Mean Girls

In high school I sometimes got attention from girls because they were interested in my three older brothers and thought they’d go through me to get to them. Only because they hadn’t witnessed my first day in ninth grade when Tim confronted me with, “You don’t know me, you don’t talk to me, I don’t know you.”

One cool upper classmate—let’s call her The Bit… I mean Lulu—invited me to go out with her and her posse. Flattered, I accepted the invitation, thinking, See, Tim, I don't need you. I can hang with a cool, older crowd.

We stopped at a restaurant and she and the posse went to the bathroom. When they came back Lulu asked me if I liked to sing, and I confessed I did. She raved about the acoustics in the bathroom and urged me to go in there and let fly. “You have to sing really loud to get the effect, but it’s amazing!” Lulu’s Gang of Bit… I mean, her friends joined in, begging me to try it. I kept saying no, but did head to the bathroom for its intended use. As my mother always said, “See a bathroom, use it.”

While I stood in front of the mirror brushing my hair the gang burst into the small bathroom. “You didn’t sing!” Lulu complained. “We were listening outside the door!” Their evil laughs left no doubt as to their goal. Forty years later people would be pointing to my yearbook picture and saying, “Remember when Lulu and her crowd caught Valerie singing into her hairbrush in the Big Boy’s bathroom? What a loser!”

Thank God I hadn’t started singing yet.