That night we congregated at Holly’s house again. Three doors down from Tyler’s. We cried and cried.
After that, The Twelve were a lot more compassionate. A lot quieter. Some of us went our separate ways after junior high, but that grief bonded us in a way nothing else could have. It set the tone for the rest our adolescence: that reality outside of childhood isn’t as bright as you want it to be.
I started to feel tired of caring what people thought about me. I didn’t want to care. I didn’t want people to feel like they had to put on a happy face around me. Or that they had to pretend to be stronger than they felt. What if Tyler had been able to talk to us about how he was feeling? What if we were all able to be more authentic?
I threw away all my Tommy Hilfangure socks and Aberzombie shirts, as well as the sequin scrunchies and everything I had shoplifted in order to fit in with The Twelve. Laura Clery was about to be her goddamn self, bitches.
CHAPTER 2
High School Hammer Time
Maggie and I changed a little after we hit high school. Our ambitions changed. For example, she wanted to give the speech at graduation. And I wanted to do drugs. Call us high achievers, because we BOTH reached our goals!
I don’t blame her for wanting to straighten up. I mean, she had straight As. She was good at school. Academic achievement was her ticket to success. But it wasn’t for me. I tested terribly, couldn’t focus, and I’d ditch class whenever I could. I also took geometry three times, and not because I loved it.
Almost failing school was fine, though. So what if I got bad grades? I was going to be an actress. It was my destiny. And you don’t need geometry to act, dammit.
I was very disruptive in class. (Kids . . . don’t be like me.) I just didn’t see the point of school. It was like a horrible spiral where I didn’t try because I wasn’t doing well and didn’t care to do well, and then my teachers would hate me, and then I would be more disruptive because . . . it’s not like I had any student-teacher relationships to preserve!
I was not a joy to have in class. For me, class was just a time for me to practice bits on my classmates—try to make everyone laugh. My teachers might have hated it, but to everyone else, I was a riot. I’d do one bit where I’d sit right in the middle of the classroom, where I knew people could see me from every angle. I’d fill up my mouth with water, hold it in there, and then pretend to be asleep. And then I would drool excessively until I heard whispers turn into exclamations of “AWWWW SICK!!!” It was very committed preparation. I took clowning around seriously, you guys.
Then I would fake waking up all startled, and splash everyone nearby. Classmates started trying to avoid my splash zone. But in a huge, overcrowded public school, it was either sit next to me or sit on the floor! When I worked in the speech office, I would photocopy pictures of my ass and pass them out. It was the original unsolicited dick pic.
Because I was very well known for causing a disturbance, this meant Maggie and I had to go our separate ways. With no hard feelings at all—she would still come over to my house in the middle of the night to watch movies with me in secret and sometimes we’d sneak into the porn section of Family Video after class—but beginning my freshman year, I was already starting to be known as a bad kid. I was tainting her image.
Because my parents were liberal hippies, I didn’t need to hide my bad-kid tendencies from anyone. I don’t think the following is the normal conversation parents have with their kids about weed:
Dad: Laura, are you smoking weed?
Laura: Um . . . I don’t know. Why?
Dad: Here’s twenty bucks. Can you get me some?
I got away with a lot. I was kind of an odd bad kid, though. I wasn’t completely removed from school or in a “bad-kid clique.” I was friends with people in all types of cliques and did extracurriculars like student council. But frequently I also happened to ditch class to smoke weed. Life is all about balance, you guys!
Once we took a field trip to downtown Chicago for a student council convention (of course I’m going to do an extracurricular that gets me out of class!). As I stared out the window of the bus, I made mental notes of all the shops I wanted to check out when I inevitably ditched the entire event. As I was exiting the bus and planning my escape, I saw this boy in my grade that I had seen being bullied earlier that day. The twist was that he yelled back at the jocks who were making fun of him, which was badass.
In his black jacket and black jeans, he was the best-dressed bullied nerd I had ever seen. I looked down at my weird sweatpants and touched my topknot, which was currently frizzing out. My mom actually made sweatpants, so I had like ten pairs and it was all I wore. Some might have called it slovenly, but I say: Ahead of my time! Athleisure is in now!!!
I approached him. “Wanna ditch this and smoke a cigarette with me?” I asked.
“I can’t. I have a boner for student council.”
“You . . . what?”
“I’m joking. Let’s get out of here.”
We slipped away from the group. I lit a cigarette, handed it to him, and he winced as he took a drag. He was pretending to be chill about it, but I later found out that this was his first cigarette! He just jumped at the opportunity to hang out with me because I was apparently a “cool kid” in my homemade sweatpants.
From then on, we were attached at the hip. We’d do everything together. I would defend him a lot from the guys who picked on him, but I don’t think he truly even needed me. Jack had this incredible “fuck you” sort of attitude. He didn’t care what people thought about him. He just was who he was. He didn’t come out as gay to me until years later (because of course it takes a long time to build up that courage), but he was always authentically himself. Always. I loved and admired that about him.
Every day we would smoke weed and ditch school. After we had too many unexcused absences, I had the brilliant idea of getting us actual excused absences. I always had a knack for accents and voices . . . and I had his mom’s voice down pat. I’d call the front desk of our school: “Hi, this is Caroline McCalpin calling. I need to come pick up Jack, so please let his teachers know, thanks.”
It worked every time. Other kids started to notice and ask me for my services.
“Can you call me out of school too?”
“Yes. That will be twenty-five dollars.”
I’d press *67 to make my number private, so the school had no way of seeing that everyone’s mom had the same phone number. It was foolproof, you guys. I got pretty sophisticated with my mom voices, too. I could do a Macedonian mom, an Irish mom, a New Jersey mom . . . Jenna’s, Lisa’s, and Jeff’s mothers respectively. I could do whatever anyone wanted from me. I once excused a kid for an entire week.
I started getting cocky about my ability . . . I probably crossed a line when I began making calls to the office while I was in class. In my defense, it was a huge public high school with overfilled classrooms and over four thousand students trekking through the halls. We could get away with a lot.
It was fourth period when my friend Megan started to complain:
“Ugh I don’t want to go to eighth period. I haven’t studied for my test at all. I’m gonna fail.”
I grinned at her, grabbed my phone, and pressed one button (I had the school phone number on speed dial), then pressed the phone to my ear. I looked around the room—our teacher was all the way on the other side, blocked by a sea of rowdy students. It was fine. Stop worrying!