Justin looks at me blankly and says "Are you serious? I loved high school. Well, not the school part, but everything else. High school was THE BEST."

This coming from a guy who was MVP three years running in volleyball, soccer and basketball, and who dated the most stacked girl in school two years his senior.

"Didn't you play ANY sports?" he asks, incredulous.

"Sure I did," I insist. "Badminton intramurals. For about a month in grade eight."

(then, not surprisingly, he pantzed me in front of everyone.)

Guess jeans with a zippered ankle. Curled bangs. Benetton rugby shirts, TUCKED IN. And try as I might I can't convince Justin that, at my school, it's what all the cool kids did: BAND. Piling geekitude upon geekitude, I played the string bass.

The only instrument you can sit on in the parking lot.

With ten of your band friends.

If you have band friends.

Which I did, more or less, miraculously, in that decidedly fickle, faintly humiliating, please-oh-please-oh-please-like-me way of junior and senior high school girls.

Year after year of fruitless curling of what is hopelessly straight, desperate to be anyone else. It took me a long time to grow up. I've only been a moderately functioning social being for… (checks imaginary watch)… well, it hasn't been long.

+++++++++

She comes over for a playdate with her little boy, a reconnection made in the initial facebook flurry. All the while I'm a little more than sheepish, overcome with past intramural awkwardness every time I meet her eyes. I felt this way coming back to Halifax, to face the same streets I walked when I was a complete dork, agitated at the comically unfunny memory of what I was.

Then as we venture into the territory of 1989 she says GOD. I was such a complete asshole. I don't even like to think about high school. It's too mortifying.

Something dissapates in the air between us leaving a pleasant, open space. And I smile to think it:

But she was, like… totally NORMAL.