Young Me 2

This momentous year, my mama, after many months of my woeful pleading, bought me my very first pair of baggy jeans, and also my very first scrunchie. These two wardrobe objects, in combination with an extra-long braided brown leather belt and an authentic blue leather-bottom Jansport bag with straps extended to hang lower than my butt, instantly shot me up to a completely new level of insane cool. Also in seventh grade, I won a school-wide essay contest about our highly unanticipated new middle school building for which I was awarded a certificate, a ballpoint pen, and publication in the next month’s Highlights magazine. What I was not awarded was rights to subjective expression, and only found out whilst reading a copy of the “final” essay before my class, that the school administration had changed segments of the essay in which I detailed any negative opinions of the new building, omitting such gems as: “vomit-colored orange stairway railings”.