The Virginia Hall of Fame
Virginia was the bad girl…the junior high bad girl who occupied a special niche in school culture. There could only be one Virginia because it took such unbelievable balls to be the junior high school bad girl, so nearly all the other girls fell back into their familiar roles of ‘unpopular’, ‘popular’, ‘pretty and knew it’, ‘smart and knew it’, ‘fading into the woodwork’, ‘quasi-normal’, etc.
But the position of ‘bad girl’ meant that you had to be a complete amalgamation of all these standard roles and then top it off with ‘daring’. Bad girl ‘daring’ incorporated such bravado, insight and self-knowledge that it couldn’t be pulled off by just anybody. You had to have all the tools and know how to use them. This was a job for a professional.
The part of me that wasn’t totally intimidated by Virginia was admiring of her finely tuned blend of male and female attributes. But make no mistake about it, she was insanely attractive (by school boy standards) and I bet if you took a poll of honest classmate responders you’d find almost unanimous agreement on that point, regardless of social standing.
I will be one of those honest responders and admit that I just couldn’t take my eyes off her, being all fascinated, attracted and repelled in one high RPM psycho-Cuisinart. To me, she was one of the most compelling girls in the entire school and I was dying to know what background fueled her attitude but would never have asked or, for that matter, even dared talk to her.
One day I realized that talking wasn’t even necessary to get Virginia’s attention because she was working on all sensory levels.
When I reached the 9th grade (the top of the junior high food chain in my district) I qualified for the job of ‘hall monitor’ and I had the authority to clear out the hallways during class times. I liked the authority bit and I loved just hanging out in the hallway pretending to know how to handle the miscreants who skipped class, checking hall passes and reporting those who flaunted my authority. O.K., to be honest, I just liked hanging out in the hallway. There was actually little difference between me, the law, and them, the scofflaws.
Anyway, strolling down the hall one day during verboten hours was Virginia, doing her bad girl thing and just daring me to shut her down and I froze like one of those deer along the side of the highway and, just like those deer, I couldn’t look away. I stared a hole right through her and she stared me right back down. But she saw something else in my stare…a crack in my armor and she wasted no time exploiting my weakness.
She walked straight toward me, stopped and said: “I bet you want to f*#k me, don’t you?”
I couldn’t even speak. I didn’t know whether to treasure the titillating moment or run home and hide.
Words were chaotically flying all over my brain and I couldn’t land one of them. I just kept staring and wondering how in the hell did she intuit my impure hormonal schoolboy thoughts when I never even uttered a single word to her. How, how, how? And what girl, in adolescent vernacular, talks like that?!?! What was going on here?
I was struck dumb and my silence instantly became her hall pass and her mission was accomplished. She was free to roam the halls and I was stunned into inaction by her two-ton one-liner.
I believe that was the day I became aware that the fairer sex was also the smarter sex; certainly the craftier sex. These girls had powers that went beyond the comprehension of the simpletons that I hung out with. Boys were crude and manipulative; taking wild, crazy swings, hoping that something landed.
Girls? They were like surgeons with scalpels and at our school Virginia was chief of surgery.