queen of stupid

as we tossed the unmarked glass bottle into the women's bathroom trashcan, we stupidly believed we got rid of the last piece of evidence. especially considering we drank the rest of it.

lisa and i were freshmen. high school freshman. which makes us the just about the smartest people in the lunchroom. i mean, did anyone else see upperclassman finding ways to drink in the cafeteria at lunch?

obviously, we had stumbled upon an idea no one else had thought of before.

lisa lived down the street from me, moving in during the summer between eight grade and freshman year. i was so excited! my street held very few other kids my age, and of the few there were, usually had a penis. so the thought of sharing my teenage years with another girl living closeby - someone to try hairstyles with, experiment with makeup, and talk about the boys on the block, had danced in my head.

the day we first met, lisa tossed her long brown hair and asked me if i smoked cigarettes, very casually, as if every 13-year-old girl smoked. with my wannabe bad ass tendencies, i knew we would be fast friends.

(before anyone wonders what happened to the goddess girls during these formative years in my life, we knew each other separately but had not yet fully discovered our goddess-like tendencies.)

as summer turned to fall, lisa and i braved the halls of freshman year together. although having very different rosters, we shared a lunch period, the walk to and from school and even our similarities at home. lisa and her mother her lived alone, about ten houses down from our red-bricked rowhome. no dad, no siblings. just like how my mother and i, save for the sibling part. i would have gladly traded in my brother for a pack of chewing gum at the time.

i don't remember whose idea it was but one day we decided what a good idea it would be to bring a bottle of vodka with us to school. but the big ideas did not stop then! nope, we decided we need to drink it, too. what could be more perfect than those little single, serving-sized orange juice containers for making screwdrivers?

besides, getting a little tipsy at lunch could only ease the rest of the school day. for lisa, this meant getting through whatever remedial class she was placed in. for me, it meant trying to ease the pains of honors english with mrs. o'kane.

a whole week had gone by, and with a slightly sleepy stupor, i enjoyed mrs. o'kane's class for the first time that year -- "great expectations" and ms. haberstram or whatever the decrepit old lady's name was in the book made sense to me. the exact details of the book escape me (still) but for the first time, i relaxed in her class.

but as teenagers are wont to do, i'm pretty sure we could not keep our genius quiet. "i'm buzzed," i'm sure i whispered to the kids around me. and i'm pretty sure lisa blabbed about our discovery that the little orange juice containers could double as old fashioned high ball glass.

so on the morning we saw the deans beginning to circle our lunchtable like a pack of hungry sharks, we shouldn't have been surprised. with the rest of the gals at our lunch table panicking -- even those who did not drink with us -- lisa and i calmly disposed of the evidence. in the days before csi, we were left with having to devise our own methods of subterfuge, the best we could come up with was do down the clear bottle's contents and dispose of the unmarked bottle.

by the time the deans swallowed our lunch table for punishment, there was nothing left behind. except for a few drunk teenage girls.

their interrogation techniques involved separating us, to keep us from sharing one brain in talking ourselves out of our punishment. but i broke like a cheap crayon, smearing contraband mascara all over my face, before finally tossing my cookies into the dean's trashcan when i saw my mom walk in the door.

grounded for life. or what nearly felt like it. detention for most the remainder of freshman year. saturday detention which is nothing like breakfast club movie. there were no hot guys, only juvenile deliquents and future drop-outs and teenage parents. there was no talking because the friggin' moderator would not leave, like the asshat principal in the john waters' flick which would allow us to discover our shared wounds which our teenager years stabbed us with and learn more about the walls, self-erected or otherwise, we built around each other.

nope, it was merely hours wasted staring at the mural of the high school mascot, counting the number of cinderblocks in each wall.

but i was a good student, so my punishment finally subsided and i was able to get on with my academic career, despite the black mark on my permanent record. i can be so smart sometimes, but don't be fooled. it's all just a cover, i am the queen of stupid.