tavie.com

Somehow, yesterday, I got to talking with Kirsten about an incident from sixth grade which spontaneously surfaced in my memory. Wanna get it down here so I don't forget it:

One day, my sixth-grade teacher had us rearrange our desks into little "islands" of four, two facing two. I ended up with my friend Lisa, a snobby bitch whose name I can't remember, and a tough but smart Puerto Rican girl named Sasha. Sasha took no shit, and I remember her going on about how the snobby bitch was "messing up the style of our group".

I was confused by this. Sixth grade was a difficult year for me - it was the year my family moved to Roosevelt Island, my first time in a class without my sister, and the first year I crossed the line from chubby to what we might term, um, well, "obese". I was very depressed, had no interest whatsoever in my personal appearance; I mostly wore my mom's old clothes, sweatpants and tee shirts, to school. Neither popular nor particularly unpopular, I was certainly no example of any kind of personal "style"; my stylishness was somewhere akin to an ~~Irma~~ Erma Bombeck or a Betty White.

So I said to Sasha, "I don't have any style."

And I remember Sasha replying without a beat, "Yes you do, you have your own cool style. SHE'S the one messing up the style of this group."

And it didn't occur to me then, but occurs to me now, 18 years later, that that little girl had a much more sophisticated notion of "style" than most people I knew then, and most people I know now. She saw my style as stemming from my personality, rather than my clothing.

I don't know what happened to that girl; she went to a different school the next year, and I heard that she was got shot in the leg and pregnant by the time she was 15. That's a fucking shame, I think. She was one smart 11-year-old.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 9:18 PM | shower me with attention