My Semi-Erotic Fiction Was Read Aloud to my Eighth-Grade Peers, and I Survived.
“Okay, class, I’m going to read your Halloween essays out loud now,” my teacher said. I panicked. I could feel the perspiration pooling in the pits under my arms. Water marks were surely seeping through my turquoise Hollister zip up. I pulled my arms closer in an attempt to hide the most obvious symptom of my undiagnosed hyperhydrosis. I knew holding my arms close would only make the problem worse, but I still did it anyway.
When did my eighth grade English teacher tell us she’d be reading these out loud? And when did my public school language arts currciulum become the Iowa Writers’ Workshop? I had not written my “spooky” five paragraph essay for a general audience. No, I had completed the assignment of constructing a loosely Halloween-themed story with a shoddily incorporated list of vocabulary words on brand with PSSA benchmarks for mine and my teacher’s eyes only.
My English class this year was a place I dreaded everyday. I was seated with a group of girls who were viscerally more popular than I was. But I willfully chose to sit with them. We sat in a group of four, and the ring leader of my desk cohort liked to make it known often that what I had to say was stupid. To be fair, a lot of the time what I did have to say probably did sound a little stupid —but this was usually out of pure nervous energy more than anything else.
The teacher, a woman with Farrah Fawcett layers and a perpetual brandy wine colored manicure, was chummy with these girls. This was a small town, and a thing like a last name wielded a surprising amount of currency. Not for me. I either got spit on as a teacher attempted to pronounce my name a few different ways before allowing me to intervene, or, on the rarer occasion they knew who I was would say, “where’s your dad from again?”
The overt dismissals and eye rolls by this particular desk mate to my contributions were glossed over by the teacher who found this individual to be the darling of the class, which only made me more nervous and prone to saying nonsensical shit that would in turn garner more annoyance from my peers in the cube from hell.
The only reprieve from the negative feedback loop of viciously incompatible teenaged girls and an unobservant English teacher were actual assignments like the one on this morning. My favorite one being any sort of personal essay. And if it wasn’t a personal essay assignment per se, I made it one by loosely basing the two central characters in all of my stories off of myself and whichever boy I was pining over at the moment, which is how I found myself writing Edgar Allan Poe erotic fan fiction.
I tended toward the spooky, but instead of leaning into the macabre, I pulled out my usual bag of content tricks: amateur romance novel meets a fourteen-year old’s underdeveloped frontal lobes. I’m gonna make The Masque of The Red Death sexy. Yes, there would be a party with masks but instead of anyone bleeding from their pores, Prince Polo, this story’s resident hottie— a loose mashup of Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Spike and 2006’s most eligible teen heartthrob— just shows up and notices a beautiful and “intriguing” woman (me). They would spend the evening eating my favorite cheeses, only stopping to go grind on the dance floor whenever a good song came on, or until their hummer limo showed up and whisked them away to a nearby Sandals resort. The piece was a steaming hot pile of garbage.
“I’ll go through the essays in alphabetical order by last name,” the teacher said. Shit. This meant I would have to sit through nearly the entire class’s essays before getting to mine. Plenty of time to destroy another sweatshirt.
As the teacher stood at the front of the class with a stack of loose leaf paper all different shades of distress in her hands, I thought that maybe some of the other essays were just as bad or as embarrassing as mine. But they weren’t. I soon learned that everyone had followed the assignment to a tee, using words like “grotesque” and “gruesome” to tell stories that were, well, appropriately grotesque and gruesome. Interestingly, a lot of my peers followed plot lines very similar to that of an episode of Fear Factor.
“Okay, the next essay is Allie’s,” the teacher announced. I looked straight at my feet, trying to disassociate from my body as hard as possible and remembering the opening paragraph I had written the night before:
Prince Polo had gotten all the provisions ready for the fete: a troupe of visiting acrobats in between tour stops on Cirque du Soleil, NOW 23 piping through the Sony speakers in the castle, and a table of cheeses exquisitely picked for Lady Marmelada.
