As I said before. I was not really fat in High School. I was on two sports teams and felt healthy. I had big thighs and my best friend’s father thought it was funny to call me “lard ass,” but I was in decent shape. I had lots of friends from different cliques, sports friends, stoner friends, neighborhood friends, smart friends, etc. I’ve always liked people and I was outgoing. The few people who’d picked on me during eighth grade went to a different high school and I felt comfortable with most everyone so I can’t say that I was lonely during high school. But sometimes I still felt very much alone.
Most everyone had known each other for years and years. There were a few girls in my neighborhood that were my age and we got pretty close, but I always felt a bit different. I was always much more aware of the world around me than most of my peers. I’d grown up with a dad that was involved in the civil rights movement in Chicago, and had spent six weeks with an aunt who’d introduced me to many kids who were members of the Italian communist party, and I’d visited Mexico with another aunt. I was very into social justice even at that young age. Our family was the kind that signed petitions and boycotted grapes because of Cesar Chavez. Most of my peers didn’t want to talk about racial issues or politics and I know I set myself apart when I was vocal about them not using racial slurs. I had relatively progressive ideas for small town Connecticut and I often found myself having arguments that consisted of me against everyone else on the school bus. And I stood up for the kids who were getting picked on. I’ve always been the type of person who would stand up for others before standing up for myself. I’m not sure why.
When it came to food I continued my unhealthy ways, but I stayed in halfway decent shape. I have always loved sleep. I had a terrible time getting up in the morning and was often running to catch the bus and skipping breakfast. Lunch was usually some unhealthy food from the cafeteria and the only halfway decent meal I ate was the dinner my Mom (my stepmother) cooked. But our whole family were also fast eaters. We would sit down and all scarf our food as fast as we could. I remember when we got an exchange student from Switzerland and we all sat down to dinner together. We started to bus our plates to the kitchen after we’d eaten only to realize he had only taken about two bites. It was a good illustration of how quickly we were eating.
As many friends as I had in high school, I had absolutely no experience with boys. There were boys I had crushes on, but I had no confidence in my ability to attract the opposite sex and the couple of times that I did feel as if someone was interested in me, I wasn’t sure if I should be excited or scared to death. I still had issues with acne and felt ugly most of the time. I was probably about 170-180 lbs. but I was lucky to have a body that would gain weight evenly over my whole body so I didn’t look fat as much as solid. With three brothers I had always grown up competing with guys and I was not one to act silly or stupid to attract them. I was completely clueless about how to interact with guys other than as friends. And some experiences as a child and the divorce of my parents had left me really confused about how males and females were supposed to interact. Then when my mother died, I had no one to turn to to ask questions about boys. I loved my step mom. She was a great mom to all of us, but she had a baby of her own that she was raising and I was embarrassed to bring up the subject. I never went to any dances or the junior or senior prom. When I watch movies about high school days I always feel as if it is describing something I never experienced.
My high school had a modular scheduling program that allowed me to take more classes than normal and graduate early if I wanted to. I took advantage of that and was able to graduate in three years. Maybe that is another reason that I felt I didn’t have a real home with any of the individual groups of students because I straddled two different graduating classes. So I graduated at 16. And then my dad informed me that I was not going to college for a year because he was not going to send his sixteen year old daughter to college.
I did get an AFS scholarship to Norway to spend the summer there, so off I went. I had a brief (couple days) romance with one of the other students heading to Norway while we were in New York waiting to fly to our host homes. But it was over by the time we arrived in Norway for our one week language camp. I enjoyed myself, but I felt uncomfortable whenever my host sister was not around because her mother hardly spoke any English at all. I know that one of the objects of going on these programs is to learn the language, but I hated feeling stupid and so I wouldn’t make a lot of effort at trying to communicate. Then my host sister and I and a couple of her friends went on a bicycle trip down the coast of Norway. I hadn’t been on a bike in years, but I soon go into it and we had a wonderful time. I also was eating relatively healthily and getting a lot of exercise so I was in pretty good shape when I got home to start my year of working before going to college.
I remember a few times I dieted during my high school years. We did the Scarsdale diet as a family and I lost about 20 pounds, but as soon as we went off the diet I put it right back on and a little more. I was always promising myself to cut back, but it never lasted for long. I had dreams of being that slender fashionable girl who’d walked off the plane from Italy, but I wasn’t super overweight and little did I know that by the end of the year I would meet my first love.