Chapter 3: High School

EMETT

I have trouble with my memories. Like most people, I remember little of my life before about age four or so. Apparently, I lived in Sharon, met two girls named Sasha and Alissa who teased me, and a boy named Kyle who was my best friend. I also had a grandmother on my mother's side, who I played games with and who I so connected with that when she died, I had to go into therapy. That, plus numerous incidents where I bumped my head at the low ceiling of the same cottage that I talked about at age eighteen, and for the most part my memories well past four and into about age nine are a jumbled mess much of which I can't remember. Though there is something else. At our first house, there was a closet in the basement that I sort of feared. It wasn't that it was dark (though it was), but that absolutely shouldn't be closed. This, combined with a fear of being touched on the back or shoulder (and of intimacy in general) made me think that maybe at one point I was locked in that room and molested. But like Joe Biden sniffing hair and touching shoulders and getting away with it on national television, I found it quite difficult or impossible to prove, so that meant the awful molester got away with it. Joe Biden, I mean.

Thanks to this, people and places began to run together strangely. For instance, I sometimes conflate moving to junior high school, high school, and college. It didn't help that we moved around quite a bit, or that the last year of high school was merged with community college before going to a proper college. So if I mentioned all of this as high school, I think it was actually junior high that I met Meredith, Candice, and Frank.

In actual high school, not the one I have mixed up. I met this punk/goth girl named Cecelia and some other girl named Austin. I later met Austin of all places on a tour of the UK and Ireland with my parents. Here we were, having crossed a rope bridge and in a hotel near the coast overlooking Scotland, and I saw this girl from high school there.

There was also a girl named Renee, and a French teacher who I was kind of sweet on. She always used to show us the strangest movies. One of these was a two-film series called Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring. The first film had an uncle and nephew cheat a hunchbacked man out of his property by blocking the water with cement, so they could grow carnations. As a result of the hunchback, the land is later covered with rabbits as well. His daughter Manon, the little girl from the first film becomes a hottie ten years later, and roams wild in the forests and springs. The nephew falls in lust with her, even sewing a ribbon in his hair into his flesh (like I say, weird movie), which eventually kills him. The old man despairs of having any legacy now that his nephew is dead. She and some visitor to town plot to undo the uncle, and fall for each other in the process. Meanwhile, while the uncle is dying of old age, he finds out from an old woman that an old flame of his got pregnant with his child and had a hunchback, making Manon actually his granddaughter. And so, despite the fact that his granddaughter hates him, he dies secure that she will watch over things after he is gone. The teacher's oddness reminded me of Candice and immediately attracted me, even though she didn't look at all alike. This teacher was petite and thin with medium-length blond hair and a youthful appearance. One day, I shared the film Brazil with the teacher, a dystopian story of a man living in an overly bureaucratic society who eventually "won" against the dystopia by focusing on his beloved and forgetting about reality.

In the last year of high school, we moved to the Eastern Shore of Virginia, so I lost touch with most of my friends from there, but I took courses that transferred over to high school and thus was able to visit my friends the last year when I graduated. As for me, I spent a couple of years around the community college, hanging out with a girl named Nina. She was I guess I'd put it, kind of a Hispanic version of my junior high flame. She was short and curvy but with dark hair and glasses. Although one time, she dressed as a devil, with makeup and a cute red dress of some sort and wore contacts instead of glasses. Unfortunately for me, a real demon of sorts was to enter my life.

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