Date: Tue, 19 Feb 2002 16:41:33 +0000
From: Hessa Meena <hessa_meena@hotmail.com>
Subject: Lesbian/High School, "Baby Vampire Made Me" (pt.4)

This is another few pieces from a book I was working on...
Love yourself, love your sexuality and $uport these archives if you can!
Hugs kisses and all that good shit.
hessa_meena@hotmail.com

Lesbian, High School
BABY VAMPIRE MADE ME, pt. 4

Dori went home that night and willed herself to throw up, maybe that would
purge the waves of embarrassment pouring off of her. If I'd just puke then I
could pretend I was wasted. She told herself knowing that it didn't matter
WHAT she did anymore. I'm fucked. She found Come's ELEVEN : ELEVEN in her CD
collection and put on her headphones. Her mom was asleep, so she blew some
pot out the window and tried to calm down.

Few songwriters captured the isolation she'd been feeling lately, and Come's
Thalia Zedek was one of them.

"Now we sink so softly
Now we sink so deeply

I think something's missing
I think something's waiting

I close my eyes
I sink to the bottom"


Somehow between junior high and high school Dori had gone from the kid that
everyone picked on to the kid that everyone avoided. Dori hung out with the
druggies and didn't play along with any of the popular kid's extra
curricular activities. She was your typical bad teenager, except for the
fact that she had a job and got good grades.

She spent most of her free time working in a record store full of bands that
her classmates had never and would never hear of. And by junior year she
had, literally, painted herself into a social corner. She felt safer
ignoring everyone.

It didn't work. Leo still bothered her, and she still liked to smoke pot
with Calvin and his basketball friends, but that was it. Most of the girls
looked at her like she was a walking fashion faux-pas or worse, and Dori
wondered why she let her mom convince her to go to what her mom called a
preppy high school.

"You'll get a great education and into a great college. Ignore the kids if
they're so preppy. Look at Izod, it went out of style." Her mom snapped,
impatient with Dori's adolescent dissatisfaction.

"What's Izod?" Dori asked, she was already in trouble for cutting classes
and all her friends were guys who carried beepers and sold drugs. It was
freshman year.

Her mother looked exasperated. "Ok, maybe I'm getting too old." She sighed
and started again. "You've seen the shirts, little alligators, right?" Dori
nodded. Her mom could be so strange in how she explained things. "Well that
seemed to control the world, and now...it's all about how wide can you kids
wear your pants." Her mom's eyebrows knitted, "forget bell bottoms, I
couldn't be-leeeev those pants." Here we go. Her mom launched into a rant.

Dori frowned, she didn't know what this had to do with the fact that she had
no friends at her sucky, preppy school. Even lunchtime pot breaks didn't
numb her dread, so she turned deeper into herself with music and painting.
Dori imagined the halls of her high school as her own private Guernica.

Guernica was a Picasso painting that captured all the fear and paranoia of
pre-war Spain, and every time Dori looked at it the pained faces reached
back. Picasso was scared of war, and Dori was scared of school. The same
pre-disaster anxiety seemed to cling to every moment in the crowded halls
and narcoleptic classrooms. Dori wondered if anything would ever break the
monotony.