CHAPTER 3 – A NEW YEAR
It was a week before the start of my junior year, and I
was back-to-school shopping with my mom—which was just as embarrassing as it
sounds. I was actually never the type to
be embarrassed to be seen with my parents or family, though. I love my mom, and, besides, am I supposed to
be embarrassed I have parents? That being said, there’s nothing that makes
you feel more like a “little boy” than going in and out of a dressing room so
your mom can see how your clothes fit, and you don’t exactly want kids from
school seeing you do a model turn for your mother.
I had the reputation in my family as the “fashion-conscious”
one, which would have been hilarious to anyone who actually saw me dress as a
teenager. (There was this dude my
sophomore year who looked me over disdainfully one day and said, “I can’t
believe you can throw those clothes on in the morning and think you’re ready
for school.”)
My family reputation dated back to when I was about ten
or eleven years old. In those days (from
my preteen through my junior high years), back-to-school time was the only time
I got to get a haircut from the salon at the strip mall rather than Mom cutting
my hair herself. One year, I picked a
style out of one of those books, and all the mousse in the store couldn’t make
my hair lie down and behave. I ended up
with a spike, which I suddenly decided was cool. So I became the first male in my family to
want gel for his hair. My concern for my
hairstyle, along with my insistence on high-top shoes that year (even if they
were “Winner’s Choice” from Wal-Mart), made me a fashionista by the standards
of my house, and I never really lived it down.
My “high standards” when it came to fashion caused Mom to
try to keep an eye out for affordable fashion trends. One year she had seen a morning show or
something that had said all the cool kids would be wearing layers of bright
colored three-button t-shirts, with the outer shirt open and the inner shirt
buttoned, and the sleeves rolled up to reveal the second color. So we filled my closet with three-button
t-shirts of every color, and I made the middle school scene on the cutting edge
of rolled-up-sleeve fashion—it was rad, man.
So rad that this particular fashion never really made it to our part of
southeast Texas
By the time of my junior year, Mom had discovered outlet
malls (brand names for less!). I was
trying on different combinations of Bugle Boy apparel, going in and out of the
dressing room, hoping Mom wouldn’t say anything embarrassing about the fit of
my jeans.
As I was coming out of the dressing room one time, I
caught a glimpse through the window of a couple of girls walking by that I
recognized. I quickly retreated back
into the dressing room, and they bypassed the store. These sightings happened once or twice
more—it was kind if like those scenes in Jurassic
Park when the raptors would dart by a window in the background—but I still
felt safely undetected.
But just as I thought we were safely on our way to the
car, I heard a high-pitched, “Oh, hi,
Elaine!” My mom had been spotted by
Donna Benson from church, and behind her, coming out of the Sunglass Hut
outlet, were her twin daughters Hailey and Bailey Benson. Crap.
The Benson twins were perfectly nice people—don’t get me
wrong. And I didn’t really care that
they saw me out with my mom. It was just
that they were from our new church and were supposed to be my new friends,
because not only were they in the youth group with me but Mom and Dad had
already become pals with their parents.
But we weren’t friends yet, and our relationship consisted entirely of
the awkward small-talk that I am terrible at.
“Hi, Jay…” said Bailey (I think). Which
one is it? I think it’s the nose that’s
different…
“What’s up?” I said, trying to talk to both of them. Don’t
stare at their noses…
“Just, you know, shopping with Mom,” she said, her stare drifting past
me.
“Yeah, me too…”
This scintillating conversation carried on in vague questions about
school activities, unmade sunglass purchases, and similar topics, answered by
shrugs, umms, and sentence fragments. Finally, after a few moments of awkward
silence, our mothers separated, and I hopped in the van to head back home for
the last few days of summer vacation.
It was a representative sample of what of my whole
experience at our new church. Calvary was quite a bit bigger than any church we had
been in before, where Roger and I often made up almost half of our age
group. Now I had not only lost Roger’s
coattails (sometimes it seemed my nickname at church was
“where’s-your-brother”) but I was now in a church that also had a private
Christian school, whose students made up a large majority of our youth group.
These were nice kids.
They didn’t exclude me on purpose.
They really did try to be friendly, but I was an outsider, someone they
only saw once or twice a week, who they never had known before.
Making friends has never come easy to me, and I had no
clue how to make a new friend unless
it came naturally. And trying to make
friends with these kids was a cross-cultural experience.
I was a church kid, through and through. By the time my junior year rolled around, I
had probably missed fewer Sundays in my entire life than the number of school
days I missed in fourth grade alone (which was the year I learned to manifest
my dread of school into visible physical ailments). I knew the Bible stories and the answers in
Sunday school better than any kid I knew, including all these Christian school
kids.
Despite all that, I was new to the Christian teen subculture. There weren’t enough of us in our old church
or in my high school to maintain any subculture at all, but at Calvary , it was in full force.
These kids had closets full of Christian t-shirts—the
ones with catchy bumper-sticker slogans like, “Eternity: Smoking or
Non-Smoking?” and altered brand-logo t-shirts, like the one where “Jesus
Christ” is written out in “Coca-Cola” font (“He’s the Real Thing”). I had no idea where these things were even
sold.
While I was trying not to pick up profanity from my
teammates and classmates at school, they had mastered the sincere “Oh,
heavens!”
They had the entire Michael W. Smith catalogue, knew Amy
Grant songs by heart, and a few even listened to some “edgier” Christian rock
songs like “To Hell With the Devil.” I
liked Weird Al.
So even though I looked at Hailey and Bailey and thought
of them as the kind of girls I ought to be interested in—pretty, Christian
girls who shared my values—I always felt like an unwashed public school kid
around them. And I never picked up any
vibe that they were interested in me, either—too worldly to be one of them and
too churchy to be a “bad boy.”
And then there was the money thing. We were by no means poor, but we had faced
some tough times through the years and were still trying to catch up. I had no concept of or taste for designer anything. We were on the cutting edge of nothing. These kids were different, wearing their
Christian t-shirts with jeans that cost more than all the clothes we walked out
of the Bugle Boy outlet with that day, combined. They talked about Super Nintendos and CD
players with enhanced stereo speakers.
They spent spring break skiing and had summer vacations to Florida , California
These things might have kept me on the margins of a few
conversations, but these disparities were nothing compared to the difference in
transportation. Kids at our church had
used BMWs and Mercedes, brand-new Mazdas and Toyotas, or full custom pickups
and SUVs. I drove (when I could get it)
my dad’s brown 1983 Oldsmobile. Most of
the time, I went around like a beggar, asking people for rides.
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