Idiot Read online

  It wasn’t a cloud. It was THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS OF MOSQUITOS trapped inside our cabin. We had left the window open and the light on and they all came swarming inside. I screamed and tried to run out, but my mom was blocking the doorway. “FIX THIS,” she said.

  Yikes. Colleen and my friends and I spent the next three hours standing on chairs with shoes on our hands, stomping on the bugs on the ceiling. I’d kill four at a time with my Sketchers, but then the bodies would fall down on my face. Yum!

  As someone who struggled with alcoholism years later, I can look back and see that drinking had always brought consequences.

  * * *

  As Maggie and I got older, our insular duo got less insular. We joined a group of popular girls called The Twelve, named both because we were twelve years old and there were twelve of us. Creative geniuses over here! We were your typical group of bitchy junior high kids, complete with professional photos taken at the Yorktown mall. Our leader was named Erica (of course) and she was this beautiful, blonde, popular cheerleader, who was dating Tyler, the most popular guy in school. All the boys were in love with her because she had tits from a young age. She’s super nice now, but was a total bitch back then. It wasn’t her fault, though. Today, none of those girls have a mean bone in their bodies. Something about being that age makes everyone a little mean.

  Once we were in this group, all of a sudden everything mattered. How you did your hair, who you dated, what brand of socks you had on. Unfortunately, the best socks my mom could get me were Tommy Hilfangures.

  “We said we were wearing Abercrombie shirts today, Laura.”

  I looked down at the logo on my shirt and mumbled back, “This IS Aberzombie.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Nothing.”

  Even if I didn’t have the right clothes, I found my place in our crew as the entertainer. There was one fateful lunch period where I stuck grapes up my nose and Erica proclaimed “Laura is totally, like, the funny one!” From then on I was their clown, and I was good at it.

  We all had our place. Erica was the leader; I was the funny one; Holly was the shining light of positivity. She could see a bright side to everything. You got picked last for basketball? Then there’s no pressure! You got detention? It’s extra time to finish your homework! To this day she is the nicest, most positive woman I know, and one of my best friends. Instead of detention, now she gets excited to go to the DMV because . . . who the fuck knows?

  My job as The Entertainer fit me well. I could make these girls laugh their asses off. We would make prank phone calls, or rather I would. All the other girls would have to go in the other room and listen on the muted second line because they’d be in tears, laughing so hard that it would have ruined the prank.

  One night, we got tired of pranking the local pizza restaurant. We decided to do something to Tyler, Erica’s boyfriend. He lived three doors down from Holly’s house, where we were having our sleepover that night. Now, Tyler was like the golden boy of our school. He was so sweet and well liked, he had this charismatic personality and great smile that just won everyone over. And he was also one of our best friends. So we wanted to do something that would REALLY get him.

  Here’s what we came up with: We put a training bra on his front porch and ran home giggling. Then we called his house. There was no answer, but we left the following voice mail: “Boobs on your porch! Boobs on your porch!” Pretty scandalous, right? But he didn’t even call back! Maybe he was out at soccer practice. An hour later, we called again. “Boobs on your porch! Boobs on your porch!” Again nothing. Well, damn.

  The sleepover continued as normal and we went home the next day. But when Monday rolled around, I got a call from Holly. It was a conference call with all the girls on it. Holly was freaking out. “There are cops outside Tyler’s house! They’re onto us; they know we did boobs on the porch! What do we do??”

  Fuck fuck fuck. We all panicked! Jail time was definitely imminent. Even Holly couldn’t spin this as a positive.

  “How many cops??”

  “Literally two cop cars!”

  “I can’t get arrested! Dance team tryouts are next week!”

  I tried to be the voice of reason. “Just lay low everybody. Just lay low.”

  We all stayed indoors that day. That night we got a call. Tyler—our good friend Tyler—had committed suicide that day, in his basement.

