NERD DAY:
We were out celebrating my father’s fiftieth birthday when my older sister Tina turned to me and said,
“Elna, do you remember nerd day?”
I stared at her blankly, Nerd day, Nerd day, I thought, trying to place it. Oh my goodness, I began. I had heard of people repressing memories, but I’d never realized… I was one of them.

***

In order to understand nerd day, you have to first understand this: as a child, I led a double life. At home I was loud, funny and boisterous, at school I was a painfully self-conscious. I’d think about running across the playground, and immediately my mind would counter, you’ll fall on your face, your skirt will flip up, your underwear will have a stain.  And so, to avoid potential humiliations, I decided to be invisible.
 There was only one thing that interfered with this: my father—an exuberant, hot-blooded Latino. He could get me excited over just about anything. 
I’d come home with a homework assignment, intent on doing just the bare minimum, when my dad would get involved. He’d think of an idea, and then I’d think of an idea, and the assignment would get bigger and more exciting. Before I knew it I was turning in creative projects. This meant: attention. There were gold-starred Elna assignments hung on the wall at my classroom. To my horror, I was being used as the class example. By the time I reached second grade I decided I’d had enough. It happened when I was given an assignment to bring in an object to demonstrate how a pulley worked. It was just the kind of project my father loved—it gave him an excuse to use power tools. He started to brainstorm. “What’s the coolest thing you can think of that has a pulley?”

“I don’t know, a flag pole?” I answered, trying not to care.
“A flagpole?” My dad gave me a look that said, you’re a creative genius and all you can think of is a flagpole?
He was right; I could do better.
“A bicycle wheel.”
He wasn’t impressed.
“Or a pulley on a bucket that goes down in a wishing well,” I offered.
That’s more like it. My dad’s eyes sparkled and he started rubbing his hands together. I could hear the friction. I loved it when he got this way, totally focused, like a kid with a new toy. I forgot all about playing it cool.
 A half-hour later, we were at the junk yard, hauling a large barrel into the back of the van.  We stayed up way past my bedtime building an arch above the barrel with 2x4s, and then attaching a rope, a pulley and a bucket.
The next day we rolled our creation through the classroom door.  When they saw my father, the kids perked up in their seats. Even Mrs. Fenton, my teacher, who must have seen my dad as a cute 29 year-old guy and not as my father, fawned all over him. “I just love Elna’s work,” she said, like I was a renowned artist. 
But the minute he left, the energy changed: everyone (except Mrs. Fenton) hated me. I tried to figure out what I’d done wrong. That’s when I looked at their desks. Every single kid had a pencil with a string tied to it as their pulley demonstration. And I, I had a full-on wishing well. Oh no. I’d inadvertently broken one of the sacred rules of being cool: I was the kid who looked like she really wanted to do her homework.
This was the end of my homework love affair with my father. From that moment on when he asked me if I had any projects, I just said no.
I rigorously maintained this stance for months, keeping all my assignments and school activities to myself. But towards the end the end of the year Mrs. Fenton announced that we would be having school spirit week.  She gave us a memo to take home to our parents that explained what we needed to do. I understood that this had all the makings of an Elna-Dad project, so I threw my memo away. Tina, not so smart, walked right up to my dad and handed the memo to him. That weekend, my father gathered Tina and me around him. The first day of school spirit week was Nerd Day.
