CheapLit: Free ebook sample of "The Lotus Blossom - A Novel About Waking Up" by D.M. Kenyon (powered by Smashwords)

It is said that no one is ever really more than the sum of the contributions made to them. This is as true about people and books too. To my old friend Dick whose wisdom is all over these pages and to the constellation of masters who took me in as a student instead of throwing me out of their dojos, temples and retreats, I would like to extend my deepest gratitude for sharing with me what you have learned.

To Jane who I have watched struggle under the glass ceiling of sexism both blatant and latent and who has risen above it all to become a warrior just the same, thank you for providing the space for me to say what I have to say here and everywhere else.

To my parents I must give special thanks. No man and woman alive have ever worked harder to do right by their children. I can still see the younger version of my father, more boy than man, holding up a fallen leaf and twirling it in his fingers – “have you ever seen anything so perfect?” This is the moment I learned how to see. And to my mother who has said “I love you” in ten thousand ways and showed us all that it is what you give that defines you, I love you back in ten thousand ways and more.

To the Lotus Blossoms, my private book club of one book in many rough editions, thank you so much for taking the time to read, think, share and suggest – Malinda, Dick, Nancy, Alice, Jane, Anne, Beth, Hanna, Annie, Susan, Bianca, Laura, Matt and Grace.

And to Van, Emma, Maaike and Hanna: this is what I have been trying to say to you all of these years – that I understand now what you were trying to teach me.

Preface

Rinchen says that the Chinese have a custom where they write a prayer on a thin piece of rice paper and light it on fire. As the paper burns down to ash, it rises up into the air and delivers its message to the gods. I guess that’s what I am doing now. After everything that I have been through over these past two years, my journal is beat to hell, but surprisingly I am not. I am eighteen years old, more woman than girl, and I have just made camp alone in the mountains of Colorado. The engine of my motorcycle is still warm and it is a comfort to me. Here I sit with a flashlight stuck in my mouth writing in my journal as if I am closing in on the end of it. All this writing is really just an opportunity to think about what things mean, at least, what they mean to me in this moment. And like the prayer on rice paper, I may very well just light this thing on fire when I am done and let it float up into the air to find someone who gives a shit.

Damn, that sounded a bit dark and depressing. It’s not how I meant it. It’s just that the past is the past even though it seems to take on new meaning every time I find myself actually telling someone about it.

I have been taking the time to rewrite my scribbles and notes into a story. I started out as a gossiping fashionista with a fake tan and a deep concern for my social credit score. Now, everything that’s important to me fits on a wicked-fast motorcycle as I make my way toward the coast. I can fight three grown men at once and can meditate on a ball of light for an hour without seeing a single pink elephant. My, how things have changed.

When I was younger, some of my friends got into diaries, but I was not a fan. I was not going to write my deepest thoughts and secrets in a little pink book with a flimsy lock that my brother and a paperclip could expose to the world. And as for Facebook, well, that is just out of the question. I don’t even have a Facebook page anymore. No one tells the truth in social media in the first place -- it’s just way too public. And besides, these days I am having a hard time understanding why anyone needs to market their personal life like that just to have a list of virtual friends. It all seems to me to be a part of the hungry ghost realm, as Rinchen calls it. It all seems to be driven by people’s need to believe that they are known by somebody somewhere in the world even if it is only by an endless stream of trivia.

Rinchen says that you don’t need to let people see every random thought that you have no more than you need to parade down the street in your underwear. He says that throwing yourself willy-nilly at the world in an endless text string of babble or thirty-four photographs of you and your friends mugging for a cellphone camera is not the record of a life. It is the record of an accident. Not every thought is a keeper. It’s the thoughts that you are going to stand behind after experimentation and consideration and the chance to say “maybe not” that is all that the world really needs to know about you.

Recently, I started reading through my journal in what started out as a sappy, sentimental stroll down memory lane. Profound joy and utter disaster have been walking uncomfortably close to me as I have been making my way along the path of my life. Rewriting these old notes-to-self and writing new entries has given me the opportunity to think things through. Like the ancient calligraphy masters, this is my Zen circle. Write it down and be done with it. Light your prayer on fire and let it go.

I find myself talking to an undefined you as I write. It is interesting how you talk about yourself almost objectively when you are telling your tale to a hypothetical somebody. It does help me weed out my own bullshit as if someone might actually check into what I am saying here and catch me in a lie. But without my imaginary you, my thoughts about these journal entries would probably be drowning in violin music.

Rinchen says that when someone talks about their life, they are always telling a story. He says that no one gives out just the facts. They can’t. Everything that happens to you gets interpreted – by you, by the people who were there and the people who heard all about it from Gossipedia at school. The story of your life changes as it passes through your lips and into the ears of others who have their brains tuned to a completely different channel.

