Bonnie - 2/5/2007 in 2005 - 2007: High School

Saturday I had another minor emotional breakdown. I went clothes shopping with my mom, because I needed clothes, and found myself completely incapable of interacting with people. I knew I was acting really fucking weird, but I couldn't do anything about it. I kept telling myself to snap out of it. I kept trying to sort of gather myself together and find reality again, but I couldn't. I found myself being really confused and just wanting to curl up in a corner some place with no people, even though I was in the mall. And then my mom yelled at me about acting weird and not paying attention to her, and I cried because I was thinking that all I really wanted was to go away and live alone and hang out inside my head for the rest of my life, and just not deal with social interaction, because I don't get it and I don't like it. Then I regrouped enough to tell my mother that I guessed I just hadn't felt like being around people that day, and that I guessed I just hadn't been getting enough time by myself lately, which was why I was reacting so weird, and that I was sorry.

When I got home, Bonnie called and asked if I wanted to do something. I didn't. I told her I'd call her back, and I thought about it for a while, and I finally decided that I really couldn't say no again, because this would be the third time and I really didn't want to add to Bonnie's social anxiety.

So I called her back and said, "You can come over... Whenever," awkwardly.

"You sound... sad again," she said.

There was a pause. This took me aback, and I was still reacting slowly to people talking to me. "It's because I'm awkward over the phone. Maybe you've noticed this." She seemed to accept this explanation. She laughed.

I was pretty terrified of what hanging out with just Bonnie was going to be like. I've had one on one conversations with her, but not many. And it still freaks me out a little bit that I'm getting close to her and she is not Molly or Dave. For awhile after she arrived, we hung out in the kitchen with my mother, who is extroverted. I was afraid to go down to the basement, because there would be no extroverts down there. But I finally got up the nerve to say, "So, what do you want to do?" And her answer was, "Play flute duets."

"Uh... Okay. Did you bring your flute?"

"No."

"Oh. Well then that would be difficult then, wouldn't it?"

"I suppose."

"Oh wait. Actually... I have two flutes. I don't know if I have any music though. My sheet music collection is... Heh, actually, I'll show you my sheet music collection, and you'll laugh."

I came down with lots and lots of paper, most of which was stuffed into one of two folders labeled "old sheet music." We went through it.

"Well, here's something, but it's two pages long and I only have the first page of it."

"You don't have any... books?"

"Nope. Well, I have this one, but it's for trombone. Wow, I have no idea where some of this came from."

We ended up playing two parts of a flute quartet we played a long time ago, rather poorly. Once we ran out of that, I went and got my guitar and real book and we played stuff out of that. That went better. (Well, at least for me.) At first this seemed like a really weird way to socialize, but then I realized that if you called it "jamming" it was actually pretty normal.

Then we just hung around for a while, and for a while she didn't say much, but then out of nowhere she said this:

"I hope in college I don't end up quickly making friends with a bunch of people who end up annoying me later. That happened to me at camp one time. This kid followed me around all the time, and he had a crush on me but I just found him really annoying."

"What, did he tell you?"

"Oh it was pretty obvious. And it was a nerd camp too, and he was one of those people who got an eight hundred on his SAT math and a four hundred on his SAT verbal, so he basically couldn't communicate at all. I hung out with him and a bunch of extreme extroverts. They were pretty much the only extreme extroverts there were, because it was a nerd camp. I'm not sure what I was doing hanging out with them, it just sort of happened. Two of the guys were twins, and they were tall and skinny with scraggly beards and high squeaky voices, and you could tell them apart because one of them always wore this fisherman's hat. The one with the fisherman's hat played the flute. I sat next to him in band."

"Wait, there was a band? What did you guys actually do?"

"Well it was mostly engineering classes, but everyone got one elective, and mine was band. Also we just sat around a lot. We played a lot of cards. And there was this one girl who would always be on a couch with some guy whenever there was free time, which was most of the time. There were a hundred and twenty of us and like twenty girls, so I guess that probably wasn't very difficult."

"Oh. Uh, I always just went to like, canoeing and archery camp. And the guy who followed me around probably got a four hundred on his SAT verbal and math. Once, he offered to build me a giant cheese grater."

She laughed. "Are Molly and Dave out?"

"What?"

"Are they out tonight, like, together?"

"No, no, I... Didn't call them." I considered telling her whatever the hell there is to tell about that, but decided against it.

There was an awkward silence, after which she said, "awkward silence."

"They're only awkward if you point them out."

Pause.

"I think I'm actually going to kick you out about now, it's getting kind of late."

So we went upstairs and she said "Thank you for having me," and then left.

"See you... Monday."