances of his comedy – that, and the fact that I never mastered the art of making fart sounds with my armpit was a definite source of frustration.

I wanted to be the one making her laugh. And eventually, I just wanted to be her.

For a stay-at-home, do-everything-for-us-but-wipe-our-asses mother, our mom had become really glamorous. She’d traded her wire-rim glasses for contact lenses and her long, salt-and-pepper hair for a blonde, remarkably accurate Farrah Fawcett ‘do. She wore shiny Nik Nik disco shirts and Candies slides exactly like the ones Olivia Newton-John wore at the end of Grease. She was, in the vernacular of the day, a Stone Cold Fox.

So I wanted to grow up to look just like her, but it turned out that growing up was exactly the problem. She was 5’ 2” and 100 pounds, so by sixth grade I was already taller than her. And in eighth grade when I had to buy a pair of size 14 knickers, (which, by the way, looked really sharp with my argyle socks and jauntily-askew newsboy cap), I knew I hadn’t inherited her looks.

But, I thought, there’s a lot of ways you can be just like a person without looking like them. Maybe I got her meticulous housekeeping skills. As I gnawed on the half-Snickers bar I found on my bedroom floor under my mud-encrusted soccer cleats, this theory seemed less-than-likely. When she went back to school and turned in her Greek Lit paper two weeks early while I finished my past-due English paper on the bus, I checked “proactive pre-planning-type” off the list. And as I watched her flit through life, easily making friends wherever my father’s military duty took us while I snuck my lunch into the library and a had a permanent commuter pass on the train to Moodyville, I decided I wasn’t destined to have her sunny disposition either.

In middle school, perhaps in an attempt to find some way to prove I was my mother’s daughter, I joined the tennis team. I was a decent player, but my persistent belief that nothing would ever really work out in the end somehow kept me out of the winner’s circle. On one hot September afternoon, I was on the bleachers after being bounced from a tournament due to severe heat wussiness. I sat with my friends and giggled rudely while the other played finished their matches.

I heard my mother laugh and turned to see that she’d arrived to pick me up and was chatting with some of the other mothers. As I gathered my gear, I saw my tennis coach approach her and offer her his hand.

“You must be Courtenay’s mother,” he said.

She shook his hand.

“Yes,” she said. “How’d you know that?”

He smiled. “You kidding? She has your laugh. I mean, exactly.”

I’d never noticed it before, but there it was. The thing I got. And he was right – it sounded exactly the same, and was, in fact, the only thing about the two of us that matched.

And when you think about it, what sort of moody eighth grader has a laugh like that? It was the laugh of an un-self-consciously joyful and self-possessed person. That wasn’t me. Except that it was. At least in short, happy bursts.

My mother and I and our laugh lived mostly harmoniously with the rest of the family until I was ready to leave for college. That’s when I learned that my father had been struggling with a pretty severe case of manic depression since he was a Junior at West Point, well before he met my mother. He saw his disease as a weakness, which made him avoid treatment and ask my mother to keep his secret – even from her closest friends.

So for all those years, while she was hosting dinner parties and covering everything in our house in red gingham and glitter at Christmastime (including the dog), she was also covering for him. She managed to explain away the manic phases where he would play the piano at 3 a.m., or suddenly imagine himself a Bluegrass star even though he’d never picked up a guitar. And she somehow hid the darkness, too – it was probably somewhere under the glitter or the piles of clean laundry or the mountains of baked goods she would produce for every occasion. (I think we all know how effective baked goods are at hiding sadness.)

When I think about it now, I realize it wasn’t just the sound of the laugh she’d given me, but the very existence of it. In the face of ridiculously difficult odds, she’d given me a normal childhood – better than that, really, she’d given me a happy childhood, and I’ll probably never know what that cost her.

Her laugh has served me well through my life – comedians love me, and my friends can always find me at a crowded bar. And now I have this job on the radio, and my mother is in the audience every single show, laughing louder than anyone in the theater. A friend says her laugh sounds like “sunshine gargling rainbows.” If you listen to the show on the radio, you can actually hear her. Every show. And you can hear me, too. Laughing.

This woman appears to be reading the paper on ecstasy. This is not normal.