The only part of your life story that is truly yours, is the one that you keep to yourself.

No two Budoka fight in exactly the same way. No two fights can ever happen in any way other than how they happen at the precise time and in the exact place that they do. A butterfly landing on your shoulder in the middle of a sword cut can make the difference between life and death and the tale that is told about it later. At least, that’s what Rinchen says.

A really great guy once told me that it is not the picture that you have on paper at the end of drawing that makes a difference to your mind. It is the act of drawing, of absorbing and considering your experience as you stroke the meaning onto the paper, that truly nourishes being. The scenery, the artist and the art become one, but only for the duration of the strokes. We can’t store our lives – not even in art. We must simply live, consider and then let go.

-Lhamo

Chapter One: What’s In A Name?

My name is Madison and before I say anything more, I would like to state for the record, that I hate my name. That is, I hate my given name. Rinchen calls me Lhamo and I like that a whole lot better. What the hell is a Madison anyway? Who names their daughter after a street in New York City or the fourth president of the United States? I have friends who have equally screwed up names like Taylor Baynes, Reagan Riley and Carter Wilhelmsen – all of whom are girls, by the way. Now that I think of it, their first names are also the last names of mostly dead presidents. They, like me, were born at a time when the whole surname-inversion fad was all the rage for a new age of mothers who were desperately trying to get motherhood right. Somewhere in our house, stuffed in a box in the basement, is the book of baby names that my mom used to figure out what to call me. My name was not intended to have some deep meaning carefully chosen to guide me into a hereditary legacy like Billy Whimplethorpe whose real name is William Darcy Whimplethorpe III or Sunshine Johansen whose parents did a lot of drugs when they were younger, but at least managed to give their daughter a happy thought for a name. “Madison sounded dignified and sort of chic” was how my mom explained it. As far as I am concerned it has all of the dignity of a strip mall.

Of course, it could be worse. My buddy Ack, whose real name is Acaryanandana Balasubramanium, was old enough to drive before he could even spell his name. At least his given name means something – “son of the teacher”. Of course, it is not like this meaning shines any particular light on Ack or his dad, given that Mr. Balasubramanium is the vice president of a chemical company.

My friends have taken to calling me Lhamo after the name that Rinchen always calls me, but they have not missed the opportunity to add their own touch to it. They always spell it L-M-A-O, a play on texting shorthand for “Laughing My Ass Off” -- and always in capital letters. I can live with it. Rinchen says that the double meaning is quite fitting if you think about it. I guess I have not thought about it enough because I am not sure what he means, but at the end of the day, nicknames are given, not taken.

I did not grow up in any place of particular importance. In fact, it seems like the people who make up my suburb of St. Louis have gone out of their way to suck the importance right out of it. My town, if you can call it that, is called Westchester. Rinchen says that it is a desperate name. He says that as people moved farther and farther away from the city in order to get away from poverty, crime and racial minorities they left a trail of wanna-be utopian names like Sunset Hills, Town and Country and Westchester. These names were thought up by real estate developers and marketeers and were made to sound like places that you always wanted to come from. Rinchen says that they were pre-fabricated dreams where all the kids look like they are on TV and where everything is perfect – that is, if you are white, at least loosely Christian and middle class. I guess you could say that Westchester is where the American Dream is supposed to happen. Rinchen says that dream and delusion mean the same thing.

Growing up, it was just where I lived. I thought every place had big yards, no fences and the houses all looked pretty much the same. I thought every neighborhood had a pool and you could ride your bike in the streets because the only time there were cars around was just before school started and when my mom and dad came home from work. I thought everyone had a daddy car and a mommy van. I saw pictures in text books and on TV of poor kids living in ghettos but thought that they all lived on a planet called Guatemala, wherever that was. Rinchen says that I was born into a world of meaninglessness, and not in a good way (although he says that there is a good kind of meaninglessness) and that I was reared to be numb from birth. He calls me and my friends “the walking almost dead”. I am starting to see what he means and it is deeply disturbing. I am starting to see it everywhere, in fact, as if I live in a world full of zombies. These aren’t the scary kind of zombies that you see in movies; they are more like pathetic gotta-have-a-latte zombies that wander around on a tight schedule pretending that they have a life.

Rinchen always said that if I worked at it, I could undo the numbness. He said that this would be liberating – from what, I was not sure. He said that if I could wake myself up, it would be the beginning of a powerful life. I immediately thought of those hokey cartoons that my brother used to watch when he was little with robots making high-minded speeches about heroic ideals. A powerful life – what does that even mean? It sounds like the happy, happy, joy, joy crap they teach us at school or an advertisement for the Army. When he said it, I had this flash of a thought of me behind a machine gun in a helicopter over Afghanistan. Girls get to do that now, you know. I saw it in a recruiting poster at school. My mom talks about being powerful, but she usually describes it as standing up to men at work. That has never struck me as particularly powerful so much as being just a little bit bitchy.

