FRESH YARN presents: Cool... By Jeannine Pitas

FRESH YARN presents:

Cool
By Jeannine Pitas

You are a dork. Your hair is greasy at the roots and frizzy at the ends, and you don't wash it every day. Your thick glasses have pink plastic frames. You wear the same outfit daily -- a plaid jumper, army-green knee socks, a white cardigan, and noisy click-clack shoes that give your steps the sound of a teacher's. Everyone knows that your mother still picks out your clothes and says you can't wear any black until you're a teenager. Everyone knows that you actually like taking recorder lessons and aren't just enduring them because your parents make you. They know that your mother is crazy; they see her red wide-brimmed hat covered in ribbons and flowers (you always beg her not to wear it for Parent-Teacher night and she always refuses, arguing that she needs to protect her ears from the cold, or the sun, or glare from the fluorescent lights in the school, or whatever lame excuse she can come up with to guarantee your humiliation). And they know that your father used to be a rancher in Montana, or a lumberjack (what else could he be with those thick flannel shirts?) and that he teaches high school science and once swallowed a live goldfish in front of his class.

You are a dork. Being equally inept at throwing, catching, hitting, and kicking, you are always the last to be picked for the team. Your knees are covered with scabs and bruises from all the times you didn't watch where you were going, you didn't see the bottom stair, you didn't notice the hole in the sidewalk. You spill things. In art class you once managed to get a whole bottle of orange paint on your new forest green and yellow striped pullover sweater, and then got reprimanded by both Mrs. Higgins (because you wasted a good bottle of paint) and your mother (because you destroyed your beautiful new sweater).

You are a geek, a nerd, and a dork. One can argue ad nauseum over whether such creatures are born or made, nature or nurture. But looking at your mother (who wears a ridiculous wide-brimmed hat) and your father (the infamous goldfish-swallower) it's clear that some of the oddball-genes have indeed made their way down to you. And in your case these accidents of nature first manifest themselves in perfect clarity at the tender age of five, when two important things happen.

Firstly, you are forced to acknowledge the existence of other people. Unlike many children, who soon find that they must protect their Legos and stuffed animals from the horde of rapacious barbarians otherwise known as siblings, you have received no indication that the world contains people other than yourself. Oh sure, there were always your parents, and a few doting aunties who pinched your cheeks and gave you chocolate-covered caramels. But these are not actual people. They are adults -- authority figures who are there to help you and harm you, to buy you a bicycle and then forbid you from riding it any further than around the block, to give you candy and then tell you that you can't eat it before supper.

They're like the school lunch monitors -- parents who volunteer to stand guard in that cesspool otherwise known as the school cafeteria and are supposed to keep the children from killing each other as well as to help them open their Fruit Roll-ups and canned peaches. However, while most of these guardians are content to chat and gossip while students get killed and cans remain unopened, one dedicated monitor, who works every other Tuesday, is no such shirker. And so, one fine Tuesday afternoon while you're sitting and trying to enjoy your peanut butter and Fluff sandwich in peace, you suddenly find yourself face to face with that devoted public servant, her eyebrows raised in consternation.

"Jeannine, why are you sitting all by yourself?" your mother demands. Glancing from side to side, you suddenly notice that yes, you indeed have the entire table to yourself, while the other children are one table over, sitting together -- Josh Kramer with his blubbery cheeks, Nicholas Hoffman with his freckles, Alice O'Keefe with her long, golden braids.

You frown. These are the children you see every day; they are in the room whenever you enter; they sing the songs and color the pictures. Once you got in a fight with Kaley Kwong over a doll; another time you got yelled at for stealing the balloon that Mrs. Caruthers gave Mike Kozak on his birthday. But while you have seen and interacted with these children each day since kindergarten began, you have not been able to figure out just why they are here. And now, suddenly, you understand. You feel your chest constricting in the horror of your first existential crisis, as you are left to wonder why it should be this way, why you should be here in this group of people who, even though they sit together, may as well be sitting alone.

Your mother is still standing over you, waiting for an answer. Without a word you pick up your red plastic lunch box and move over to the girls´ end of the next table, where Katie DeSimone is deeply engaged in a conversation with Katie O'Connell. You do not hear them, they do not see you, and you, perfectly content with this arrangement, continue to eat in silence.

But the next thing that happens is even more traumatic. Now that you have begun to notice people, these same people begin to notice you.

First, Mrs. Caruthers notices that you are bumping into things a bit too much, even for a klutz. Then, she observes that you are squinting when you try to look at the board. She sends you to the school nurse, who makes you look at a screen and read some letters, then gives you a note to take home. Your parents take you to a bald doctor in a white coat, who makes you read some more letters on a screen and puts a strange telescope up to your eye. "Nearsightedness and astigmatism,' he announces. You do not know what either of those words are, and of course you're too scared to ask. You are led into a room with hundreds of pairs of glasses like the ones your parents and aunties and Mrs. Caruthers wear, and little five-year-olds like you do not wear. A thin lady with long gray hair begins handing you pair after pair. You try them on as your parents gape at you, their faces blank. Finally you don the one with pink plastic frames, and both faces break into grins. "They're adorable," your mother gushes, and you shiver. "She's going to be an intellectual," your father asserts, and while you don't know what "intellectual" signifies, you have a sinking feeling that it has something to do with eating live goldfish.

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.