TABLA NON ROSA

So I'm slogging to the high school bus stop knowing it's going to be the same old thing but I grimly board with my back hunched from all those necessary and unnecessary books in the dinosaur days before backpacks, and off we dive down North Island, a stupidasHell name in a Georgia suburb, five-plus hours from the nearest ocean and I have that same bad feeling like in an elevator that rises to the top then settles with a thunk, my gut the thunk, like something dropping deep in there like when my mother would say “time to see Dr. Bergman! “ that sadist, and though I much enjoyed his huge and colorful pegboard, it only eminded me of the punctures to come, or worse, the tongue depressor he held for a full 60 seconds as I gagged trying to dislocate his disgustingly hirsute wrist, or of summer camp “starting in 3 days!” the dreadthunk subsuming me like ten stiff drinks except I'm completely sober and dreading every f***ing day of hiking, idiotic insidious campfire songs and swimming in that filthy lake feet stuck in cloying muck with unseen tickly crawly things and slapping at mosquitos like some pathetic tourrettes thing, but anyway we're careening down the Island and then out the window in her totally tan skin there stands LAUREN, like some self-conscious female “David,” especially the legs are what gets me those perfect carved calves not a mosquito scar inturned knee or any other mar like she's sunned and danced her entire life, morning rays careening off as though embarrassed to intrude and taint them with further adulation -- and long blonde tresses sparkling maddenlingly all the way down to the boysized butt and and of course there's the divine goyish nose, upturned enough without her head's help which accomodates anyway, and I know even before the bus slows to allow her majesty and her freckle-faced overweight groupie gooped to the max with cover-up which makes no difference as she's a stubborn constellation nothing short of the grave could camoulflage and who gets to be in the “in” crowd simply by fortuitously living next door to Lauren, that I canNOTsit down on the bus, it is Verboten, because the seats MUST be reserved for the reigning queens and dammes, and even if they sit one behind the other leaving a seat open this allows no option, because up the hill is the next beatific barbie with hair even better than Lauren's and plus she has the kind of white teeth that round all at the sides so perfect it makes my eyejuice hurt and meanwhile I'm in my mom's old-lady stretch pants because the more glamour and gloss on the bus the bigger and badder my butt fgets rom the secret binge-ing I do after midnight following my daily one-half a cheese sandwich-on-diet-bread flagellation, which is hopeless since for one thing my hair frizzes like some follically-focussed Big Bang the instant I hit fresh air and it is long but in that bad way that bad hair has of making the head a triangle, flat then blowsing at the sides and this is after washing and then using those demonic gargantuan brush rollers, sitting under a cancer-causing tube and cap dryer for a full two and a half hours and then sleeping this way in the only possible way, on my back, that, STILL, despite the egregious night of brain-rape I'm not even close to being THEM, though constantly checking out the competition like a rubbernecking junkie while I'm standing all the way, not that anyone's actually SAID anything it's just understood that neither the front NOR back NOR middle of the bus is available because Nerd-dom  as is widely known, is profoundly contagious and the nerd who is not in control IS ACTUALLY AND TOTALLY in control, that's how it's played or ELSE!  And then one day an even nerdier girl named Jordan back in the days when we had no Hunters or morgans or jordans as girl names and her equally pimply pockmarked hunchbacked and semi-whiskered brother move into town to our very bus and I'm thinking I should befriend her or them and how could they refuse being worse off than I which is a harrowing dilemma moving me assuredly further from my goal of one day at least sheepishly sliding halfassed into a seat near a honeyblonde blue eyed dentally dashing diva ... but each time those ghastly sibs debark at Indian Trail all I can think as they head uphill the tangled wicked path is Trail of Tears, so I do try but we don't get far so I give it up, relieved -- I'm only human after all – but anyway, these were days way hay hay before Columbines Unibombers, disgruntled opportunistic postal workers or even that infant Evan Lorke with his killer ideations came along, so there are no guns or even thoughts of violence, it's all instantly inward, the rage growing like funky little tumors like demon babies poised to gush from my thousands of pores but kept in check so as not to actually slash and burn every stultifyingly stunning specimen who in reality cannot control her genetic makeup any more than I can, but demon babies are loyal puppies admirably leashed to allow for separate tables at lunch and all the other dos and don'ts and endless woulds and wonts.............. but the REAL killer is that going home the route is REVERSED such that (standing of course) you can omnisciently enjoy the anatomical vunderbars depart one by one, heaven beaming on their various glorifications like legs you're never gonna get and when you go home your mother doesn't understand because she's that kind of mother so you've learned not to be that kind of daughter, you just do your hair again that night and when everyone's asleep, once again plunder the kitchen for cookies, waffles, cake, peanut butter sandwiches, ice cream, potato chips, cheese nips and anything else you can stuff, then the next day your mother's saying aren't you hungry? and you're starved because now your stomach has expanded but you say no, not really, picking through your food like it was crème de dogpoop and finally bed down in those damned crown-of-thorns daggers only to wake up to YOU, nothing but YOU and what's WORSE, you don't get your picture in the paper, start a revolution or go down in history as a hero since you blazed no trail and unParked no one, were so totally no Rosa, but sucked it up, dioing but inch slowly and steadily toward the nirvana of graduation for which you're chosen to be one of two speakers based on your irrepressible intellect which you'd barter in a heartbeat for one good hairday, and as you get up to belt out your contribution to the squeaky clean vision of America's future, your sandal breaks so you are limping to the mike such that right up to the end you're a hopeless mess but at least school finally ends, but your legs and hips and hair follow like John and Paul and of course Judas, and haunt so, such that 40 years later of drowning in the desert of real life you're still checking the mirror and competition to see if anything vaguely Lauren or Belinda or Katy-like has evinced but hasn't but at least now you can sit down on a city bus with all the other hapless haggard riders with their own North Islands floating in the prehistoric miasma of their disparate present Hells all of you obssesively and depressingly sizing up the body parts you might one day have before pushing up those darling daisies , which of course is absurd given age and circumstance and genetics and fate, but mostly thinking

for chissakes already just get a goddamned car!

C Julianza Shavin 2008