“The dashing Prince Polo arrived at the masquerade party with just a moment to spare before the dinner spread was put out,” the teacher tried to read, but stumbled on every other word, drawing attention to my terrible handwriting consisting of ambiguous letters, each with the spacial awareness of a toddler. “Prince Polo looked at the cheese table and was an apostate… hold on. Prince Polo what, Allie?”
“Prince Polo looked at the cheese table and was appalled,” I blurted.
“Got it. Prince Idol looked at the cheese table and was appalled. All of his favorite snacks were in attendance at the party.”
“That is not what appalled means,” one of my desk mate’s pointed out to everyone.
“Yeah I think what you wanted to say there was taken aback,” the teacher added. I had ever so slightly misused just about every vocabulary word while trying to jam them into my trite love story. “As Prince Polo stuffed gouda into his mouth amongst the dreadful and foolhardy partygoers, he noticed a beautiful and alluring woman with brown hair across the ballroom floor…” the teacher read on.
“Oooo, Allie, so romantic,” the girls in my square looked at me with their taunting eyeballs. I looked down at my armpits, half hoping blood was seeping out of my pores so I could perish into humiliated oblivion. My teacher continued on reading the story, while I thought of ways I could toss myself through the window as inconspicuously as possible.
Around paragraph three or four, the teacher continued: "There were seven rooms in Prince Polo's mansion, which had been featured on an episode of Cribs already. One lime green, another sky blue, the next fuscia, then lavender, hot pink, chrome for the millennial, and finally, aquamarine — Lady Marmelada's favorite color.
Prince Polo looked deep into Lady Marmelada's piercing blue eyes through her obstinate and gaudy mask. The pendulum of the giant clock at the front of the ballroom swang from the window to and fro the wall as the other masked partiers waltzed. Just then the the chimes of the clock rang out twelve times. The charming and haw- haw- oh, are you trying to say haughty?"
"Yes," I grumbled.
The teacher took the opportunity to explain to my classmates that haughty meant arrogant, and probably wasn't the intended word to describe the dashing and noble Prince Polo.
"Just then a man wearing a cloak made his way to the aquamarine suite where Prince Polo and Lady Marmelada were talking. 'You alone will stand against the vampires, the demons, the forces of darkness' the mysterious cloaked man said to Lady Marmelada. ‘You are the chosen one.'
Lady Marmelada went to grab the cloaked figure but when she went for his mask, the man literally disintegrated into dust. Knowing her destiny, Marmelada turned to Prince Polo and said, ‘well you heard the man. Let's go!’
Lady Marmelada and Prince Polo then walked arm in arm to the nearest cemetery where they would defend the partygoers from the formidable and belligerent vampires."
The teacher finished the essay, and held her gaze at the sheet of lined paper in her manicured hands. A fly ripping a fart could have permeated the silence in the classroom. I eventually looked up to see mouths agape. Some faces were twisted in partial horror, not unlike the dreadful partygoers at the masquerade ball. I had finally discovered an appropriate usage of appalled. The ring leader of our cube, however, had a look splayed across her face like gratitude, like I had just given her an exquisite birthday gift.
I managed to receive an A on my tawdry essay, but not without a blurb from the teacher about improving my handwriting. I crumpled the paper into the sleeve of my green plastic binder, hoping to shove it into the inner-most recesses of my mind.
Unfortunately that part of the brain responsible for suppressing traumatic memories would deem this one unfit, and I'd spend many nights about to fall asleep only to be jolted to consciousness because I was reminded of this essay being read aloud to the eight grade public.
But over the years I found ways to assuage the sheer humiliation of that eight grade horror. I am a survivor, after all. That although no one ever showed up to my school letting me know that I was the chosen one to slay the vampires with my hot, bleach-blonde boyfriend, writing would eventually become a lucrative skill. Not only that, I could also take comfort in the strides the over-the-counter deodorant industry had made in the ensuing 16 years or so to mask the sweat death.
Lady Marmelada then swipes her Lume deodorant a couple times over her pits, ready to slay the corporate vampires while she battles from home. When she finally gets a moment of reprieve after filing a dazzling news story, she sends her dashing Prince Polo a beguiling snap. Later, she meets her confidants for some cheese and ale, fantastic friends who reserve zero judgement for our Lady Marmelada and only for the belligerent foes.