“What makes a good nerd?” he asked.
I looked down at my sneakers, avoiding the conversation.
“Nerds wear glasses,” Tina suggested.
 “Nice,” my dad beamed.
“And nerds tuck in their shirts,” she added.
“Uh-huh.”
“And nerds…” she paused, “nerds are nice people, but people tease them, and they shouldn’t.”
I rolled my eyes. Tina was clearly not the right person for the job. “Nerds have slicked back hair,” I blurted out. “They wear pens in their pockets, and they have pimples, and they don’t just wear glasses—they wear broken glasses with tape in the middle.”
“Good,” my dad said, “but you forgot the most important thing: nerds have toilet paper hanging out of their underwear!” For some reason we thought this was hi-larious.
My dad told us to follow him out to the garage, where he unveiled an old trunk. He reached inside and pulled out two old suits from the seventies, one polyester baby-blue and the other pastel orange.
“Try these on.”
We crawled into the suits. The pants had to be tied on with a rope, and the sleeves hung down way past our arms. My father spun us in circles. “Nerds!” he shouted.
“Nerds!” Tina and I cried, with our arms raised high above our heads.
We found two pairs of old safety glasses and taped the bridges. We drew pimples on our faces, we slicked our hair back, and we stuck toilet paper out of the backs of our underpants. We were the best nerds ever.
Monday rolled around. Our nerd outfits were set up on the carpet beside our beds. When our alarm clock went off, Tina and I began the time-consuming process of replicating our “nerd” look. Half an hour later we were ready to go…glasses, check; hair gel, check; pimples, check; toilet paper, check.
My father drove us to school. When he dropped us off in the school parking lot he took one final look at us and called out the window, “Nerds!”
We threw our arms in the air. “Nerds!” we shouted. My father drove off honking the Pee-Wee Herman theme song. We watched the mini-van shrink as he drove further and further away, and we kept waving just in case he looked back.
When Tina and I finally turned around, the entire school—the kindergarten line, the second grade line, the fifth grade line, everyone— was staring. The first thing that I thought was, “Why are they pointing at us?” Followed by, “Why is no one else dressed up?”
As it turned out, it wasn’t Nerd Day. It wasn’t even school spirit week. My father had misread the memo. He had dressed us up as nerds a whole week early. And you know that dream where you show up to school naked and everyone is staring at you? It turns out it’s just as bad to show up to school dressed as a nerd from the 1970’s.
It was a defining moment for me, worse than any hypothetical I could’ve imagined—All I wanted was to be invisible. Instead, I was highlighter orange. I tried to undo it as best as I could. I took off my glasses, wiped my face, wet my hair, and removed the toilet paper. But there was still no way to explain why I chose to wear my father’s old suit to school.
I made it through the first half of the day by ignoring the staring and whispering. But when it came time for lunch, I knew I had to find a place to hide. I figured the less people saw of me, the better; as it stood my reputation would probably take years to recover.  So I took my sack lunch and headed for a place behind the gym that I knew would be deserted. I turned the corner. Sitting against the wall, wearing a baby-blue suit, eating her lunch alone, was my older sister. 
***
“Do you remember nerd day?” Tina repeated. I looked across the room and watched my dad attach three birthday hats to his head.
“Yes,” I said, “How could I forget.”