And what is all this talk about happiness that Rinchen always harps about? I can see that my friends at school are not always happy. Some of the more emo among them even pretend to be miserable. It seems that they are really just trying to get attention. There are the really odd ones like Nick Thompson. He had this thing about cutting himself which is a particularly stupid way to try to get someone to care about you. He even recorded himself doing it and posted it on YouTube a couple of times. That’s just whacked. It is actually pretty gutless if you ask me. If you are going to end it all, make it stick. After a few too many fake suicide attempts, they stop bringing the safety net to the side of the building. If you did not get attention before, the world will positively ignore you after you don’t jump - again.

Actually, Nick eventually did make it stick and I am still very freaked out about that.

In Nick’s case, he was just trying to be important enough to drag his parents away from their social schedule. My guy friends call Mrs. Thompson one of the “hot moms” or “Mickey the MILF” (her first name is Michelle). She is tall, slender, has well engineered boobs and quite the stunning wardrobe. My dad refers to her as a “trophy wife” and then almost always makes the sad joke that he has his own trophy wife, meaning my mom. As if. Nick’s dad is a man’s man. He drives a big black SUV, works out every day, is well dressed and, to be perfectly honest, has a great butt. Most people say he is everything a modern man should be: smart, well put together, friendly in that fake “hello, Bob, how’s your wife” kind of way. He is the very model of a man and a gaping asshole of a dad.

I think Nick gave up trying to be the apple of his parents’ eyes at a pretty early age. They only seem to have eyes for themselves and not necessarily for each other. Instead, he sought proof of his own existence by creating an endless series of emergencies that forced them to run to his rescue, even if they came to deeply resent him for it. Back in the old days, kids with parents like that ran away to join the circus. Unfortunately, these days, you actually have to have skills to be a part of Cirque du Soleil. Who goes to see an ordinary circus anyway when you have the mall and MTV?

Nick eventually settled for blowing his mind on whatever drug he could find floating around the halls of Westchester High. I once overheard his mom telling one of the school secretaries that he was getting better, meaning that he was no longer a complete pain in her ass. He hadn’t changed. He was just sedated. He spent most of his time loafing around the house lost in the 10,000 songs on his smart phone. It seemed like he had finally figured out a way to be dead without the pain of actually dying. Ack was friends with him and said that if you could get past all the angry youth stuff, he was a pretty nice guy. He liked to read and knew lots of stories. From time to time, I had thought about getting to know Nick better. He wasn’t a horrible guy to anyone. He just seemed to be in a constant and incurable state of pain. But when push came to shove, I always backed off. I just didn’t want to get sucked into the Nick vortex. As a consequence, he never made it very high on my list of things to do. My life, at least before I met Rinchen, seemed to be complicated enough without trying to save the whales, if you know what I mean.

In my opinion, all that that self-pitying crap gets you is therapy lessons and the loss of car privileges. At our house, my parents are students of parenting. They have read books to figure out how to raise my brother Tyler and me. Yes, my brother is named after yet another dead president. And by the way, what the hell is that all about? They pay close attention to the psychological impact of every decision they make and every action they take and yet remain utterly oblivious to the fact that turning every moment into psychotherapy totally messes with a kid’s mind. Nothing could be more annoying than constantly being asked how you feel about this or that or being coached to express your anger. Dude, I have no trouble expressing my anger. The problem is that other than anger, I am sometimes not sure that I have any other real feelings. Okay, so that’s bullshit, but I do spend a fair amount of time on the island of Don’t-Give-A-Damn.

My parents don’t get it. I am not a science experiment. I mostly just want to be left alone. I will figure this stuff out as I go and, after all, I have Rinchen if I really need to get deep into my own cranium. Most of my friends and I would prefer that our parents simply be resources for the things that we cannot get for ourselves like shelter, transportation and unlimited cellphone service. That is their primary job after all. I think there are even laws that say they have to give us that stuff. I don’t recall ever learning in history class that Neanderthals spent a lot of time teaching their kids how to cope with their feelings while hunting wooly mammoths. They more or less stuck a sharp stick in a kid’s hand and told him to throw it. And, they probably taught him how to run like hell. I am pretty sure that Neanderthal parents did not give a damn about how little Ugg felt about any of it. Ugg only had to face deadly beasts and learn how to kill and eat them. This is pretty straight forward stuff. I, on the other hand, have to learn how to make it through Mr. Leary’s history class while he keeps trying to look down my shirt and how to pass by Rita Montrose in the hall at school without busting her in the face for telling half the school that I had mercy sex with Ack. (I didn’t, by the way.)

