1: Posts and What Not to Do With Them

In which poles are walked and juice is spilled.

It has long been said that one man’s kick in the groin is another man’s source of hysterical laughter. This saying has had an immense impact on my life, even though I am not a man. Nor does it hurt particularly much when somebody slips and kicks me in the groin, so there’s no laughter for anyone else, but I digress. Tragedies, such as Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth and other lesser-known works, such as my life, have provided much agony for high school students. My life may not have hurt anyone else, but it sucked for me, so since the best way to eliminate one’s misery is to spread it around I have decided to write my life’s story. Thus far, at least, since I’m not dead. Yet.

 

My life began like that of the average person, as a baby. The dictators hovering over my crib (also known as the people whose sex cells colliding resulting in me, most people refer to them as parents) had yet to decide that unnecessary cruelty was the proper way to build character and agreed on dubbing me Ava Elizabeth Riel. They had argued for months over whether to name me Louise or not. I, for one, am glad they did not. My hair would grow to look like a mad Frenchman’s in time, so there was need to accentuate that further by practically naming me after the executed Métis leader.

 

As the years passed, I grew older. Again, this was nothing special. My legs grew longer, my vocabulary greater and my hair became bushier. And bushier. And bushier. I was bearing a striking resemblance to Albert Einstein before my mother decided to put it into a ponytail. It has rarely come out since. She also had forced me into short skirts and wool sweaters. Those I made clear were not to stay a part of my wardrobe by throwing them out the window. I then watched my brother run them over with the lawn mower. This was back when he actually mowed the lawn. Now he stares at it as if hoping it will shrink back into the ground in fear before he has to go back inside to the air conditioning.

 

It was the summer before grade eleven. This is the best spot to start things. This way we get summer scenes and a year of school while still leaving things open for a sequel. I like sequels. They make my heart smile. Like goldfish crackers and Sharpies, both of which are irrelevant, and one of which I would not recommend eating. I highly doubt I’m the only person who finds fishy crackers unappetizing.

 

Anyways, back to the August before my junior year, where our stories starts…

 

 

It was a wonderful, sunny summer morning. The birds were buzzing, the bees were chirping, my parents where debating and my brother was nowhere to be seen. Exactly the way I liked it. Eager to keep my luck rolling for longer than twenty minutes, I pulled some clothes out of what I hoped was the pile of freshly laundered clothes on the floor " fresh ideally meaning they were washed within the last month " and scrambled down the stairs. Somehow I remembered to step over the squeaky stair " this day was shaping up to be a good one.

 

And it may very well have been an excellent day if my father hadn’t spotted me running past the entrance to the kitchen towards the front door, where I already had one foot into my flipflops.

 

“Ava,” he bellowed. My father enjoys bellowing. It makes him feel tall. I don’t know why, but that’s his explanation. “We need your opinion,” he explained even louder as I slunk into the kitchen. Our collie, Sheba, gave me an understanding look from her position by the door that lead to the deck, before collapsing back onto the linoleum to resume her daily opossum practice. At least someone could feel my pain. “Do you think J.M. Barrie was asexual because of being a psychogenic dwarf or was he just lacking in the trouser snake department? In need of a miracle pill for the middle aged writer, perhaps?”

 

See what I have to live with? And they say teenagers are obsessed with sex. Sex my a*s! Actually, no, please don’t do that. Anyways, back to my father! I didn’t bother to indulge him with a response and tried to run away, but he wasn’t willing to give up.

 

“Ava, don’t run away when we’re discussing the sex lives of classical writers! You never know what you could learn.”

 

I glared at him as I stood in the corner of the kitchen. My mother stirred her coffee, and if I hadn’t known better I would have assumed that it was milk. In reality, it was probably just her morning Valium. When she looked up she seemed startled at my appearance. It probably blew her tiny little mind. Most things did. Like the discovery that Luca was leaving ER, because whatever would she do without her favourite fictional Croatian doctor? My response when she had voiced that question was to tell her to get a life. I was grounded for six weeks for insubordination.

