#normal conversations

B: I did cut one of them

A: well! 9 more to go

anyways pentobarb can be given just about anywhere and still cause death. it's still a sedative overdose so it's still, presumably, peaceful, although slower, I suspect. also it's a CII controlled drug so like. not a great murder plan overall if you were thinking that.

I have an uncanny talent for remembering miraculously far back into my own life with incredible clarity. My earliest memory is of the yellow lining inside my crib. Another is of my second birthday party, where I wore a light blue dress for the approximate length of one photo....before I tore it off and spent the rest of the event naked. 

Man, I knew how to party back then.

One of my favorite, and probably most shameful, memories is from Kindergarten. Let me preface this story by saying I was a real Goody Two Shoes. I followed the rules, I shared, I never picked fights, I always came in from recess on time, I talked about Jesus a lot. Like, a lot.

BUT.

There was this girl named Brittany in my class and she represented my very first encounter with a bully. Like some kind of villain from a Lemony Snicket novel, she wore the same shade of pink every single day. Even in Kindergarten, she already had a really good grasp on her Regina George persona. 

As a good kid, I wasn’t really familiar with enemies or bullies. Because up until this point, I’d never had any. All I really understood was that this Brittany was making my day to day life miserable. She made fun of my hair. She kicked mud on my shoes. She would pretend the snack I brought to class smelled bad. I did not know this word at the time, but I'd have described her as a fucking douchenozzle.

Now, my parents were big proponents of the "kill them with kindness" method, and I took that very much to heart. So whenever Brittany reminded me that I had a boy's name or that she thought my Show & Tell was stupid, I’d laugh and let her cut in front of me in line for the swings.

That had the ultimate effect of just making her MEANER.

Plus, at some point, I think Brittany understood she wasn't getting to me (she was, but on the outside your girl was cool as a cucumber), and that just fueled her fucking fire. So one day, she went for the jugular. And if you know me, then you know the jugular is my family.

"I saw your mom drop you off at school today," she said.

"My mom drops me off every day," I agreed.

"Well, your mom is ugly. And I bet your dad is too."

Those words just hung in the air between us and I remember feeling really sick. All the color must've drained from my face because this poisonous smile slowly spread across her face like a puddle of oil.

No one had EVER said anything mean about my parents before. It felt foreign. It felt wrong. And I knew instinctively that it was unfair territory. I mean, it was one thing to say something mean about me - I could defend myself if I wanted to - but my mom? My dad? They weren’t even THERE. How were they supposed to stand up for themselves?

The thing about this memory is that after Brittany verbally attacked my parents, there’s a momentary blankness. I don’t know how I managed to get next to Brittany, I don’t know at what point I grabbed the front of her dress - but the memory picks up with my tiny hands on her pink collar, flinging her into the mud under the monkey bars. And then, I held her down. 

I held her down until her ruffled pink dress was drenched in playground sludge. And while Brittany screamed and cried and drew our class and teacher to one side of the playground, I slipped back into our classroom, went to Brittany's personal cubby, located her Show & Tell piece - an iridescent Dance Magic Barbie dress - and shoved it down the neck of my sweater.

AND THEN I WAS SENT HOME FROM SCHOOL FOR BULLYING BRITTANY. 

It was a cruel twist of fate. My mom had to leave work to collect me from the main office, where I was being held. Through tears, I told my mom what had transpired. I told her how Brittany had been torturing me all year. I told her that I’d finally broken when she had said my parents were ugly. And through big, ugly, messy tears I confessed all about the mud and the stolen Barbie dress because I “wanted to hurt Brittany like she hurt me.”

And I waited for the hammer of justice to fall. 

The hammer of justice ended up being my mom buying me ice cream at Rite-Aid.

So, I guess the moral of this story is something along the lines of don’t fuck with my family or don’t be a bully....???? I don’t know. I don’t care. Mostly I just wanted to say, hey Brittany, if you’re out there, your Barbie dress still looks great.