Rinchen says that parents always worry about how their kids will turn out because of their misgivings about how they turned out. He says that parents look back and see everything that they could have done better and that would have given them more. He calls it the consciousness of woulda, coulda, shoulda. Rinchen says that a cat can waste its entire life chasing its own tail in “order to’”. We chase a good education, not for the joy of knowing, but in order to get a good job. We chase a good job, not for the joy of doing, but in order to have a nice house. We chase after potential mates, not for the joy of loving another person, but in order to have access to an object of luscious hotness. A good job, a cool crib, some prime beefcake and, of course, a great set of wheels seem to be everybody’s gold standard (your mileage may vary on the beefcake).

Rinchen does have a point, though: humans are creatures of acquisition, pretty much like squirrels. But on the other hand, who goes through life playing for a crappy job, a dumpy apartment, a dorky boyfriend and a bicycle? Rinchen says that we all tend to miss the opportunity for real fulfillment. This has something to do with being. I am not completely sure what he means by “being”; I mean, what is the alternative – not being, like, dead? He is a rather confusing person sometimes (although some would say mystical); like one of those guys in a Kung-Fu movie who always speaks in riddles. He would say that they are only riddles to me because I am still a dumbass. He is a rather blunt guy, but never mean about it. But I am not the one who says that perfectly alive teenagers are “the walking almost dead.” He says that being should not be confused with simply existing. He also says that I will figure this out eventually. He says a lot of things. Sometimes I wonder if he isn’t completely full of crap and I am a total moron for listening to him in the first place.

Chapter Two: The Art Of Niceness

Since I was in third grade, I have been friends with Ack Balasubramanium. And I can prove it because I can pronounce his name. Lots of girls are friends with Ack because he is funny, but mostly because he is safe. As we got near the end of high school, Ack came to really resent being considered safe. In fact, it drives him nuts. He always has a date for school dances and they are usually really nice girls – who almost always happen to be in between boyfriends and really just want a reliable escort that isn’t going to get drunk and maul them in the parking lot. Ack fits the bill perfectly. He is not at the top of the A-list, but he is not a B-lister for sure; so that makes him acceptable to most girls, at least for event-dating purposes. He has manners like my grandpa. They must have locked him in the cupboard under the stairs for quite a while to get a boy to be so amazingly polite like that.

Ack’s parents are from India. Ethnic diversity in Westchester is pretty much limited to the children of highly educated professionals from India, Pakistan, Korea, China and Japan and only in small doses. There are guys like Kwame Johnson who are bussed in from the city with a few other kids. Their lives suck. It takes them two hours to get to school and two hours to get home at night. Kwame and the other kids from the city seem to get along pretty well at school, even though it has to be, for them, like going to school on Mars. The fact is, however, most of the white kids think that the black kids are pretty cool. Their toughness and street cred is assumed even if they are science nerds . Kwame comes to school looking all gangsta and that, but he plays the clarinet in the jazz band. I am pretty sure that most gangsta rappers skipped clarinet lessons. The birth of cool just doesn’t look like that anymore. He is actually one of the best musicians in school and a math whiz, too.

Ack, however, despite having jet black hair and medium brown skin, may possibly be the whitest kid in Westchester. He is what every mother out here is shooting for in a son. He is not allowed to wear jeans to school and his shirt is always tucked in. He does his homework first and watches TV last. He is one of the smartest kids in school and always makes the effort to be friendly. The thing that I like best about Ack is that he never really says anything bad about anyone, unless he is really, really pissed. It is like criticism and judgment are just not part of his programming. It is almost weird. If he is hanging out in a group and someone starts dissing on someone else behind their back, Ack almost always finds something nice to say about the victim of the back-stabbing. I don’t know how he gets away with it, but he does and because of it, he is one of the best-liked guys in school. The reason I like him so much is because I can absolutely trust him.

Up until recently, Ack had been the guy that I knew the best. When I was younger, he was my personal ambassador to the League of Boys. I could ask him things that I would be too embarrassed to ask even my brother. And dads, well, who the heck can talk to them about anything? Lately, Ack has kind of slowly disappeared from my scene as I get deeper and deeper into my own thing. I sometimes wonder if I haven’t been kind of using him, in a way. I think he still really likes me in the more-than-just-friends kind of way and while I really, really love the guy, he just doesn’t flip my skirt.