  None of us knew he was even close to his breaking point. He had always seemed so happy. None of the “typical” signs were there—he wasn’t an outcast, he never had trouble socializing. It was the first time we were faced with death that wasn’t about our pets or grandparents—it was someone just like us. At that age you think you’re immortal and invincible. I think Tyler’s death woke us up to the harsh reality that you could be here one day and gone the next. And we had that wake-up call at age twelve.

  That night we congregated at Holly’s house again. Three doors down from Tyler’s. We cried and cried.

  After that, The Twelve were a lot more compassionate. A lot quieter. Some of us went our separate ways after junior high, but that grief bonded us in a way nothing else could have. It set the tone for the rest our adolescence: that reality outside of childhood isn’t as bright as you want it to be.

  I started to feel tired of caring what people thought about me. I didn’t want to care. I didn’t want people to feel like they had to put on a happy face around me. Or that they had to pretend to be stronger than they felt. What if Tyler had been able to talk to us about how he was feeling? What if we were all able to be more authentic?

  I threw away all my Tommy Hilfangure socks and Aberzombie shirts, as well as the sequin scrunchies and everything I had shoplifted in order to fit in with The Twelve. Laura Clery was about to be her goddamn self, bitches.

  CHAPTER 2

  High School Hammer Time

  Maggie and I changed a little after we hit high school. Our ambitions changed. For example, she wanted to give the speech at graduation. And I wanted to do drugs. Call us high achievers, because we BOTH reached our goals!

  I don’t blame her for wanting to straighten up. I mean, she had straight As. She was good at school. Academic achievement was her ticket to success. But it wasn’t for me. I tested terribly, couldn’t focus, and I’d ditch class whenever I could. I also took geometry three times, and not because I loved it.

  Almost failing school was fine, though. So what if I got bad grades? I was going to be an actress. It was my destiny. And you don’t need geometry to act, dammit.

  I was very disruptive in class. (Kids . . . don’t be like me.) I just didn’t see the point of school. It was like a horrible spiral where I didn’t try because I wasn’t doing well and didn’t care to do well, and then my teachers would hate me, and then I would be more disruptive because . . . it’s not like I had any student-teacher relationships to preserve!

  I was not a joy to have in class. For me, class was just a time for me to practice bits on my classmates—try to make everyone laugh. My teachers might have hated it, but to everyone else, I was a riot. I’d do one bit where I’d sit right in the middle of the classroom, where I knew people could see me from every angle. I’d fill up my mouth with water, hold it in there, and then pretend to be asleep. And then I would drool excessively until I heard whispers turn into exclamations of “AWWWW SICK!!!” It was very committed preparation. I took clowning around seriously, you guys.

  Then I would fake waking up all startled, and splash everyone nearby. Classmates started trying to avoid my splash zone. But in a huge, overcrowded public school, it was either sit next to me or sit on the floor! When I worked in the speech office, I would photocopy pictures of my ass and pass them out. It was the original unsolicited dick pic.

  Because I was very well known for causing a disturbance, this meant Maggie and I had to go our separate ways. With no hard feelings at all—she would still come over to my house in the middle of the night to watch movies with me in secret and sometimes we�
��d sneak into the porn section of Family Video after class—but beginning my freshman year, I was already starting to be known as a bad kid. I was tainting her image.

  Because my parents were liberal hippies, I didn’t need to hide my bad-kid tendencies from anyone. I don’t think the following is the normal conversation parents have with their kids about weed:

  Dad: Laura, are you smoking weed?

  Laura: Um . . . I don’t know. Why?

  Dad: Here’s twenty bucks. Can you get me some?

  I got away with a lot. I was kind of an odd bad kid, though. I wasn’t completely removed from school or in a “bad-kid clique.” I was friends with people in all types of cliques and did extracurriculars like student council. But frequently I also happened to ditch class to smoke weed. Life is all about balance, you guys!

