My escort to the coronation ball at my school as a junior started calling me in the fall of senior year, shortly after my relationship with my first boyfriend ended. He'd asked for my number in the spring. When I asked why it took him so long to call, he said that I wouldn't have talked to him then. "You were surrounded by too many people." This was true. At school, I was usually with people or talking to my friends. Even at that point, given that I was the main student leader as student council president, a group of younger guys, some of whom had supported me during my campaign for office in the spring, would meet me at the door and walk me to my locker most mornings. It became a routine so natural that I never thought about it. I suppose he felt I was a bit more humble by this time, and more alone, since I no longer had my football player boyfriend from Lanier.
He started to call me on the phone now and then. When he tried to talk me into letting him be my escort to the debutante cotillion, I explained that that couldn't happen, because a friend of mine, and his family, understood that he and I were going to the ball together, and that it was out of the question to change that. He'd been the one I had always hoped to go to the ball with, since I was 11.
One time we were talking, he said that I was "just a cult of personality," I suppose, riffing on the popular song by "Living Colour." I guess he was trying to make fun of my seeming ubiquity and power as a student leader, or supporters, such as the aforementioned group of freshman and sophomore guys who met me at the door in the mornings and walked me to my locker. Maybe because I'd watched one too many soap operas, and mastered some of their theatrics, I may have surprised him and taken him off guard by agreeing with his disrespectful assessment. Quite calmly, and introspectively, I responded by saying that "You know, I think you're probably right. Because I really don't give people much of a choice. If they don't bow down, I knock them down. And if they don't say they're sorry, I make them sorry. Don't you EVER say anything like that to me again. And I mean it." That response, while not reflecting real actions or experiences, acknowledged the genuine respect that I was typically shown.
A couple of specific experiences may have also been on my mind at the time. In eighth grade at St. John, at school on rainy days, other girls went in pairs to monitor and play games with children in lower grades. As class president, my job was to sit up front at the teacher's desk and monitor my own classmates during recess as they did work; on those rainy days, our game period would be scheduled for later in the afternoon. On this day, one of my classmates refused to cooperate and listenend to his walkman, even popping his fingers and bopping his head because he was so into the music. I asked him to put the walkman away and he refused to do so. I went back to the desk.
Suddenly, I got an idea. I wrote a note outlining a plan that I passed to one person and that went from one member of the class to the other. When everybody was on board, I gave the nod to one classmate, who got up and went to his desk in the back of the classroom and tapped him on the shoulder to talk to him, moving her lips and gesturing as if to ask him something. He said he couldn't hear. She repeated it. All around the classroom, people were moving their lips and engaged in conversations that were totally inaudible to him. "I can't hear you!" "What's happening?" He got up and started going from one person to the next, and they pretended to talk to him, but were just moving their lips. "Say something. Somebody! Anything! Oh my goodness! I can't hear." He went from one classmate to another, in desperation, and they moved their lips. He had a great sense of humor and was always so funny in general; he constantly made people in our class laugh with his constant jokes. In fourth and fifth grades, maybe because he was the tallest boy in class, he was a guy that a lot of girls had a crush on, the one that a lot of them liked to talk to on the phone. I was never one of the girls who admired him in that way or to perceive him as "cool." He'd loved pinning signs on people's backs without them knowing, and once even pinned one on my back that said "I'm ugly but I'm proud." He was constantly playing jokes on people. He was just the perfect candidate for a joke like this, for how he exaggerated his panic and desperation was genuinely funny. He played the part in this scenario to a T, spinning desperately from person to person in class in a desperate attempt to hear something. He was hilarious with his exclamations and gestures. I looked on in amusement and quiet victory. What made the joke even better and more realistic was that the band was practicing in the library, which was across the hall from our classroom. The instruments would start and then stop suddenly. This went on for several minutes. He was affected deep puzzlement and would say, "Now, I can hear the band." "Why can't I hear anything else." We had him going for about ten minutes. And then finally, one guy said, "They're gaming you, man." He looked up at me, knowing I was behind this joke that had convinced him that he couldn't hear, and I smiled back.
In the back of my mind, I was also probably thinking of the time that this guy in our class who harassed some people when I was in ninth grade began to say disrespectful things to me one day. I told him to back off and underscored to him how ashamed of himself he should be going around picking on people. I told him that school was no place for that sort of thing. The next day in class, he called my name. I looked around at him, expecting him to say other rude things. Instead, he softly said, "I'm sorry." I said, "Then I'm sorry, too." He never bothered me again.