It makes me wonder. Why is it that the hot guys are usually knuckleheads and the sweet, honest guys have missed the bus to gorgeous? And why do I get all hot and bothered by looks and not sweetness? Surely sweetness is so much better for you. Rinchen says that if I ever grow up, gorgeous will lose its power and I will eventually look for kindness and forgiveness as the basis for my love life. Until recently, I hadn’t really had that much of a love life, so this has all been a bit theoretical. And yet, I do wonder. When I see all of the pretty people in their beautiful homes who seem to merely tolerate each other rather than actually love each other, it seems to me that nearly everybody gets it wrong. The divorce rate in Westchester is off the hook. Half of my friends are portable kids in a joint custody agreement. The parents that stay married do not seem to be happy and the ones who get divorced seem to be happy by themselves, but turn vicious when they have to think or talk about their ex-spouses. It’s a mess.

I think that’s why the boyfriend-girlfriend thing is becoming increasingly rare. Most of my friends hook-up and do the friends-with-benefits thing. Nobody kids themselves about permanence except for a couple of the Malibu Barbie types. Those girls not only practice codependent relationships with their boyfriends, but they have break-ups that are clearly divorce training. By the time they are on husband number one for real, they will already know how to get the house by a well-planned smear campaign staged on Facebook. When you are in high school, you know that no relationship is going to go the distance, so why formalize it by declaring property rights? And yet, if the right guy comes along, do you really want to be that casual? Of course, the art of hooking up has its advantages in that it seems to reduce the babe-to-bitch and babe-to-prick conversion that happens when someone decides to head on to greener pastures. Maybe. Most guys when they move on still seem to turn into total douchebags.

Rinchen says that guys like Ack will likely have happy marriages once girls figure out that he is the kind of guy to play for. He says that kindness and forgiveness are the real currency of relationships and that sex is just another form of getting high. This may be true, but I would like to get stoned on it a few times before I head off to a life of permanent niceness. (I’m just saying.)

There is one thing, in particular, that Rinchen said about Ack that really caught my attention. According to Rinchen, Ack is very skillful in relationships. Skill? Around school, when they call someone skillful in relationships, what they mean is that the person is either manipulative or good in bed. Rinchen says that Ack does not just fling himself at his friends and splatter himself across his social groups in an accidental pattern of whatever. He pointed out to me once that Ack truly has discipline when he relates to people. He doesn’t run his mouth off about any old opinion that comes into his mind. He chooses to say nice things. He works at being polite. He cares about being helpful rather than trying to grab power in a group of people by dissing someone to put them down so he can look big. In fact, the key to Ack’s popularity is that he consistently builds people up when he talks about them. He is the one guy that everyone knows will not punk them when they are not looking. While he may seem awkward and does not always like the path to “just friends” that he always winds up on, he refuses to step off of it. It is true, after all, that this is the higher, more difficult road and Ack is who he is by choice and his choices are actually pretty good ones.

Rinchen says that when a person starts living her life on purpose, cultivating her thoughts instead just blurting out whatever comes to mind and starts building relationships based on compassion, she will no longer leave behind a vapor trail of malicious gossip, hurt feelings and animosity. When such a person starts creating relationships based on real caring rather than choosing friends who improve her social score, then good karma will flower in her footsteps.

Karma. Now there’s a million dollar word for you. The more I learn about it, the more I realize that I have been an idiot too often in my life and have wasted a lot of time and effort on foolish things.

Chapter Three: Past Lives

In Westchester, there is a vague, yet accepted method for raising children. Books and therapists have a lot to do with it. My parents say that it was very different when they were kids. Both of my grandmothers were stay-at-home-moms, which in those ancient times were just called “moms”. Both of my parents have worked for as long as I can remember, but there are many women in my neighborhood who stay at home with their kids. Most of them seem to fit the same mold. They all have the best kiddie gear, like strollers made out of aircraft aluminum. They all drive vehicles with the best crash ratings and ample cargo space. Most of them talk about how much work it is to raise children and sometimes make it sound like it is harder than coal mining. They complain about their kids driving them nuts in one breath, but then talk about how freaking special they are in the next. Fun fact: almost all of them have babysitters. Some even have full-time babysitters. I have heard my mom comment, with a hint of skepticism, that these babysitters are necessary because stay-at-home-moms need some relief from the rigors of child rearing. Basically, they hire sitters so that they can go hang out with other stay-at-home-moms over lunch or at a day spa. Frankly, it sounds like a scam to me and I have some babysitting credentials. But I suppose that the stay-at-home-mom thing is good work if you can get it. I have noticed that in my house, neither of my parents have a huge appreciation for stay-at-home-moms. My father never says as much about it, but implies that they are opportunists and my mother seems to be jealous of them. I could be totally making that up, but that’s my story and I am sticking to it.