  Once we took a field trip to downtown Chicago for a student council convention (of course I’m going to do an extracurricular that gets me out of class!). As I stared out the window of the bus, I made mental notes of all the shops I wanted to check out when I inevitably ditched the entire event. As I was exiting the bus and planning my escape, I saw this boy in my grade that I had seen being bullied earlier that day. The twist was that he yelled back at the jocks who were making fun of him, which was badass.

  In his black jacket and black jeans, he was the best-dressed bullied nerd I had ever seen. I looked down at my weird sweatpants and touched my topknot, which was currently frizzing out. My mom actually made sweatpants, so I had like ten pairs and it was all I wore. Some might have called it slovenly, but I say: Ahead of my time! Athleisure is in now!!!

  I approached him. “Wanna ditch this and smoke a cigarette with me?” I asked.

  “I can’t. I have a boner for student council.”

  “You . . . what?”

  “I’m joking. Let’s get out of here.”

  We slipped away from the group. I lit a cigarette, handed it to him, and he winced as he took a drag. He was pretending to be chill about it, but I later found out that this was his first cigarette! He just jumped at the opportunity to hang out with me because I was apparently a “cool kid” in my homemade sweatpants.

  From then on, we were attached at the hip. We’d do everything together. I would defend him a lot from the guys who picked on him, but I don’t think he truly even needed me. Jack had this incredible “fuck you” sort of attitude. He didn’t care what people thought about him. He just was who he was. He didn’t come out as gay to me until years later (because of course it takes a long time to build up that courage), but he was always authentically himself. Always. I loved and admired that about him.

  Every day we would smoke weed and ditch school. After we had too many unexcused absences, I had the brilliant idea of getting us actual excused absences. I always had a knack for accents and voices . . . and I had his mom’s voice down pat. I’d call the front desk of our school: “Hi, this is Caroline McCalpin calling. I need to come pick up Jack, so please let his teachers know, thanks.”

  It worked every time. Other kids started to notice and ask me for my services.

  “Can you call me out of school too?”

  “Yes. That will be twenty-five dollars.”

  I’d press *67 to make my number private, so the school had no way of seeing that everyone’s mom had the same phone number. It was foolproof, you guys. I got pretty sophisticated with my mom voices, too. I could do a Macedonian mom, an Irish mom, a New Jersey mom . . . Jenna’s, Lisa’s, and Jeff’s mothers respectively. I could do whatever anyone wanted from me. I once excused a kid for an entire week.

  I started getting cocky about my ability . . . I probably crossed a line when I began making calls to the office while I was in class. In my defense, it was a huge public high school with overfilled classrooms and over four thousand students trekking through the halls. We could get away with a lot.

  It was fourth period when my friend Megan started to complain:

  “Ugh I don’t want to go to eighth period. I haven’t studied for my test at all. I’m gonna fail.”

  I grinned at her, grabbed my phone, and pressed one button (I had the school phone number on speed dial), then pressed the phone to my ear. I looked around the room—our teacher was all the way on the other side, blocked by a sea of rowdy students. It was fine. Stop worrying!

  I put on what I thought was a bright, enthusiastic mom voice. “Hi there! This is Peggy Manzer, Megan’s mom? Yeah. Megan’s not gonna make it to eighth period today, she’s got a bit of a tummy ache. I think it’s diarrhea, but I’d rather me find out than you! Ha-ha!” I had no doubt Megan would be leaving school without a problem. My Peggy Manzer impression was spot-on.

  Unfortunately, one small piece of classroom etiquette was ingrained in me despite all my efforts not to learn anything in school. Without realizing it, I was whispering on the call. I used my library voice, so it was pretty obvious that it was a student calling. Megan got detention . . . but I didn’t! They never figured out it was me.

  With Jack, I was the one leading us into trouble. I introduced him to his first cigarette and his first ecstasy pill. All of it. Jack kept up smoking for years after that first cigarette that I gave him. (I recently got him to quit smoking because that guilt weighed on me all this time.)