I’ve thought about it a lot, and I’m pretty sure the man I think was the love of my life probably wasn’t.

See, he loved me and I loved him, but I think the Me he loved wasn’t really me, and the him I loved was a Him I’d made up in my head a long time ago, and then dressed him up in it like a Love of My Life suit.

The Me he loved was a person I’m sure no one else in my life would recognize. I was like a gratitude machine, always trying to make up for his being such a generous humanitarian, what with the whole “loving me” thing and all.

Every day, I’d be glad to add something of his to my to-do list. “Honey? Is there anything you need? Pick up your dry cleaning? Clean out your garage? A lifetime supply of earth-shattering blow jobs? Because, seriously, I don’t have anything else to do right now.” Who wouldn’t fall in love with that person? I was like Julia Roberts in “Pretty Woman.” Except he wasn’t paying me. And I wasn’t in thigh-high patent leather boots. Well, at least not all the time.

The Him that I loved—well, the real…let’s just call him Judgy McSex-a-lot—was chock full of contradictions. He was a runner, but he smoked. He was supportive, but judgmental. He seemed emotionally distant most of the time, but at other times, his sweetness would put me into a blissful sugar coma.

I awoke one morning to find him watching me sleep. He smiled and just said one word: “Pretty.”  How does a person not get sucked in by that?

In possibly the only instance in my life in which I might have been deemed a Pollyanna, I chose to concentrate on only the good things. So what if he smokes, he’s great in the sack! So what if he’s quiet, he’s so smart!  So what if he’s probably an alcoholic but always gives me shit about not being able to fix my relationship with food. He’s got good hair!

I wouldn’t say that I was looking at him through rose-colored glasses – in fact, it was just the opposite. I chose to take my glasses off to look at him. That way the looming clouds of our uncomfortable dinner conversations, his utter lack of a sense of humor and narcissism just looked like pretty fuzzy marshmallows, floating happily above our heads. It may have been the one time I was finally able to put my astigmatism to good use.

I was still squinting happily through our days together when he dumped me after a year.  It was an ugly break-up that left me emotionally hobbled for upwards of another year.

Immediately after the break-up, I got re-acquainted with all my old friends. Mrs. Fields was as much of a hoot as she’d ever been. The Entenmanns were still the most charming couple to have over for breakfast, or lunch, or any one of the three dinners a person might have in one night. And Oscar and, really, the entire Meyer family, were nothing if not staunchly supportive.

I started gaining weight, and fast. And as soon as I could see it on me, I knew I could never see Judgy again. Not that I wanted to – after the dumping, I avoided seeing him like the plague. Well, not like the plague, because I don’t do a lot to avoid the plague these days. I avoided seeing him like the AIDS. I steered clear of his neighborhood, all of our shared friends and anything having to do with his business, environmental geology. This was the hardest part, it turns out, because you can’t swing a dead piece of tofu in Portland, Oregon without whacking an environmental geologist in his holier-than-thou head.

But thankfully, we never crossed paths those first few months, since the last thing I wanted was for him to see me. Six months post-breakup, I’d gained 15 pounds. Glasses still off, I continued, inexplicably, to be devastated by the loss of him. Right around then, the radio show I work on started getting some attention from the press. A local magazine decided to run a feature article on us. I was mortified. I told my therapist, and she was perplexed by my strange reaction to this great news.

“We’ve been in the paper before,” I told her, “And I felt the same way. I just keep picturing the same scenario. He’s at work, reading the paper with his co-workers at lunch. They come upon the story and the picture of me and he says, ‘Wow. Look how fat she got. I guess I dodged a bullet there, huh?’ And then, in my head, he laughs in this cruel, frat-boy way. Even though he was never in a frat.”

There were lots of times I could see my therapist editing herself; sitting in her warmly appointed office surrounded by colors and fabrics designed to make me feel comforted and accepted, and trying everything in her power not to fly out of her comfy leather chair and throttle me until I returned from my year-long vacation in Crazytown. (Which by the way, is only a quick train ride away from Funkytown, which I’ve heard is much more festive.) She managed to hold herself back, but I could see her frustration as she rubbed her forehead.

“How often do you imagine this scenario?,” she asked.

“Every time my picture’s in the paper. Or on our website. And he always says the same thing: I dodged a bullet, there, huh?”