I remember being with my mom at a grocery store and meeting one of our neighbors, Mrs. Sheffield, on a Saturday morning. Mrs. Sheffield was pushing a double stroller with two toddlers. She looked incredibly well put together for a dash to the store. My mom was in jeans, a work shirt and no makeup. They chatted briefly. My mom’s half of the conversation consisted mostly of obligatory doting on the children. Mrs. Sheffield’s half of the conversation was mostly about Mrs. Sheffield and her highly dramatic struggle to raise two small children as if normal people didn’t have more than one. The whole conversation seemed like a set up. The well groomed appearance, the massive stroller and the tale of woe all seemed to be well-orchestrated to leave everyone who met Mrs. Sheffield with the same question: how does she do it? As we made our way through the grocery store to find laundry detergent, I overheard my mom wondering out loud, “why does she do it?” Mom said that Mrs. Sheffield reminded her of some of the people she knows at work who always make a big deal about every little thing they do so that it covers up the fact that they spend most of their time surfing the internet shopping for shoes.

Mom went back to work when I was about six months old and despite having a career, she continued to do all of the things expected of a Westchester mom. Both of my parents attended every parent-teacher conference unless one of them was out of town on business. My dad’s participation in school conferences, however, was largely a strategy to avoid getting yelled at by my mom. My dad’s standard of child well-being has always been based on the principle of no blood, no problem. My mother, on the other hand, was talking to teachers even when there were no conferences scheduled and actually read the notices and bulletins that were sent home from the school in my backpack. Because I took dance lessons all through elementary school and was in cheerleading during middle school, that meant endless transportation logistics for both of my parents, but especially for my mom.

Most of the working moms in Westchester have jobs, but not necessarily careers. A ton of them sell real estate. They engineer their working lives so that they can pick up kids when they need to be picked up and drop off kids when they need to be dropped off. Mr. Edwards, down the street, is a stay-at-home-dad, which in my neighborhood is like being a cross-dresser. I have noticed that the other men in the neighborhood, on the rare occasion that they gather for a party at the pool or something, don’t treat Mr. Edwards with that same seriousness as they treat each other. They don’t ask his opinion about manly things like golf or professional football. While he is not exactly ignored, he seems to spend most of his time talking about children with the moms. I hear that the guy has actually climbed mountains with ropes and stuff, but because he does not play golf, he is an outcast.

My mom is a master car-pooler. She even sets up spreadsheets that orchestrate five or six other moms into a taxi service with dispatching and logistical routing. When I was really little, we had to ride in car seats and this limited the number of kids that could be hauled in a single vehicle. As we got older, my parents bought my mom a minivan that had room for seven kids. It was practically a school bus. It wasn’t until my brother was in middle school and I was in high school that my mom got to have a car again. My dad was against giving up the minivan because he said that was handy for hauling garden supplies and home repair materials. Mom offered to switch vehicles with him. He drives a fairly large silver car with black leather seats, a killer stereo and a sunroof. Dad, realizing he was being wedged into the middle of his own double standard, caved in and my mom got herself a convertible.

When I turned sixteen, I had been dreaming about all the places I would drive. My parents were dreaming about the transportation load that I would be taking off of their shoulders. They could not get me to the license bureau fast enough. Since that day, I have been doing more than my fair share of hauling my brother and his creepy little friends around.

The one thing that parents really care about in Westchester is grades. Reading is a big deal here, especially when you are little. My dad once joked, at least I think it was a joke, that my mom started reading to me when I was still in the womb. How weird is that? There is a casual competition among parents to see whose kid passes the critical development milestones first. The Parenting Olympics categories are: walking, talking in full sentences, potty training and reading. How a child places in any of these events amongst the parental social circle will give parents no small amount of pride, or embarrassment, as the case may be. My brother Tyler was almost disowned. He was not fully potty trained until he was three and half. My parents avoided neighborhood functions for the six months of that era in my brother’s life, considering it safe to socialize only after he stopped crapping in his pants.

Rinchen says that kids these days are not really educated so much as they are processed and I totally get what he means by that. Everything centers around standardized tests. Even the text books were designed to help you do well on these tests although you don’t really learn anything useful. Rinchen says that is the karma of American education. Parents expect politicians to be responsible for educating their children instead of themselves. Politicians want to keep their jobs so they make promises to raise test scores. They then put pressure on administrators and teachers to abandon actual learning in order to spend the entire year preparing for standardized testing. They even delay standardized tests in my school district if there have been too many snow days as if a couple of days is going to make a difference. The scores at Westchester High are among the best in the state and yet we are still a school of complete dumbasses. But we are certified by the federal government as 100% grade-A beef.

Looking back at it now, my young life was structured primarily to build a résumé so that I could stand out on a written application and make it past the gatekeeper of success. I participated in things. There were ballet lessons when I was in first grade. This gave way to hip-hop dancing by fifth grade because the cool girls did not do ballet. Hip-hop was not allowed in Westchester until the white rapper M2 went legit. I still don’t think that the adults here have actually listened to his lyrics. They just heard that he won a bunch of major awards and declared hip-hop safe for Westchester children. My mother was wounded when I told her that I did not want to do ballet any more.

