She began her story slow... and then it went fast. I suddenly felt like I was sucked into her high school self. But her story reminded me so much of mine it felt uncanny. Like she was speaking for me. Telling my story.
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Imogen and I became friends during that period when everyone stopped caring about who everybody was friends with. It was too late into the senior year, all people cared about was figuring out which colleges everyone got accepted to. The idea of making new friends unless they were going to the same college as you seemed like a wasted effort.
Maybe this reveals how fake most friendships were. First the fact that it felt like effort. I mean relationships do take work, but it shouldn't feel like the kind of effort it did back then. It shouldn't feel like the effort of a waitress pretending for the thirtieth time to be having a good day when greeting a new customer.
From freshmen til junior year,
fake-waitressing
for friends made sense, even though I still think it's a bad idea now and I would make friends with people I didn't feel so effortful around if I were to do it again. But like smoking cigarettes during a phase of your youth without getting addicted to them, it wasn't a batshit dumbass move. Rather just an understandably dumb one.
So going into senior year I had no intentions of making new friends. Sure I wasn't going to go out of my way to leave the ones I already had, but I wasn't going to keep up the happy Jeannie act they all knew me by. I guess I no longer cared what they thought, which is insane given that a year before I desired nothing more than to be accepted by this group of girls.
Interestingly, and I'm sure you obvious to you, once I stopped putting on the facade, the girls liked me more. They found me cool and avant garde. I guess it was the timing.
Nihilistic Hipsterism
was coming into mainstream vogue and even girls in our small no-name town lusted for that style. Anyways, so that group of girls and I still got along well. And now that I no longer needed to posture a certain way, I didn't mind being around them either. They weren't that bad after all. Not the smartest or most interesting bunch, but not terrible company.
They didn't like
Imogen Howe
. Of course this was right around the time Imogen became Imogen. Before then she had a boring regular name, like the rest of us. But when she changed to Imogen people couldn't stop talking about her. Especially this group of girls. Everything they said about her was negative and judgmental, but they couldn't not talk about her. I didn't really say much, not because I thought it was mean, but because I didn't find all the jokes the girls were making to be funny. And that made me think it was because they actually were jealous of Imogen whereas I kind of found it empowering to watch her do that. Become a new person. Now that I tell you this I guess a lot of it had to do with me seeing a lot of myself in her.
But it's not like i was so tantalized that I sought her out. Her locker was no where near mine, and we never had any classes together. She wasn't even in my lunch period. And she never went to the same parties or events that I went to. We jus lived opposite lives. And if we were to start talking, one of us would have to go out of the way, way out of the way, to make the effort. And like I said, this was during that time when effort for the chance of a friendship didn't make sense.
Instead I kept hearing about her and seeing her walking around the hallways. I also spent a little too much time on her
Facebook
profile -- this was back when most people had their privacy settings so you could see pretty much everything even if you weren't Facebook Friends -- I admit... I don't know how to explain this, but I was just fascinated by her. But like I said not so much that I would go out of my way.
So how did we finally begin speaking, you're wondering right? Well it wasn't that she came and sought me. At the time that was what I wished. I even played out the scenario -- multiple versions of them in fact -- in my head. This is what I was thinking about rather than boys I guess. Weird right? But no she didn't seek me out. And I was too cool trying to not care about making new friends, trying to act too cool for school, that I wasn't willing to go out of my way to say hi either.
I thought it would be so weird. So strange. Kind of like that feeling when you're really high in the winter and you suddenly go into the warm and everything feels so gooey. Do you know that feeling?
-----
Jeannie went to take a sip of her
coffee
but frowned and swigged her mug around while staring into it. I know, see I told you it was a long story, she said.
I'm not complaining. I looked down at my coffee too. I didn't even want anymore coffee, I wanted to finally hear how they met, but we couldn't possibly just sit here sipping waters could we? It seemed only right to get another coffee. Maybe a decaf I thought. But before I could turn my thought into action the waitress came over and filled our mugs with fresh, back, caffeinated sludge. Great.
At least I was on vacation. I didn't need to wake up early tomorrow and this meant that it didn't matter if I was up all night. Plus who knows, maybe Jeannie and I could go for some drinks later. Who knew how long this story would take?