“Did you ever hear him use that phrase in real life?” she asked.

“Never,” I replied.

“So what does that tell you about the likelihood of that scenario happening?”

“Um. It makes it less likely?”

“Exactly.”

I didn’t buy it. She told me to offset that image with one that most non-crazy people have when something swell like getting good press happens to them – one of smiling, supportive strangers and friends reading it and being happy for me. What a crock of shit. No one smiles while they read the paper.

Six months later, I was better. 15 more pounds heavier, but better. I could see him a bit more clearly, but his foibles were still fuzzy. Looking back on our relationship, it was as if I had mental TiVo, watching the good parts over and over again while fast-forwarding through the bad.  I wondered if I’d ever get over him and so did every person in my life. They’d gotten over him immediately…what the hell was wrong with me?

That spring I took a weekend trip to New Mexico for a film festival with a group of friends I’d worked on a short film with. We were all set to go to one of the illuminating seminars when someone mentioned margaritas. It doesn’t take long to weigh the respective merits of those two words against one another. Seminar. Margarita. You try it and see where you net out. I’ll wait.

We drove around the outskirts of Albuquerque until we found the perfect hole-in-the-wall spot to drown our boredom. As we walked to the restaurant, we noticed that there was a psychic across the street. After a few margaritas, getting a psychic reading was deemed a necessity and not getting a reading was, apparently, “for pussies.” So I knocked on her door.

I walked into an environment not unlike my therapist’s. A thirty-something woman with much better hair than me sat at a rustic wood table surrounded by tasteful southwestern art. Dressed in a khaki skirt and a sweater set straight out of J.Crew, she looked surprisingly not nuts.

I sat down and she asked me what I wanted to know.  I desperately wanted to ask her the standard, “When will I find love again?” question, but I didn’t want to seem…y’know. Desperate.  “Whatever you want to tell me,” I replied.  She whipped out the tarot cards and smiled.

“Well, let’s just see what happens.”

She laid out the cards, periodically making “hmph” noises. When she was finished, she looked concerned.

“Wow,” she said. “I see a very charismatic man here who’s really informing your life.”

I couldn’t think of who she meant.

“He’s charming, but he’s got a lot of rules.”

Hmm…nope. No one comes to mind.

“It looks like you got involved with him thinking that it would be good for your self-esteem, but now you just feel small.”

That’s…okay, that’s weird, but that describes about half the relationships I know.

“He tried to make you think you had a problem, that you were a mess…but it looks like he was the one with the disease.”

She took one last look at the cards and then really looked at me – made sure she had my full attention.

“You know you dodged a bullet with that one, right? You would’ve lost yourself completely.”

My breath caught in my throat, and suddenly I was totally sober. At the same second, I was slapped with two harsh realities: one, she was absolutely right and I’d wasted almost two years mourning a relationship that never really existed, and two, psychics were totally real.

I walked out of her storefront realizing that this stranger had just said the exact same thing that every person in my life had been telling me all along. It’s just that she spoke my language.

And so it was there, standing in the hot New Mexico sun, dazed from shots of tequila and truth, that I put my glasses back on. And in the smallest possible way, things started coming back into focus.

An initial test model, circa 2010.

An open letter to the person in charge of new punctuation:

I have invented a new punctuation mark, and I am writing to ask you to consider introducing its usage into the American Punctuation Lexicon.

I would also like to check up on the status of the interrobang (also known as the quesclamation mark). You may not remember it, but it was the combination exclamation point/question mark invented by ad executive Martin Spekter to help us with such sentences as “WHAT did you just say to me?!” and “Lindsay Lohan’s suing WHO?! Over WHAT?!”

The interrobang, in punctuation limbo since 1962.

The fact that it was invented in 1962 and you’re still considering it doesn’t give me much hope for it, or for that matter, for the Irony Mark, or “Snark,” – the backwards question mark that some are hoping can indicate sarcasm in our increasingly digital world. I think it sounds like a great idea. Whoever thought of it is a genius.

But onto my idea.  Get ready for it: The Friendly Period (exclamation point!)

Sorry. What I meant was, the friendly period! Period.

