I’m three years younger than Jim, so my freshman year in high school was his senior year. The friend of his that I was most comfortable with had been friends with him since kindergarten, so I’d known Rob for essentially my entire life. Rob was always very good to me as a fellow youngest brother, so I expressed my teen gratitude to him by being a huge sarcastic pain in the ass.
Early in the school year, when high school life was still an emotionally fraught soup of anxiety and social confusion, I saw Rob in the West Cafeteria. The West Cafeteria was the “cool” cafeteria that had been remodeled to look like a mall food-court. I don’t remember my brief conversation with Rob, but it ended with him making a brotherly lunge at me, probably for a noogie or other testosteroney exchange. I turned to run from him, tripped over my own two feet, and watched my armload of books and binders spill out all over the speckled vinyl composite floor. As I fell in slow motion, I remember it being the most embarrassing thing that could ever happen…
… except that it wasn’t. In my memory it’s an instant revelation as I laid out on my tummy, but it’s more likely something that percolated over the next day or week. No one cared. The expected mockery montage never came. The need to live it down never had to happen. A whole room may have seen a nerdy kid fall over, but they all had better things to do then remember it. The literal scene from a sit-com or school dramedy happened, but there was no pointing and laughing. It was very freeing. I can’t say that I am more immune to embarrassment than the average person. I am certainly just as susceptible to a surge of adrenaline that comes from expecting to look like a fool in front of a stranger. It just doesn’t stick. I learned the Ridikkulus spell when I fell down, and defeated the boggart inside me.
(This terrible cheesy ending is entirely the fault of my inability to concentrate because of the playlist I’ve linked below. I put my headphones on tonight for two reasons. First to keep my cat from meowing at me while I write. Second to get into the high-school mood. I googled 1987 greatest hits and got the generic knock-off cover version playlist below. It’s an amazing alloy of bad and cheesy in a way that you must experience yourself.