Confession

I have a secret.  Coming out about this is probably going to make my life harder for a while, but hopefully in the long run, people will understand, accept it, and move on.

***

“Shit. Hell. Damn!” I said.

“Screw. Dick. Bitch!” said Angie, kicking her tan, suede Peter Pan boots against the middle school bleachers.

“Shit, what are some other curse words? I can’t think of any.” Finally, the day had come that I started using “salty” language, as my mother put it, and I was drawing a blank.

“Um… what about fuck?” said Angie.

“Fuck! Yes, Fuck! FUCK, FUCK, FUCK! I shouted, flipping my hair around like Madonna in the “Lucky Star” video.

The almost-empty gym echoed with significance, as Angie laughed the throaty laugh of a girl who snuck drags off her parent’s three pack-a-day habit.

“I have an idea,” said Angie, pulling a bobby pin from her teased and Aqua Net-sprayed hairdo.

***

This may come as a shock for those reading who think they know me.  So brace yourselves.

I am not a very nice person.  In fact, I’m a bitch.

For those of you (besides my ex-husband and any representative of Comcast) who are still reading and thinking  “No, Lisa, you’re one of the nicest people I know,” I’m going to need you to listen very carefully.  OK?

***

We took turns carving “Fuck” on the bleachers and fantasizing about what it would be like to kiss Michael J. Fox.

When the bell rang, I walked to my next class feeling like a pop star.  I couldn’t wait to try out some of my new vocabulary on the assholes in social studies.

“Did you study for the quiz?” said Denise, playing with the alligator on her pink Izod shirt. I hated that girl.  With her long legs and blond hair, she always looked like a moving version of a preppy mannequin.

“No, bitch.  What’s it to ya?”  I said, walking away.  I could feel my armpits forming a relationship with my off-brand t-shirt.

Angie looked at me from across the room.  “Nice,” she nodded.

Oh my God, I think I might be a badass!

***

There are several categories of bitches.  There’s the lady at the grocery store who sees you heading toward the register with a handful of items and a toddler and speeds up to get in front of you with her overflowing cart, all the while looking casual and nonchalant.  That’s not me.  That’s what I call an “inconsiderate” bitch.  I hate that kind.

Then there’s the bitch who cuts you off in traffic but flips YOU off as if it was your fault.  That’s not me either.  That’s a “rude” bitch.  I’d like to smack that kind.

There’s also the bitch that pretends to be your friend, but then goes behind your back and tells everyone all your secrets.  I’m not her either.  That’s a “backstabbing” bitch.  Those bitches are the actual worst.

Me?  I’m what you would call a “socially appropriate” bitch.  The kind that says nice things like, “Oh, it’s okay that your kid just knocked my kid off the jungle gym and called him a butt face.  It’s a normal part of their development to be territorial,” when what I really want to say is “I don’t know you very well, but it seems you’re raising an asshole.  You should probably get off your fucking phone and parent him, so he doesn’t grow up to store the half-gnawed body parts of cut-rate strippers in his freezer.”

Us socially appropriate bitches have to work twice as hard as other bitches, because in most cases we want to use curse words and tell it like it is.  Instead we spend a lot of time at the end of the day bandaging up our half-eaten tongues and telling our spouses how our day was in low whispers just in case the spawn has gotten out of his fucking bed.  Again.

***

When I got home from school that day, my mother was waiting at the kitchen table with her hands crossed in her lap.

“Lisa, can you come here a minute, honey.”  She only called me honey when someone died or she was mad.

Please let someone be dead.

“Your gym teacher called me today,” she continued.

Fuck.

***

Being punished from talking on my pink princess phone for two weeks gave me a lot of time to think about what I’d done.

Even though I apologized to the teacher and my parents, the truth is I wasn’t sorry for what I did.  School sucked and it deserved the “Fuck” I gave it.