A Period of Very Poor Decision Making

The summer before I began junior high school I decided to get a fabulous new haircut.  I’d had a bob with bangs for most of my youth and I settled on a shortly cropped ‘do to usher in my new era of life.  In my mind, my new haircut was going to make me look like Chynna Phillips of Wilson Phillips. Of course it would have helped if I had her pixie face and blonde hair.  At the time I had not yet accepted that I was obviously a Carnie rather than a Chynna.  The haircut was a disaster and I started junior high school looking like an awkward, ginger hermaphrodite.  I added a full set of braces to the mix later that year, with, wait for it. . . . headgear.  (Okay, I only had to wear the headgear at night but that meant busting it out for sleepovers.)

My first order of business as a junior high school student was joining the soccer team.  The team was composed of students from grades six through eight.  It was also essentially a boys' team.  Two of my sixth-grade girl friends joined and there was one eighth-grade girl on the team as well.  The rest of the 20+ members were boys, many of whom were in eighth grade.  The difference in skills between a 13-year-old athletic boy and an 11-year-old tremendously uncoordinated girl are vast.  I had never played on a soccer team before and I can safely say that I was the absolute worst player on this team.  They had won the league the year before and were counting on a repeat.  I spent the season warming the bench and nursing a serious crush on one of my eighth-grade male teammates.  I also experienced several in a never-ending line of humiliations which, strung together, form my life.

When my three female teammates and I got ready each afternoon in the locker room, we did so with the field hockey team.  They wore skirts and matching braids.  We wore boys' uniforms and two of us had dude haircuts.  (The eighth-grade girl seemed to be a baby lesbian, but what do I know-- we had matching hair at the time and I'm the one who ended up going to Wellesley.)  If the field hockey team had wrapped up their day by the time our practice ended, we were locked out of the girls' locker room.  On one such day after a home game we decided to try the back entrance to the locker room.  Finding an open door, my teammates made their way down the stairs.  I was bringing up the rear when a janitor sprang into action, yelling at me to stop and barring me from the entrance.  As a gal who never ever got in trouble in school, I was horrified.  I started sputtering about the main entrance being locked when the janitor cut me off, explaining, "Boys are not allowed in the girls' locker room!"  My face was stop-sign red in an instant.  I could not bring myself to explain my gender.  It was too awful.  My friends, having realized I was no longer with them, came back up and laughingly told the janitor that I was a girl.  His confusion and apologies only made it harder to keep from crying.

One of my teammates was also my best friend at the time.  She was merciless and I had no doubt that she was going to share this story with the rest of the team, which she did.  She also screamed out the identity of my crush that year during lunch.  I don't know why having a best friend who was mean to me seemed to make sense at that time in my life.  It was a period of very poor decision-making.  (And we're back to the haircut.)  The other sixth-grade girl on the team came to be one of my closest friends in junior high school and in a display of friendship at a school dance that year, she asked my crush, her older brother's friend, if he would dance with me.  It was supposed to be a surprise, but I found out and watched from about six feet away as he flatly refused.  And that is where we get to the real tragedy of this post.  That poor guy has had to spend the last 20 years living with the knowledge that he missed out on ALL OF THIS: