FRESH YARN PRESENTS:

Cool
By Jeannine Pitas

PAGE TWO:
The next day in school you are beleaguered with attention "You look beauuuuutiful," Mrs. Caruthers gushes in her syrupy kindergarten teacher voice. Your classmates, however, do not think you look beautiful. One by one they approach you, staring as if suddenly you had morphed into one of the dinosaur skeletons in the science museum, or a gorilla at the zoo. "Why are you wearing glasses?" they ask. "Jeannine, do you have an eye problem?" All day long, from gym to art to the bus ride home, it's why are you wearing glasses, why do you have this problem, and all you can do is shrug and stare down at the floor, for the truth is that you do not know why, all you know is that everyone is looking at you as if you'd just arrived from another planet. And suddenly, you understand there are ways of being in the world that people consider to be normal, and that while you are indeed one of these children, with the same needs (snacks, naps, playtime), the same goals (to survive), the same reasons for having to get on a bus and come to school each day (because somebody made you), you are somehow not like the rest. And as the years go by and they continue to look at you and whisper, trading Pogs and weaving friendship bracelets and gushing over Zach Morris from Saved by the Bell, you once again feel that you are both a part and apart, inside and out. That you should belong, but you don't.

And so, you are a dork. For a while you try to fight it. At the age of 11 you start using your 1 1/2 hours of daily allotted TV time to watch Boy Meets World and Home Improvement and laugh when the invisible TV audience does. You buy magazines like Tiger Beat and plaster your walls with pictures of Jonathan Taylor Thomas, Devon Sawa, and Rider Strong. In sixth grade you take up cheerleading (in elementary school they have to accept everyone who wants to join) and even though they make you stand at the very end of the row, far away from pretty Lynn Sinelli with her perfect black curls or Alice O´Keefe, who has morphed from a pretty five-year old to an unbelievably well-developed 11 year old, you still feel that somehow, like a cell undergoing the process of osmosis, you will absorb at least a bit of their coolness. But, you don't, and by eighth grade it seems virtually impossible that you ever will.

However, a few months into the school year -- at the end of the first marking period, to be exact -- you are struck by a revelation. As usual, you have gotten your grades and they have all turned out to be A's; as usual, the Honor and Merit Rolls are posted outside the principal's office. Normally you pay them no heed, but today, while making a fast trip to the lavatory during Spanish class, you feel a magnetic pull toward the long white sheets hanging outside the principal's office, and you find yourself scrolling the names from the bottom up. Mostly there are younger kids, only a few names from your class. Up, up, up. You gasp in horror. At the very top of the honor roll, in big bold letters, is your name. A few inches to the right, 97.7. You have the highest average in the entire school.

From that point on, you no longer lower your head when your classmates pass you in the corridor. If they notice any such change in your demeanor they don't let on, but this does not disturb you. Your newly acquired conviction that you are gifted rather than freakish enables you to survive the year unscathed, and after only one month in your new high school, you find that you have friends: Christy Anderson, your squeamish biology lab partner whose strategy for surviving the frog dissection is to read the instructions aloud while you do all the dissecting; Stephanie Rubens, who wears all black and reads Aleister Crowley and listens to the Clash; Jessica Coleman, who practices her Rachmaninoff for three hours each day before school. With this eclectic group you talk about things like Austria under the Hapsburgs and the conflict between reason and passion in Crime and Punishment; you hang out at the science museum and attend outdoor Shakespeare plays and dance around to David Bowie. With them you learn that cool does not consist of trying to be like everyone else, but in setting yourself apart.

Now, you are a sophomore at a small East Coast liberal arts college filled with Goths and computer geeks, thespians and writers, true intellectuals who love learning for its own sake and most of whom were once social pariahs like you. Your glasses have been traded for contacts, and your hair, though still tending toward frizziness, has been cut to a reasonably flattering style. No one, upon looking at you, would peg you as a former nerd.

But then, all of a sudden, it happens. It's a Monday night, and you're standing outside Spiegel Auditorium after listening to a lecture on Intelligent Design Theory, sipping your apple juice and wondering how a proponent of ID could ever have managed to set foot on your ultra-liberal campus, when suddenly you see him. Jake Lewy, triple major in theatre, literature and evolutionary biology, tall and black-haired, a 20-year-old Alan Rickman. He's in your lecture on "Epic Visions and Traditions" -- Homer, Virgil, Dante, etc. You could swear you've caught him looking at you during class. He's standing by the door, talking to two other guys whom you don't know, obviously having some serious discussion about how fouled-up that lecture was. Your heart is pounding. Should I join them? Just walk up and say hi? Don't be a wuss -- You're 19, not 13! But for all the experiences you've endured and enjoyed in your ascent from the ranks of the untouchable, you still know nothing of boys.

But, you decide that the time has come to summon your courage and talk to him. However, as you descend the stairs, you are so absorbed in staring at that wavy black hair that suddenly you stagger forward, your plastic cup flies out of your hand, and you are crouched on all fours, your already well-scarred right knee throbbing, and juice has spilled everywhere, and you can hear the chuckles around you, and you don't want to look up and see what his face looks like now that he knows you missed the final step, maybe he knows you were looking at him, and suddenly, you feel a hand clasping your arm. And oh my God, it's actually him, his face creased with what looks like genuine concern. You stagger to your feet. "Are you all right?" he asks

"Yeah," you respond, feeling the blush spread all over your face.

"Are you sure?" he repeats, still clutching your arm, and with a slight mumble you shake it free, thank him, then dash down the stairs, why did I do that, why am I running away but you are, out the door and back toward your dorm, where your roommates have probably already started a party and they'll want you to join in and drink some wine and spout your witticisms and you will, yes, you will do anything to forget that while your jeans may be sufficiently tight and your hair may be perfectly coiffed you are still that kid who misses steps, who pushes the door when it says "pull," who can't catch a ball even if it's aimed right at her. And even though you truly have become unique, different, cool, the truth is that underneath it all you are still the one whose father eats goldfish and mother wears crazy hats. And suddenly you are faced with the poignant realization that, no matter where you go in this life, you will still spill juice on your new Urban Outfitters skirt and run away from guys that you like; you will still wear mismatched socks (not on purpose) and snort like a pig when you laugh; you will still be the cerebrally gifted ignoramus, the perpetually under-appreciated genius, an "intellectual" on the surface perhaps, but a dork to the very core.

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