Am I talking about an era of increased kindness? No. A new, more pleasant brand of menses? No. (We already swim, ride horses on the beach and run through fields of daisies – how much more pleasant can menstruation get?)

No, I’m talking about a period that says, “That sentence, the one right before me, is as affable as they come. That sentence, in fact, wants to buy you a beer.”

Here’s the problem: increasingly, we’re using very cold, technological ways to communicate. No one wants to actually go through the long, drawn-out process saying hello and how are you on the phone, or, god forbid, having to see someone in person. There are germs in every handshake, and people get bad haircuts that you have to lie about. So emails and texts have become, for many, our primary means of communication. But reading something on a screen makes everything colder, so we try to warm up our communications with annoying emoticons, or, in my case, the gratuitous exclamation point.

In a study entitled “Gender and the Use of Exclamation Points in Computer Mediated Communication,” (for reals!) Carol Waseleski (exclamation point!) deciphered that woman use exclamation points 45% more often than men in e-communication.  But it’s not because we’re more excited than men. Women use exclamation points online as indicators of a “friendly interaction.” We’ve been socialized to try to make people feel comfortable and to keep the peace. Hence sentences like, “Bill, I can’t wait to see the 4^th quarter EMBO Report on the new 12-gauge ball bearings!”

She’s not excited to see that report. No one is excited to see that report. She’s letting Bill know that she’s not angry that it’s late yet. When she’s angry, she’ll use a period.

I used to abhor exclamation points, largely because I am not a perky person. I am a person who assumes a day is going to blow until the world convinces me otherwise in the first five minutes by handing me a 16-ounce skim half-caf mocha in bed, which never happens, so you do the math.

So you can imagine my increased usage of exclamation points is extremely disconcerting both for me and for those who are forced to endure my emails and texts.

A sample sentence from a recent email:

“Yay! Dinner at McFuddernutters sounds great!”

In this case, the exclamation points are preventive. Because the person receiving the email knows that I can be a sarcastic bitch, periods would have made it read:

“Yay. Dinner at McFuddernutters sounds great. I just hope their neverending salad bowl will fill the bottomless pit of despair I feel because I’m sitting in an establishment called McFuddernutters.”

Now, what you might say is, “Hey, why don’t you stop being a sarcastic bitch (interrobang?)” Good exclamated question. Answer: because I don’t want to, friendly period!

The friendly period is here to solve all our communication problems.

Picture this: a larger, slightly squished period that’s big enough to see that there’s a half-moon of a smile three quarters of the way down its jolly round body. It’s simple, it’s not nearly as annoying as those bright yellow happy faces, and it’s stylish. Because what’s more stylish than black and white? Nothing, stupid. (Friendly period!)

I implore you, punctuation person…don’t make us wait 48 years for the friendly period to take off (friendly period.) We need help now in getting rid of the scourge of gratuitous exclamation points, and I, for one, would have significantly less punctuation shame in my life.

Please get back to me at your earliest convenience (friendly period.) Our future depends on it (irony mark.)

Sincerely,
Courtenay Hameister

Actual Hate Prom photo. Apparently the girl in the red dress thinks there's going to be an ice skating rink there.

Last month a Fulton, Mississippi high school girl, Constance McKinnen, had her high school cancel her prom because she wanted to bring her girlfriend. She and the ACLU sued and she won – with the judge’s understanding that Constance would be invited to the new prom that the parents had organized.

Well, Constance was invited to a prom, it was just a fake one at a local country club. She and five other students, two of them with learning disabilities, were chaperoned by the principal and teachers, while the majority of students partied at an undisclosed location their parents had arranged.

Now, pictures of the “real” prom have surfaced on facebook, with kids clearly having a blast at the Hate Prom – engaging in long lines of hate freaking, the homophobic robot and the Electric Adam and Eve, Not Adam and Steve Slide.

As I looked at the pictures, I realized that this town’s story is the new Footloose.

Constance is John Lithgow’s character, Reverend Moore, who’s trying to impose her beliefs on an entire town. And the parents of the kids, well, they’re all collectively Kevin Bacon’s character, Ren McCormick. They’re all plucky rebels who just want what all real Americans want: to worship at the church of their choice, to watch Thursday night television uninterrupted, and to find new and interesting ways to persecute gay people.

