Seventeen: Grad, black eyes, and a shiny green suit

Seventeen.  The last year of high school.  The year where your future is out in front of you and has the potential for anything.  At seventeen, I was looking into the future and seeing my future self as a popular, sporty, active, and successful.  Instead, I joined the year book committee as editor and started working at Zellers as a cashier.

But still!  It was graduation!!  I was going to rule the school in my senior year.  I called teachers by their last names only (no "Mr" or "Mrs" for me!) and skipped a class.  Yes, it was only one class and I got busted at the mall by my teacher, but I was BAD ASS.  Seriously.

I was playing Rugby again that year, but was seriously hampered by the fact I had to have a job.  It's funny.  My brother played basketball and therefore did not have to work because he was too busy.  I played rugby, edited the year book, was in choir and band, and in a couple of advanced classes, but I had a job.  Not that I'm bitter.

A week before graduation, we played a particularly rough team.  Not the team from the year before where I had told their captain we didn't want trouble and then proceeded to (ACCIDENTALLY) break her leg, but another team with similar toughness.  We did a couple of plays and then someone mentioned that someone else was bleeding.

When someone is bleeding in sports, you're supposed to stop everything and stop the bleeding.  I looked around for the culprit.  It was then someone pointed out it seemed to be coming from me.  My nose was gushing blood.  I seemed to have broken it by running into another girl's shoulder.  With a giant maxi-pad held to my nose, I stopped the bleeding and sat out the rest of the game.  Later I went to the doctor and confirmed it was broken.  A WEEK BEFORE GRAD!  He stuck his fingers up my nose, did a hard yank to the other direction and pronounced me cured but for the start of two black eyes.

Just in time for year book pictures.  Thank goodness grad pics had been ages before, or it could have been ugly.  Instead, it was just kind of funny.

There I am 5th from the left in the back row.  See how scary I am?

By the time grad came around, I was still a little bruised and swollen, but I was healing.  It took a lot of makeup, but I managed to make the bruises look like somewhat-on-purpose eyeshadow.

So, I spent 3 hours curling my hair and pinning it up.  Then I squeezed into an emerald green dress I had designed myself.  If you look at my pic, you can see the swelling in my face, but otherwise I didn't do too badly.

Faces have been removed to protect those guilty of 90s fashion.

I just wish I had picked out a better dress, I look like the guy from Good Morning Vietnam!  Shiny green suit!




This is a further installment to My life in stories.  I would list them all, but... that's a lot of things to link to.