“I know you better than you fake it…”
A few years after graduating college, with the idea in mind to become a literature professor, I found myself going to graduate school for a degree to teach high school English. Not a terrible idea entirely, but I was entirely unaware of what made it terrible; I was expecting it to be something that it never was- genuine– and this slight in understanding would set me back years.
“Hung down with the freaks and the ghouls…”
It was my last semester in college, and I wanted to re-take “Intro to Creative Writing” because I had gotten a C- in it the first time around and I couldn’t allow that on my permanent record. It’s hard to imagine caring about such things in retrospect, but in the early aughts I had it in mind to go all the way to my English PhD, and what kind of doctor of literature would have gotten a C- in fucking Intro to Creative Writing– where the girls write about boys they’re fucking who don’t want to date them and the boys write about girls they like from afar- who are sometimes sitting in the very same class.
It was in this very same class that I met Kasie, who had written very adorable stories about her boyfriend not calling her on Easter and an entire five-pages as a thinly veiled excuse to complain about one of her girlfriends- whom I knew, even if Kasie had changed her name to something innocuous, she included enough catty details that made it obvious. I leaned over to her desk and said, “I know who this is…” and watched her turn beet red- a bold move, unwittingly played to great effect- our meet cute.
KTP 