  Jack went along with it all because we both felt . . . different. Also, he loved pot as much as I did. Bonding! We had this rebellious spirit that led us to shoplift and get high and hang out at the graveyard at night. There was this little section of the graveyard where an entire family was buried. The mom, the dad, and baby. Their last name was Vinkus, and our nighttime activity soon became “hanging out with the Vinkuses.”

  Jack’s mom hated me. Can you imagine why? Because I totally can’t.

  She called my mom at one point and said, “I do not want your daughter anywhere near my son.” We were your modern-day Homeo and Juliet: a gay boy and his troublemaker best girlfriend, torn apart by their families’ disapproval of their love . . . of weed. After that we would just sneak around with our friendship. Nothing was going to split us up.

  He would call my house phone over and over again, and my family couldn’t stand it. He wouldn’t let up until I had answered. He’s actually in sales now and he’s really good at it—it’s that relentless persistence. But we would end up with like ten voice mails in a row, most of which were just him saying “Helloooo, Clarice” in a Hannibal Lecter voice.

  As soon as I got my driver’s license, our rebellious adventures entered a whole new realm. Driving us around in my parents’ convertible gave us our first taste of adult freedom! Since we were two people who tended to overdo things, I’d drive with the top down and Jack would scream random things at people.

  We’d drive past the elementary school around the time school got out and Jack would scream, “SANTA’S NOT REAL!!!”

  We were great kids. But in this particular instance, Jack saw this really serious-looking cyclist we were passing and chose to yell, “GET OFF THE ROAD, ASSHOLE!”

  The man glared at him. “Jack! That’s mean,” I said.

  “Come on. He could have scratched your paint.”

  I kept driving. And then I noticed him. The biker. Following us. And he wasn’t just any cyclist, this guy was the real deal, decked out in a helmet, dark shades, and jacket. And he looked fucking mad. He sped up.

  “Jack . . .” I whispered, trying to stay calm.

  “What?” Jack looked confused, then turned around and immediately shrank with fear. “DRIVE, BITCH, DRIVE!”

  We hadn’t just pissed off a random biker, we pissed off one who had apparently been pissed off FOR THE LAST TIME. Rage fueled his furious pedaling, and soon he was speeding up alongside us. I turned to try to lose him. He caught up. I turned again. There he was, pedaling on his ten-speed Schwinn, with murder in his eyes. This was the lamest car chase you’d ever see in your life. Two teens in an old convertible versus a bicyclist in the suburbs. And we were somehow losing.

  I took one
last turn . . . into a cul-de-sac. There was nowhere to go. The cyclist parked his bike in front of our car, and he kicked out the kickstand like a boss.

  Jack, meanwhile, was hyperventilating. “Run him over! Hit him, Laura! Hit him!” And he wasn’t kidding. Underneath it all, Jack has got a heart of gold . . . it’s just really far underneath.

  “I’m not gonna fucking hit him!” I yelled.

  The cyclist slowly walked up to Jack’s side of the car. He whipped off his sunglasses. With no way to escape, Jack shrank down as far as he could into his seat and rolled up the window. Of the convertible. A car with no roof.

  The cyclist stared deep into Jack’s eyes. Then said with raging intensity:

  “May God have mercy on your soul.”

  Then he got back on his bike and pedaled away.

  You may be wondering how a guy on a bike could have caught up to us if we were in a car. First, he was just really fast! Second, I don’t speed—okay? I might have cheated in school, smoked weed, and ditched class, but the speed limit is the speed limit, you guys! After that, Jack stopped yelling at people on the street.

  * * *

  Growing up, I knew we couldn’t afford things that weren’t, like, food and toothpaste and clothes to cover our bodies. But I was also a teenager that existed in the world! I wanted cool makeup and tacky jewelry sometimes. So I would steal it. BUT I always justified it. It’s not like I was stealing from your grandma. I would never do that! I’d steal from Walmart, a big capitalist corporation that wasn’t exactly known for its good deeds. I was ethical; I had morals! I was basically Robin Hood, if he stole lip gloss from the rich and then . . . wore it.