There’s a funny thing that happens when you go against routine, and try something new. When you sit with your left leg over your right, instead of your right over your left. It’s weird, and funny, and uncomfortable, and in its own twisted way, extremely beautiful. Not because of the fact that you feel weird inside, but for the fact that you feel any change inside. Because change is different. And different is good.

Two weeks ago, I had my first big girl, high school dance. Balloons, lights, the whole shebang shebang. After the dance, Genna picked me up. Her old, blue, pickup waited in the lot as I walked down from the gym in my 80’s dress/skirt/who gives a c*** what it was thing, and walked across the parking lot. When I got in the car, she had her hair tied up in a tight bun as if she wanted to say something like “I came here just for you, so get in the car and don’t whine about how horrible the dance was.” I didn’t whine. Ten minutes into the car ride, she put her hair down. That’s what I call familial telepathy. After sitting in silence for a few minutes, I asked to turn the radio on.

“No.”

“Why not?”

She didn’t answer me or look at me.

She just turned the windshield wipers on.

“Genna, it’s not even raining,” I said.

She nodded her head. “Observant you are,” she said.

“So why did you turn them on?”

“Why not?”

That’s when I noticed for the first time in my life that not everything has to have a reason, and more importantly, the more meaningful things in life don’t have reasons. And there’s a reason they don’t have reasons. I just don’t know that reason yet. And I don’t care to know.

As Genna pulls up to my house, she turns the windshield wipers off.

“Well, this is you’re stop,” she says.

“Yep,” I say, in one of those perfectly awkward voices only a teenager can fully understand.

I step out of the car, and carefully place the words “I love you” in between the time that I close the door and the time that she starts the car, so that I know she hasn’t heard me say it, but I’m sure the world knows that I love her. ?
That’s the kind of lame person I am. I’m a complex thinker, an inventive learner, and a curious and passionate humanitarian, or at least, that’s what it said on my report card.

When I step into my house, I take my shoes off and set them by the door. I walk into daddy’s room, and kiss him on the cheek. Then, I walk into my room, turn the lights on, and divulge myself into my electronic social life.