I’m not bragging, but back home, I could lasso a runaway calf on horseback and have it hogtied in under sixty seconds by the time I was ten. When I last went fishing, I landed a 45” Musky from Mille Lacs Lake with a Bucktail spinnerbait and had it filleted before Dad docked the boat. And in school, I’d mastered a double back layout dismount from the uneven parallel bars my second year on the team. I wasn’t boastful—I was just trying to be competent in the world as I knew it.
So, I wasn’t prepared for our family’s move 1400 miles away to the East Coast. We left the summer before my sophomore year, and along with losing my home of fifteen years, I lost my horse, my gymnastics team, and my confidence. Not even my vocabulary was acceptable—I quickly learned to substitute sneakers for tennis shoes, jeans for dungarees, and soda for pop. I didn’t really make headway, however, until I met my neighbor and new best friend, Deb, a pot smoking promiscuous atheist Jew, who took my former virginal ranch-hand status as a personal challenge. In the span of one summer, I abandoned my Plow-boy Levi’s for hip-huggers, mini-skirts, and hot pants. Her family’s Passover celebration would have been my first drunk and disorderly offense if they’d let me out of the house, and by the start of school, I’d traded memories of my quarter horse for the pillion seat of my new boyfriend’s Harley. I wasn’t intent on being a bad girl—I just wanted to fit in.
Deb and I had college boyfriends, so we didn’t have to pilfer from the peach-fuzz-face crowd, but we had reputations to uphold. We began each morning in the girl’s bathroom where we stuffed handfuls of cotton balls into our bras, rolled up our waistbands to show mid-thigh length skirts, and discarded our knee socks for flesh-colored panty hose. The other girls separated themselves into The Nerds, The Cheerleaders, and The Greasers, but Deb and I were in a class all our own—Dangerous and Dangerouser, straight “A” students with secret lives. Instead of theater or debate club, our extracurricular activities were illegal driving, rolling reefers, and visits to Planned Parenthood. And we did it all while acing the science fair and climbing the honor roll.
By the end of the first semester, we were true fugitives, ‘breaking and entering’ the high school at night. The school didn’t have a gymnastics team, but it had a trampoline, and I showed Deb how to slide a credit card under the lock’s latch and enter through the boiler room door. We laughed and screeched along the dark hallways leading to the gym, set up the trampoline, and then the lessons began. A pike, three swivel hips, and a forward summersault with a half twist. We practiced for months. At the time of our arrest, Deb was ready for level three.
Karen Laugel is a physician and emerging writer. She lives on the Delaware coast with her kayaks. Her poetry has appeared in Pen in Hand and will soon be featured in the Tipton Poetry Journal. She is a member of the Rehoboth Beach Writers Guild and the Eastern Shore Writers Association.
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