 

MY BIGGEST CRUSH:

I’ve had a lot of crushes in my day (I think crush is the perfect word to describe it too. It simultaneously means to have a brief infatuation with someone unattainable, and to be violently squashed) but every woman has one crush that trumps all other crushes. Mine was on Dan Sabo. We met in high school. He was a senior while I was a sophomore which made him automatically cooler than me. Plus he was the drama club president, which meant he did funny skits in the high school assembly and everyone in the whole school knew him by name, unlike me.

Our friendship began because I was Mormon. Dan had never met a Mormon and he was curious about my beliefs.  One day after drama club he asked me some questions. I answered them as open-mindedly as possible. And so began our routine: Every Tuesday after school we would sit in his car and have long conversations about religious dogma. Dan was a non-denominational Christian, and he loved to ask things like, “Why are we here on earth, Elna?”
I’d launch into an explanation, his eyes would light up, and I’d watch him shift back and forth in his seat with excitement. When he got this way he looked like he was trying not to wet himself; I guess God had that effect on him. We spent hours in Dan’s car. While I talked, Dan would listen intently; but when Dan talked, my eyes would glaze over, and instead of listening, I’d think about kissing.  I still don’t know exactly what non-denominational Christians believe because the whole time Dan was explaining his faith, I was making up scenarios in my head that ended with our making out.
This went on for several months. We would go to drama club meetings and find ourselves in Dan’s car talking about existence. The best part was that we really believed we were only one or two questions away from figuring it all out.
One day in the midst of one of these discussions, Dan started talking about snow, and how looking at fresh snow really helped him “get it.” He described the perfect whiteness of snow. He described how the little crystals sparkled, and then he explained that one could not look at snow and not believe there was a God.
The words came out before I could stop them. “I’ve never seen snow,” I said. Dan was shocked. I was shocked too—not because it was a rare feat, but because it wasn’t true. I’d seen snow dozens of times. I’d been skiing; I’d been to the Alps! But it was too late. I’d just lied for no reason at all and the only way to take back the lie was to admit to it. And I wasn’t about to do that.
“How is that even possible?” Dan asked.
I made up a story about how every winter I’d gone on some exotic family trip, Spain, Italy, the Bahamas.  And so on.
To Dan this wasn’t just a list of poorly planned vacations—it was a real tragedy. He explained that snow had guided him, it had helped him understand his inner light. All of a sudden his face lit up, “Elna, the mountains are only three hours away,” he said, “We should just drive to the mountains and see snow right now!”
I made a mental pro/con list. On the one hand, I really liked Dan, and if we spent six hours in the car together the mathematical odds of our making out would increase dramatically. On the other hand, I would have to act like I was seeing snow for the first time. And how do you do that? How do you have an experience you’ve already had, for the first time? I looked at Dan. He had his usual “I am so excited I’m going to pee my pants” look. Then I thought about all the times we’d just sat in the school parking lot. The keys would be in the ignition, the tank would be full of gas, but Dan and I never went anywhere.
“Okay,” I said, “Let’s do it! Let’s go see snow!”
Three hours later, at the base of Mount Rainier, clumps of partially melted snow started to appear alongside the road. I pressed my face against the window and tried to react genuinely. “Is that what I think it is?” I began. Dan grabbed a sweater from the backseat of his car and threw it over my head.
“Not yet,” he said.  “No peeking til we get to the top.”
For the next twenty minutes, I sat in my seat with his sweater over my head. I inhaled the cologne in its fibers, and tried as hard as I could to memorize his scent. I started to feel a little bit bad. Dan was so proud of himself for being the first person to ever show me snow. But it was all a lie. I realize that at any moment I could have compensated for this guilt by telling the truth, but that would have been too obvious. Instead, I decided to go deeper.  I decided that when Dan took that sweater off my head I was going to give him the performance of a lifetime.
I felt the car slow down and veer off to the side of the road.
“Stay right there,” Dan said, and he opened his door. While I waited I thought of all the possible reactions I could have: surprise, joy, gratitude, confusion. I practiced saying the word “snow” in my head. I could say it lightly like a damsel in distress, I could shout it like the word “Surprise!” at a surprise party. Or I could say it softly, reverently, like an “Amen” at the end of a prayer.
Dan opened my door. I felt his soft hand on my hand as he helped me out of the car. My feet made a crunching sound below me and I stood up, feeling the cold air on my bare arms.
“Ready?” Dan asked.
“Ready,” I said. He pulled his sweater off my head. We stood facing a large clearing covered in snow surrounded by a semi-circle of tall pines. Everything sparkled. I didn’t need to act surprised; I was surprised. Three hours previous I had been in the school parking lot, and now I was in the middle of the forest.  Amazing.
