"Maybe you were a late bloomer."

With six years separating us in age, Ms. K and I are not quite peers. The gap is enough time for us to have completely different pop cultural references. Then there's the fact that we're of completely different tribes. She's constantly fascinated by my high school experience since it differed so much from hers. Whereas she was athletic and popular, I was the geek and the introvert . . . she the chemically altered party girl, me the teetotal social leper. You get the idea.

I once made the mistake of telling her about the murder mystery party I hosted my senior year for me and my friends, conveniently and sneakily arranged for when my parents were out of town. I wrote the murder mystery, cleaned the house, and cooked dinner for my eight friends. We had a blast.

From the look on Ms. K's face, you'd think I had told her I made regular trips to Mars. The super nerdtastic concept of a murder mystery dinner party boggled her mind. "Was there booze at this party??" she asked, aghast.

"No drinking."

She was nonplussed. "Who throws a party without any booze?? High school is supposed to be about having fun, experimenting with drugs, pregnancy scares, and beer pong. Don't you feel like you missed out??"

"Actually no. Minus the pregnancy scares, I got that all out of my system in my 20s."

"Maybe you were a late bloomer," she added with a sense of finality, like she had figured out the key to the puzzle. "When did you get pretty?"

"I don't know. You've seen the pictures."

Indeed she had. Perhaps mistakenly, I showed her photos of me circa 1995. My dark, thick eyebrows were untamed. I wore dark lipstick against my pale skin, a remnant of my Anne Rice reading, "preppy goth" phase. I wore blazers with such regularity that you'd think I was a middle aged woman -- in fact I was mistaken for a teacher TWICE during my senior year. And I certainly wasn't experimenting sexually as I had no interest in boys and the feeling was apparently mutual.

Ms. K shook her head. "We would not have been friends in high school. I would have been like, 'Who's that chick with the blazer? She's weird.'"

"Hey, I'm okay with my weirdness."

"You're normal now!"

"Normalish."

"Yeah. Ish," she said with a smile and a kiss.


[ Me in 1996 with a sassy smile and a healthy tan -- minus the goth makeup thankfully. ]