I picture all those parents, as soon as the ACLU won the case against them, driving their VWs into an empty warehouse to dance out their anger like Ren did. They throw their tape of Michael Bublé in the stereo and start rockin ‘out. As the sun breaks through the slats in the warehouse wall, we see their appliqué sweatshirts and husky dockers silhouetted as they run and punch the air in frustration. And when they get to the part where they leap onto the high bar that just happens to be in the warehouse, which is weird, and do gymnastic swings around it, none of them really nail the dismount, so they just start landing on each other, ending up in a giant pile of mom jeans and newscaster hair before someone finally says, “Hey! We don’t need to do this! We can solve this the American way – through duplicity and massive, organized, publicly sponsored passive aggression!”

So just like Ren and Ariel (and Sarah Jessica Parker) they create their own rebel prom, with lots of twinkly lights and extra sparkly intolerance. (And speaking of sparkly things, I’ll bet these kids would’ve invited Edward Cullen to their prom in a second – how is it that they can be in love with vampires, but terrified by a couple of lesbians?)

But in all seriousness, it’s not the kids in this scenario that terrify me. It’s the adults who engaged in this behavior that’s straight out of Mean Girls.

And the memberships to Christian churches they listed on their facebook pages just makes me want to ask them, “Have you seen this one other movie? It’s called Jesus Christ Superstar, and it is AWESOME.” It’s a sort of biography of this very cool guy who may or may not have lived a long time ago, and there’s singing and dancing and stuff (which I don’t think really happened), but anyway…he said all this great stuff about not judging people lest you be judged, and not persecuting people for their beliefs and most importantly, that those people who are sent to fake proms? They’re going to inherit the earth, so you’d better get your resumé together.

Well, he sang most of it, but that’s not the point.

So, Fulton parents, go ahead and rent that Superstar movie, and when you’ve finished watching it, maybe we can talk about what you’ve done.  Oh, and while you’re at the video store, rent Carrie.  ‘Cuz Stephen King? That guy knew how to throw a hate prom.

My ticket to 9 year-old romance.

One of the most romantic moments of my life came to me by bike. My bike, actually, and I was in love with it. It was a bright green Schwinn Fair Lady Stingray with yellow and green daisies covering the banana seat. No streamers. No basket…nothing that might’ve increased my aerodynamic drag. I was 9 years old, and at that point it was important that I clocked less than 8 minutes to get to the Dairy Queen.

It was June of ’76 and I was experiencing my first summer of independence. It was the first time I can remember taking real pleasure in solitude, tooling around the neighborhood with only dusk and cul-de-sacs as my enemies. We lived in a subdivision called “The Dam West” in Aurora, Colorado…as in West of Cherry CreekDam. Whoever thought this would be a great name clearly didn’t grasp the concept that one cannot hear spelling.  Although we had it easy. The people I felt really sorry for were our neighbors in our sister subdivision, The Goddamn Fucking East.

Our house sat at the top of a block-long incline with a sharp left turn at the end of it. My brother Scott loved it – he and his friends would use the speed of the incline to their advantage. They built huge, architecturally unsound skateboard ramps that they would then use to jump over long lines of…each other. This was really convenient for the parents on our block as it was much cheaper for the ambulance to take three boys to the hospital than one at a time. I’d love to regale you with tales of Scott’s successful jumps, including one over my father’s 1968 Chevette, but I’m a bad witness. I only saw them through tiny slits between my fingers.

Unlike Scott and his lucky-to-be-ambulatory friends, I had respect for the incline. I had to navigate it a few times a week to get to my piano lessons with T.J. Scranton. He was a scruffy, bespectacled, real-live stoned hippy who, much to my chagrin, still believed in the Protestant work ethic even though he’d rejected organized religion. So every Tuesday and Thursday I would plop my sullen ass— which hadn’t seen a piano bench since the week before—on my banana seat, and pull out of our driveway.

To control my speed, I’d keep my feet either on the ground or holding steady on the pedals for most of the incline. This didn’t gain me any respect from my brother and his skate punk friends, but my mother was pleased that she had at least one child for whom it didn’t really matter which laundry detergent worked best on blood stains.