Dan searched my face for a reaction. I took a deep breath— it was time for me to deliver. I went with possible reaction number 17: I threw my hands up to my face like Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone. “Snow!” I hollered, the word echoing from the mountains above. Snow, snow, snow, snow. I twirled in a full circle, and then I bent down and picked up a handful of the new white powder.  I gazed at it. “It’s so beautiful,” I said.  “Ahh,” I added, shaking the snow from my hands and to the floor. “It’s freezing!” (As if I’d never touched frozen water before). It was a terrible performance, overdone, reeking of melodrama—but Dan loved every minute of it.
“Race you to the trees,” he said. I took off running. Dan didn’t run after me. Instead, he bent down, scooped up a pile of snow, packed it between his hands, aimed, and threw it across the clearing. It hit me in the middle of my back. “Rude,” I yelled. I could feel the wet spot through my T-shirt, but I ignored it and ran faster. 
When I made it to the trees, I glanced back at Dan. I could hardly process it. I was living out a daydream. I, Elna Baker, the chubby uncool girl, was in the woods with Dan Sabo, the guy who ran the school assemblies, and he was holding a snowball and he was chasing me! I threw back my head and felt the cold air on my cheeks as I ran. I imagined Dan catching up to me. I imagined his grabbing my right arm and spinning me into him. I imagined him dipping me, and I imagined him kissing me.  It would be perfect. He would kiss me like I always thought lovers would kiss, softly, confidently, like a declaration.
I was imagining all of this so vividly that I didn’t see the log directly in front of me. My right foot caught it at a perfect angle. My body was catapulted into the air.  I floated for a total of three seconds. As I flew towards the ground I thought about staying up there, but I’ve learned from years of being a klutz that landing is inevitable. I hit the ground with a thud, my body rolled over itself three times, and then I smacked into a rock.
“Owwww!” I sat up, embarrassed and hurt. My hands immediately went to my throbbing head. But before I could assess the damage, Dan was there, bending over me and holding back a laugh.
“Are you okay?” he asked, kneeling down beside me. “Are you hurt?”
I was about to say no when Dan leaned in and pulled a twig from my hair. We had never been this close. He was eight inches from my face. I could smell his cologne. I looked at him, his green eyes, his lips, his braces (okay, so he had braces, but he was still hot). After all my daydreams the moment had finally presented itself. I was going to kiss Dan Sabo.  That’s when I felt it, in my hand—liquid.  I knew without having to look that it was blood. When I hit the rock I had hit the corner of my head. “No,” I thought. I had to stop it. If I wanted to get kissed I had to will back the blood.
Dan was still looking at me, looking directly into my eyes. “Kiss me, kiss me, kiss me,” I tried to telepathically communicate. Then, a warm bead of liquid slid down the side of my face. I watched Dan’s expression change from admiration to sheer horror.
“You’re bleeding!”
I took my hand off my forehead. It was covered in blood.  I wasn’t just bleeding—my head was gushing blood!
“Don’t move,” Dan said. He stood up and looked around, as if he’d find a first aid kit hanging from one of the trees. “Oh shit,” he said, followed by, “It’s okay,” and, “We gotta put pressure on it.”
While Dan panicked, I wallowed in self-pity. I had spent six months engaged in deep religious conversations just so I could get kissed—and now that the moment had arrived, my forehead had spit blood.
Uggh. I took a handful of snow and pressed it up against the wound. It didn’t help. The blood mixed into the snow, and the snow melted down my arm. “Alas,” I thought, “my newfound friend does not serve this purpose.”
I must’ve looked pretty faint because Dan was getting worried, “We have to do something,” he said dramatically.  “Here,” he pulled his shirt half-way up, “use this.”
It was a vintage ALF t-shirt; one that I knew for a fact was Dan’s favorite. I should’ve just said yes. Then there would’ve been snow, blood, and partial nudity, all the makings for a great romantic experience.  Instead I said (and I still regret this),
“Dan, promise you won’t tell anyone about this?”
“What?”
“I have my period….” I began, “and I have a pad in my pocket.” It wasn’t a new thought. When Dan had searched his pockets, I had searched mine, felt the pad, and then decided against it. But desperate times call for desperate measures.
I pulled out the maxi-pad, carefully unwrapped it, undid the wings and stuck it to my forehead. At the time I was only thinking about how to stop my head from bleeding, and how to save Dan’s shirt. But when I caught a glimpse of his face, frozen in amusement and disgust, I wanted to rewind. I wanted to put the maxi-pad back and I wanted to slowly bleed to death.
But you don’t get second chances. I thought about this on the long car ride home. Dan sat in the driver’s seat staring straight ahead, both hands on the wheel, and I sat beside him leaning against the window, a bloody maxi-pad still pressed against my forehead. “After all of our profound discussions in the high school parking lot,” I considered, “this may very well be the meaning of my pathetic life.”