 

“So teach me something or let me leave,” I told him. Dad narrowed his eyes at me, and I could tell he was trying to read between the lines of what I said to discover some evil, secret hidden teenage meaning. Like invisible ink, only verbal. He wasn’t going to find one, and I had a feeling that somewhere, deep down " very deep " he knew that too but was simply being stubborn by refusing to take something at face value. “Look, it’s been a wonderful discussion, but can I go please?”

 

“Fine,” said Dad at last. I could tell he was watching me as I walked away, still trying to figure out what I really meant.

 

Once I was hidden behind the oversized, half-dead houseplant that had been a gift to my dad from one of his clients I sped up. Somehow I managed to get out the door, all the while looking over my shoulder like an escaped convict. I was a prisoner in my own house and I had the creepiest, most incestuous jailors ever. I needed to drown my sorrows, preferably in a watermelon slushie.

 

I had almost made it to the store when I realized that my purse was back at home in room, under my bed, hidden under a pile of quilts so my brother couldn’t decide that he needed to borrow twenty bucks without asking. My feet ground to a stop and I groaned, smacking myself in the forehead. By the time my tongue was lolling out of my mouth, the too cool for school eighth graders who had been walking down the sidewalk were staring at me and walking to the other side of the road. Some too blonde diva who obviously stuffed, but her tiny little lovers wouldn’t know enough to notice, was sniggering at me while pointing at my knees. A feeling of dread rose in my chest and I glanced down at my legs. My half shut eyes shot open in disbelief. There was nothing there. Absolutely nothing was wrong with my legs, except for the tiny cut by my ankle that I gave myself shaving and my knees were maybe a tad on the knobbly side, but other than that nothing. That little tramp! I turned to yell at her, but they had already disappeared around the corner and I wasn’t about to yell and chase after them. Besides, the boys were all taller than I was, though I had no idea how they would be able to run with their pants around their knees.

 

So, glowering at my apparently offensive knees, I started walking home. Unfortunately, because I was looking down, I didn’t notice the light standard.

 

“Hey, look out!” someone yelled.

 

Instinctively, I looked up to locate the sound and turned my face straight into the post. A sound like that of a bleating sheep escaped my mouth and I stumbled backwards almost bent double, pressing my palm to my forehead. The person who had warned me and therefore caused the accident approached me, but all I saw where a pair of gargantuan blue skate shoes and very hairy legs. I hoped very much that it was a guy.

 

“Are you okay?” they asked. I waved them away, but being unsure of where their head was, caught him in the eye with my finger. “Geez!” they yelped, jumping away.

 

I stopped whining and looked up to see a guy I didn’t recognize from school scooting backwards, his mouth wide open and one hand clapped to his eye.

 

The appropriate response would have been ‘I’m sorry’. But my mouth has a habit of going out on it’s own without my consent. “What do you think you’re doing?” I screeched.

 

“Me?” he said, clapping his spare hand to his collar. “How about you? I didn’t stab you in the eye!”

 

“No, you just walked me into a pole!”

 

“Walked you? I think you mean warned you about it.” He had pulled his hand out of his eye, which was still there only incredibly bloodshot. His cheek was streaked with tears, but I had enough residual common sense not to point that out. “You did all the walking by yourself.” He glared at me and fished around in his back pocket for a pair of wraparound sport sunglasses. I assumed they were to protect his eyes from further damage. Well, he wouldn’t have to worry about that, as I was doing my best to distance myself from him without walking backwards into a garbage can. “Well, if that’s all, I’ll be going.” Without waiting for me to respond, he turned around on his heel and walked away.

 

I harrumphed angrily and turned to walk in the other direction. After a few feet I pivoted, almost fell over and headed back home in the right direction.

 

“That didn’t take very long,” commented Mom when I clunked into the house. Apparently between the caffeine and the meds she was calm enough to speak.

 

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I sniffed indignantly, walking over to the fridge. I extracted the container of orange juice and headed to the cupboard for a glass. I had almost made it to the kitchen table to sit by myself, as my parents were still leaning against the counter, probably getting butt germs all over where dinner would be made, when I caught my knee on a pot for another dead plant and sloshed my juice all down my front. Grumbling under my breath, I slammed my sticky glass on the counter and headed to my room to change.