Let me tell you a story about something that happened to me in high school. Back then, I fit the profile of a heroin junkie to a T. Still do, actually. The disheveled appearance, the pale skin, the extreme thinness, the facial tics (actually, that’s probably more of a crystal meth thing, but it sure didn’t help my cause), the scar on my arm after I started donating plasma… it all added up to one inescapable, unavoidable, and wholly incorrect answer: drug abuse. I was clean as a whistle back then (and I still am, thank you very much), but I caught the whispers in the halls, and occasionally, someone would ask me to refer them to my dealer.
Anyhow, it seems the guidance counselors at my school were paying inordinate attention to me. Every day, it was “And how are you feeling today, Chrissie?” and “Are you feeling okay?” and “If you have any problems, you know who to see.” I monitored their behavior. They were amicable with the student body, as guidance counselors should be, but as soon as they saw me, they immediately seemed to want to put in a friendly word. They’d let other students pass by, but they never let me.
The clincher came one day. Over the summer, I had failed to remove a splinter from my foot in a timely fashion, and a painful infection had developed. Then one day during the fall, I stepped on a needle with my good foot. Between the festering abcess on one foot, and the painful wound on the other, I was forced to limp along in a most undignified fashion. So, I got to school, limped to all my classes, and was limping to lunch when I was spied by a counselor, who true to form, dropped everything to voice his concern.
GC: “You appear to have something of a limp today”
NTG: “Yes, I stepped on a needle last night, you see, and…”
GC: “Oh my god! Did you go to the hospital?”
NTG: “Uh, no…”
GC: “You need to go to the hospital! It might be infected!”
NTG: “I don’t think it’s infected, I cleaned the wound and everything, it just hurts.”
GC: “You could have caught some disease from it!”
NTG: “From a sewing needle?”
GC: “Oh, a SEWING needle! What a relief! I thought you stepped on a HYPODERMIC needle!”
Jumping to conclusions, anyone? I spent several hours after that trying to rationalize some sort of excuse for him that involved a perfectly good reason I might have hypodermics lying carelessly about that didn’t involve illicit drug use, but none came to me. It definitely explained their preoccupation with my well-being. That and my coming out of the closet and all, but I don’t think they even knew about that. I just looked like a walking drug addiction, I guess. I could have pointed them to a dozen other kids with real problems, or if I wasn’t to cynical about everything by that point, enlightened them as to some of mine, but… Oh, well. Glad to see things haven’t changed since then…
Heck is where you go when you don’t believe in Gosh.