I was a Brownie and then a Girl Scout until that became lame. By middle school, I was cheerleading and playing basketball. My dad hated cheerleading. He said that the proper place for a girl was on the court, not cheering for some guy from the sidelines. My mom was not too hot about cheerleading either and by eight grade I was pretty much over it. I think it had something to do with the cheer moms who wore cheer team jackets to sporting events as if they were reliving the glory days that most of them never had. I guess back in the olden days only certain girls got to cheer. Some of the cheer moms had made the cut and some had not, but they were making damn sure their daughters made it to the top ... of what, I cannot say. Nowadays, the middle school cheer teams are pretty much open to anyone. The high school team is still picked through tryouts, but the A-list does not do tryouts, so being a cheerleader is not really a status builder anymore.

By my freshman year, I was pretty sure my dad was right. I had no interest in cheering for guys. I had no interest in guys who needed to be cheered for and there were a lot of them. Freshman boys are total dorks – except guys like Ack. He was always just my friend. He moved to Westchester when we were in the third grade. He was very shy in those days, but always polite. It did not take the teachers long to figure out that Ack was a brainiac. He had the highest scores on every test and they even talked about letting him skip a grade for a while there. Ack and I participated in the after-care program at school. Our parents picked us up after work, well actually, my mom picked me up after she got out of work. My dad worked later than my mom did. My mom once told me that this was the burden of being on the mommy track. Someone had to take one for the team and that was my mom. Because of my brother and me, she could not always devote the same amount of time to her job that some of her co-workers did and because of this she had not been promoted as frequently as my dad had been.

After-care meant that Ack and I had several hours to do homework and goof around. In third grade, kids are just starting to develop cliques. I did not like hanging out with the girlie-girls who played games where the same alpha-girl got to be the boss. Ack was no athlete, so he did not usually hang with the mini-macho boys who were constantly playing games involving the destruction of the universe. We both liked to play soccer and kick-ball, however, and we always seemed to wind up on the same team.

If truth be told, Ack was my first kiss, but I am not sure it counts because I did not kiss him back. It happened when were in sixth grade. We were sitting by ourselves at a table supposedly doing homework. Ack was telling me about India and how the young people there did not get to pick who they were going to marry, but rather, their parents do. I thought that this was the stupidest thing that I had ever heard. I remember asking him whether or not his parent were going to pick his wife for him.

“My grandmother says that they are,” he said suddenly looking down at his book without really seeing it.

“Will she have to be an Indian girl?”

“I guess she would have to be,” he said still off in some foreign distance in his mind, “American families don’t do it that way.”

“Maybe she will be really cute.”

“Maybe she will be a cow,” he said in despair.

“Find your own wife here and run away and get married,” I said. Ack looked up at me suddenly with a grin of hope and then sunk back in his chair and frowned.

“My parents will never allow it.”

“Hey, this is America, when you grow up you don’t have to listen to your parents. I think it’s a law or something.”

Ack smiled again. Before I knew what he was doing he leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. I wasn’t sure what to do. I wanted to wipe it off, but I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. We had been talking about such a serious subject and I could not bring myself to insult him. And … I kind of liked it. I gave him a hug in return. “It is going to work out, you’ll see.”

“I hope so”.

“It will, geez, you have years and years to figure this out.” From that point on, I was special to Ack. He would defend me on the playground. He would say nice things about me behind my back. He was always there to talk to and always there to help me with homework. And he never liked any of the other guys I hung out with -- ever.

More than once, he would create situations so that he could try to kiss me again, but he was never so forward as to push himself on me even though I could tell that he wanted to. I was the first of a long line of girls that told him that they loved him like a brother. In time, the mere whisper of the word “brother” on the lips of a girl would make him instantly sick to his stomach. It was a source of great irritation for him when we got to high school. He complained about it constantly. And yet, he would never degrade himself to push a girl against her will, nor would he ever talk trash about anyone, even the girls who were using him for a safe date.

By high school, most of my friends were girls and we usually traveled in packs, mostly for our reassurance and sometimes for our protection. I would like to say that it was safer in a pack, but not always. While girls band together publicly, privately they will mercilessly tear each other to pieces with gossip and back-stabbing. This is not just confined to the Malibu Barbies, but pretty much happens with all girls except your BFF. And even then, you cannot be sure. I would love to say that I have never done this to anyone, but before I really thought it through, which is before I met Rinchen, I had slashed many a girlfriend’s reputation behind her back. The way this usually happens is by text messaging or Facebook, although Facebook can be a bit too public. And besides, we have all had lectures in school about cyber-bullying so it is generally safer to do it by texting. In the olden days, you had to gather in secret to gossip about your classmates. But in the cellphone era, all it takes is fast thumbs and a Send button and you can get broadcast coverage to the whole school and beyond. Every time a phone vibrates in the halls of Westchester High, someone is getting nailed.

