Mr. Irresistible Part I (Because I Suck Monkey Balls)

Author’s Note: Too busy this week to get the entire thing done, but I’d feel horrible if I did two straight BSG live-blogs back to back. I’ll have the completion up Monday and a question about something I want to do.

“I’ll do it,” I say emboldened by a causeless rush of courage. My moods are in a constant flux between agoraphobia and extroversion, and right now I am cresting the wave of high volume oddity. “I want to be in Mr. Irresistible.” Susie Green gives me a look of distaste from over the clipboard. In our high school’s version of a male beauty pageant, I am the only non-athlete on the list.

Susie is a cheerleader, and while she would like people to believe she doesn’t like me because I don’t take things seriously, the truth is that she’s hated me ever since I snot-rocketed her in the face in the second grade. “Um… that’s fine, BC. I can’t keep you out but what’s your talent going to be.” Her smile says that her teeth would rather be in my throat.

I toss back a handful of skittles, and murmur, “I am going to strip while solving a velocity problem.” I love skittles. Especially after I sort them all into their respective colors and down them like shots. They’re like my Viking mushrooms, destroying my fear so that I can find glory in battle.

Susie rolls her eyes. “Are you sure you can do that?”

My teeth are grape colored as my lips work their mathemagic. “It’s easy. I’ll just take a polynomial function with the g constant already taken into account. I only have to take two derivatives to know everything about the object… actually only one since I already incorporated the acceleration and I’ll assume free fall. After that it’s basic algebra.”

“I meant the stripping part, but that’s fine.” Susie leaves before I can make any more bizarre additions. In only a few minutes after she leaves the euphoria has passed, and I’m sitting back in my desk wondering aloud “Did I really just say I’d do what I think I said?”

In the constant war between who I am, and who I might have been had I been raised in a healthy family, I often throw up bits of insanity like bubbles of swamp gas. They are impossible to control and after they surface I just have to live with the smell. As I sit at my desk, sorting the skittles by their place in the rainbow and eating from the inside out a sudden dread creeps upon me. This could be more humiliating than the time I put on a magic show in the third grade. Who the hell was I kidding? Doing math in public is way more fucking strange than doing magic tricks. At least people have some context for public magic tricks.

I winced as I ate the yellow skittles, remembering the bright red cummerbund and black top hat I had worn so many years ago. I supposed my tiny magician’s costume was in the attic somewhere. How much worse would it be to remove a similar costume? In front of hundreds of people? That afternoon I ran for three miles until I felt that I was going to collapse. In less than three weeks I was going to have to put my money where my mouth had so eloquently chosen to place itself. I needed to make sure I looked… well slightly less disgusting.

I was just nuts enough not to ask to be taken off the list.