Rant - Polly

...leaves doing everything for a dollar.

How is that a legacy? A stupid yearbook tradition, 1998, when ink was still printed and indelible. Do they even print yearbooks today? If they don’t, the girl in the corner who talks to not one single boy in three years except to ask about homework assignments might have the opportunity to bravely ask that her legacy to the school be changed, and not illustrate some kind of propensity toward whorishness.

Sophomore year, one conversation, one that felt like one tenth of a conversation. Andy Barr, six-foot three and empty, sat at the head of the wooden table in our fancy cafeteria. Sunlight streamed through stain glass windows on twenty foot walls, illuminating the dust falling into the institutional slop on our plates. “Your omelette smells like my dog,” is what my roommate Kristen said to me after I waited in line for forty minutes to get custom-made ham and cheese and eggs. At least she was nice enough to let me sit next to her during sunday brunch. Andy had a broken hand from a football scrimmage and was complaining that his ‘pussy finger’ was worthless for month. How could boys be so raw. Kristen laughed. I ate my omelette and tried to pretend it didn’t smell like Kristen’s dog. I stopped listening. I had already stopped listening.

“No, I wouldn’t do it! Maybe, like, a million dollars...no, no! Not even.” Kristen was laughing.

Andy shook his head. “What if the guy was hot? No one would know, you’re on a plane, you’d never see him again.”

“A dollar.” I can still remember realizing it had come out of my mouth. Shock value. Listen to me.  I stared at my omelette. The girl from the corner who doesn’t talk to boys and eats dog-scent omelettes just opened her fucking mouth, oh yeah. The girl who has never kissed a boy on the lips would fuck a guy in an aiport bathroom for a dollar, if he was hot. I didn't mean it, I just wanted to be part of the conversation, and it came out like milk. But it burned. The words burned as soon as they hit the air. Burned, but never disappeared. Two years later, when the powers that be in the class put together the page of legacies, Andy Barr reached up his ass and pulled out a tiny nugget of humiliation. Just for me. How sweet. Fuck you.

Polly Witker leaves...