I remember thinking at one point, that it was almost an obligation to participate in Gossipedia at school. After all, we all have the right to know the truth about our classmates and if one says she didn’t when she actually did, well it is a matter of truth and justice that everyone be informed. Right? I used to think it was amusing. Who needs reality TV when you have text messaging? If someone really screws up, you can hear the phones throughout the whole school vibrating at once as the scoop rips through the hallways and classrooms at the speed of thumbs. CNN does not have a communications network that is this fast.

Rinchen says that people gossip because they believe it gives them power over others. He says that we put people down so that we can look big. He also says that it is a really sick thing to take pleasure in another person’s suffering, let alone cause it. You don’t learn this for real until you are the one suffering.

A lot of the gossip at school is about sex. It is funny that in the days of internet porn and sexting that sex is still regulated by the unspoken approval or disapproval of the social order. This can vary from clique to clique. The kids who party the most are typically the loosest about sex. The girls who show up drunk at football games are assumed to be having sex. Oddly enough, however, the guys who show up drunk at football games are usually assumed not to be having sex. The Malibu Barbies are having sex but are denying it. The Five Suspected Lesbians are believed to be having sex with each other which is considered, in the halls of Westchester High, to be something less than real sex. This is because real sex has risk. While I suppose there are diseases you can get from girls having sex with girls, it is not the same risks as when girls have sex with guys. Risk is what makes it real and what makes it newsworthy.

Every year, several girls disappear from school for a week or two and Gossipedia reports that they have just had abortions. These reports almost always come from the girl’s best friend who promised that she would never tell a soul. Most of the adults in Westchester oppose abortion religiously, politically and morally unless, of course, it is their daughter who has been knocked up at a party. Some girls never tell their parents and slip downtown to Planned Parenthood, if they can get past the age screening. Ah, but the daughters of parents of true conviction that make the mistake of telling their parents of true conviction that they have created a science experiment have to ride out a pregnancy. Nothing crushes your status at school more than being pregnant. It is social bankruptcy until everyone forgets about it and they never forget about it. You are forever branded as a slut although that can, over time, make you popular with a certain type of guy who is cruising for low hanging fruit. The girls that carry their babies to term usually transfer during their pregnancies, but not always. Baby mammas, however, are not accepted at Westchester High, though having sex certainly is.

This is not a great problem for me. My parents would absolutely freak out if they thought I was having sex, let alone got pregnant. I think about sex a lot, but so far, it has not been worth the risk for me. It is something that I will probably get around to in college. I have been told that having sex is practically part of college degree requirements. At least, that is the what everyone says.

During my first two years of high school, I really did not have the guy-thing figured out at all. That was largely because the guys in the first couple of years of high school did not have the guy-thing figured out either. But, over time, it starts to sort itself out. First of all, you figure out that how you look is directly related to how much attention you get from guys. While this should be the first clue that a guy only sees you as a thing, most of us think that the attention we get is proof of some sort of worthiness. Pimples are a huge problem and for that reason nearly all of the girls and many of the guys at my school see a dermatologist. Most kids try to get braces out of the way before high school, but it does not always work out that way. I had mine on until half-way through my sophomore year. That is one thing that Westchester has in abundance – abnormally straight, unnaturally white teeth, just like on TV.

Of course, there is the all-important issue of clothing. I would love to say that this is a mixed bag at my school, but it’s not. There are a variety of basic styles from Gangsta to J. Crew that are beyond ridicule. Boys wear their jeans baggy and girls wear their jeans tight. It was not until recently, that I noticed that this is an incredibly one-sided fashion phenomenon. Why are we expected to show off every dimple on our butts, but the guys get to wear denim pajamas? Seriously? I remember spending all day at the mall looking for jeans that “fit” which is girl-code for makes-my-butt-look-awesome. Recently, I have begun to wonder what getting your look just right even means anymore. But you know that you are getting into good fashion choices when you see the guys checking you out. This is a bit weird when you think about it because you really only want the hot guys to check you out and you do not want any attention from the dorks. There is no fashion filter that you can wear that only appeals to the guys you want to have look at you. It is an all or nothing thing. Rinchen says that fashion is sexual bait and that people, especially women, often confuse it for power. We think that because we can give a guy a boner that this is some kind of homage to our goddess-like hotness. Rinchen says that this is kind of like saying that a lamb has some kind of control over a tiger just because it has gotten the tiger’s attention. It is pretty stupid when you think about it, but it is amazing how many of the girls I know pray to that goddess. Rinchen says that the person who really gets trapped by fashion is the person wearing it. I am starting to see what he means.

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