One Tuesday, as I was loading the sheet music for “Mandy” by Mr. Barry Manilow into my backpack, my brother’s friend Greg Guffey strolled up. Greg, like Scott, was two years older than me, and you could clearly see those additional years of wisdom in the deep, dark, wells of his blue eyes.

He and Scott were busy that summer making a stop-motion animated film wherein a huge bird flies over a village and terrorizes it by pooping an entire jar of mayonnaise on it. He was brilliant.

“Where you goin’?,” he said, casually tucking his curly blonde hair behind one ear. God. He looked just like Robert Plant. If Robert Plant was eleven.

“Stupid piano lesson,” I said.

“Cool,” he said. “Later.”

“Yeah. Later,” I replied, and started to take off.

Discombobulated by being in the presence of genius, I had failed to take off in my usual, careful way. In fact, I’d just…taken off. Just jumped on the seat and started pedaling furiously down the hill.

In seconds, I knew I was in trouble. I was going way too fast and the turn at the bottom of the hill was speeding towards me like it had its own bike.

Almost immediately, I had a decision to make. Either try to take the turn at a speed I knew I couldn’t handle, or fly into the Miller’s rose bushes and hope for the best.

I was taking the turn.

Yes, I’d probably fall and pain would undoubtedly ensue. But if I’d hit the Miller’s bushes, Lorna and Bob would rush out to help me and want me to come inside. Eventually the topic of conversation would turn to the M&M’s I sold them for choir but never delivered because I ate all four boxes. The Millers were just one of five families I’d managed to avoid for most of the summer. I was taking the turn.

I knew immediately that I was going down. I was a bike pussy—I’d never gone this fast on a straightaway, let alone a turn. So I just braced myself for what was to come. In my attempt to make the turn as wide as possible, I steered the bike toward the curb. That’s where I hit a nasty patch of gravel and my front tire slid sideways, taking the rest of the bike, and me, with it.

Ow. Ow. OW. I was pretty sure I’d scraped everything. I did an immediate body check. Ow, my hand hurts, ow, my elbow hurts, but mostly, OW my knee hurts. I was taking a shaky inventory of the new six-inch long scrape on my left knee, filled with gravel, blood and pride when I heard the footsteps. Please, dear God, don’t let it be a Miller. Then I realized it wasn’t coming from the Miller’s house, it was coming from the top of the hill.

I turned to see Greg rushing down the hill toward me. He was wearing those running shorts with the white stripe up the side – you know, the ones no one ever really ran in? But there he was, running.

“Jeez. Are you okay?” he asked.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “It’s my…” and before I could say, “knee,” I started sobbing uncontrollably. “I was…taking the….turn …and …..IthoughtIcouldtakeitbutIcouldnttakeitandtheM&MsaregoneandIlovedyourmovie
and[incomprehensible].”

He nodded and shook his head at the same time for a minute, looking at me with a combination of concern, confusion and severe unease. Sure, he’d seen his sister Monica cry thousands of times, in fact, most of the time he caused it. He was, after all, the one who’d dubbed her Monica Mental.

But this was different. Suddenly he was the boy and I was the girl and it was his job to protect me. And do whatever it took to make me, for the love of God, stop crying.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”

And then Greg Guffey, genius, filmmaker, skateboard hero, put one arm underneath my back, used the other to cradle my knees, and he picked me up. And even with as much pain as I was in, it registered. Greg Guffey is carrying me home. I’ll probably lose my leg at the knee and go to school every day in a little cart, but Greg Guffey is carrying me home. Melanie Masino is going to pee her pants. I might’ve already peed my pants. But GREG GUFFY IS CARRYING ME HOME.

When we got to the house, he plopped me down on our front steps, rang the doorbell and turned to go, leaving my mother a blubbering, bloody gift.

“You gonna be okay?” he asked.

“Yeah. I think so. Thanks,” I said.

“You really wiped out.”

“I know,” I said, pulling tiny pieces of gravel from my elbow and trying not to wince.

“That was pretty cool,” he said, smiling this time.

“I know,” I replied.

As Greg walked away, my mother came out and tended to my wounds, all the while expressing her shock at which of her children showed up bloodied on her doorstep. And even as the Bactine sting hit over and over again, I began to imagine all the possible ways I might endeavor to injure myself that summer.