In and Out of the "In" Crowd

At the new school, in the small former mill town outside Boston where my mom had grown up, I met Rosemary and Sally and Sheryl who called themselves “college” with a long “e”and said I was one of them. They wore plaid skirts with knee socks and Peter Pan collars. Their hair was in neat flips. I was honored to be considered one of them. I even wrote to Franny that I was now in the “In” crowd. I was that proud.

But they were boring after the theater and the journalism of Kalamazoo and I drifted away from them. Then I met Denise Lawson who was kind of a bad girl. She had red hair and wore slouchy sweaters and skirts that were so short she kept getting called into the girls’ dean’s office. Miss Pepperil was straight out of Dickens. She’d make surprise raids on the classrooms and have the girls kneel on the floor and rap the knuckles of those whose skirts did not fall all the way to floor in the kneeling position. Then she’d trot them down to her office where they sat gossiping and doing their nails while the rest of us labored over algebra and U.S. History.

Denise had a cousin named Kevin. He went to another school in a neighboring town, but he didn’t drive and had to have his mother take him everywhere. He wasn’t allowed to drive with the other kids.

Kevin was cute and just enough of a rebel to spike my interest. When mom wasn’t around, he’d cut class and hitchhike to meet me in the bleachers of the football field. He didn’t play sports; he didn’t hang with the cool kids. Just my type.

Our spot was A J’s Pizza named for Andy and Joan, the owners. A J’s was where all the uncool kids went. The pizza was fine and Andy was counselor to us all. He flipped his dough up in the air the old fashioned way and dispensed advice with the pepperoni.

When I say we were uncool, I mean we were really cool, in the way that teenagers were cool when they were too young to be full fledged Beatniks, and the hippies were yet to be. We were star crossed lovers with nowhere to go but A J’s in the evenings and the balcony of the town’s only movie theater on Saturday afternoons.

Tuesday was the night for hanging out downtown. The stores stayed open late and all the kids, in groups of “college,” outlaws, uncool wannabe hipsters and everyone left over did the stroll down Main Street, eyeing each other and ending up at places like AJ’s and his chief rival, Sam’s across the street. Only the college and the left over kids went to Sam’s though. His lights were bright and his pizza was definitely second rate.

It was one Tuesday night when Kevin was grounded or his mom just didn’t feel like chauffeuring him around, that Denise taught me how to shoplift.