Last week Konnie wrote about us switching
places, and she said we never tried it in junior high or high school, which isn’t
quite accurate.
Yes, we never tried switching places
on April Fool’s Day, but we did switch once. During the first week of seventh
grade, ergo, not as a prank. In fact, the only person we intended to fool was
Konnie’s assigned locker partner, who was being an unmitigated brat.
To put it simply, at one point this
cretin got a new lock for their shared locker but absolutely refused to give
Konnie the new combo. She was going as far as to block Konnie’s view while she
opened it!
Konnie tried everything she could
think of, including complaining to their homeroom teacher who told Konnie she couldn’t do
anything about it and to work out a compromise.
What kind of compromise can you work
out with someone who refuses to budge?
Konnie was at her wits end, so I
turned to my best friend, my assigned locker partner, and told her Konnie and I
were switching places for homeroom only. I did tell her why and she was all for
it.
I think a few of our other friends
from the previous school year recognized we’d switched places, but none of our friends from the previous year was in Konnie’s homeroom, so no trouble.
When it came time to get into our
lockers I used as much force as I could muster to get her to let me see the
combo. She was stronger than she looked. So, knowing Konnie’s teacher would be
no help, I took off to the front office to air my grievance about this brat.
The school secretary had the same
attitude as the teacher.
I admit it, I lost my temper, and
back then I had quite a potty mouth, which got me scolded and threatened with expulsion
from the secretary and the principal. All of which increased my tirade.
Our big sister’s best friend was only
in ninth grade, so not in high school like our big sister, and she heard me
yelling so she came to find out what was wrong.
She pointed out that the school
staff did not want to deal with our mother, who taught me the potty mouth, and was also
a journalism student at the local university. She basically said, “Mistreat her
daughters and you’re going to be in the news.”
She also insisted that Konnie could
share her locker, since she didn’t have a locker partner.
Konnie moved lockers.
The brat got what she wanted all along,
but I’m not sure she enjoyed it.
Before week two of that year was
over, the whole school knew why a little seventh grader had a locker in the
nineth grade hall. And they knew who caused that change.
I don’t know if she learned her
lesson or not, but I do know she didn’t make a whole lot of friends that year,
and I saw her get hazed more than once. Actually, I saw her get hazed
repeatedly.
And if you are wondering, Konnie and
I did not get hazed at all that year due to the threat our big sister had issued at the
end of the previous year, just before she advanced to high school. She promised that
anyone who dared to haze her baby sisters would get it twice as bad when they
got to high school.
The high school in question was notorious
back then for horrendous hazing and there was no way any of us could have known
then that by the following school year we would be living in a different city
altogether.
The threat worked.
Actually, once my best friend and I
were walking away from the school when a guy came up behind us. I think he had
skates on, I can’t remember for sure, but he dove between my friend’s legs and smeared red lipstick down the inside of both her legs. When he jumped to his
feet and actually looked at us, his expression turned to horror and he yelled, “That’s
Jacki’s kid sister!”
I turned to find another guy stop
dead in the middle of an attack run on me, also horrified.
I took advantage of their terror and
yelled at both of them, “Touch my best friend again and you’ll regret it!”
There was another incident that year
where a guy got a towel and was flicking the girls in the gym. The other girls ran; I
turned and faced him, asking his name.
He asked me why and I said, “Well, I
need your name to tell Jacki. You know Jacki Westover, my big sister.”
He hightailed it out of there so
fast the other girls cracked up.
But anyway, we did once trade places
in seventh grade.
Happy writing everyone.
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