Idiot - Laura Clery Page 0,6

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