you know, there are few things in this world that i am unequivocally sure of. what adult life has taught me so far is i don’t know anything about anything. it’s how i know that i finally made it out of that unbearable quarter of everyone’s life where they keep thinking they know things once they hit a milestone.
- when i graduated high school i was like, “i’m eighteen now! i’m a real adult!!”
- when i graduated college i was like, “i’ve got a degree, suckas! i’m a real adult!!”
- babygirl. you sleep in a mattress with a hole in it, you’ve never made your own doctor’s appointment, and you are still consistently mispronouncing “epitome.” so let’s not get too cocky, bud.
anyway, now i’m like, “i know nothing except that i’m afraid of the yellowstone supervolcano!” and that’s how i know i might almost be a real adult.
what was i saying? oh, right: i don’t know a lot, but i do know three things:
- dogs are good;
- eating is the best part of every day; and
- bikinis: why?
i don’t understand why we as a society have gone all-in on bikinis. i mean, okay, yes, they’re “““““sexy””””” and “minimize” “tan” “lines” and whatever whatever whatever, blah, but like, they are the least practical article of clothing mankind has ever invented and we all!!! just accepted it!!! we were all like, “yeah, this is fine, even though you can’t jump off anything without it falling off, you’re gonna get twice the sand stuck in the places you want zero sand, and the tan lines you do get are gonna be frickin weird once we inevitably evolve from bra-and-underwear style to like, aeonflux-inspired leather flesh prisons.”
i resisted buying bikinis for a long time, and because you are all my friends you will accept me at my word when i say it was for the above reasons and not deeply-rooted insecurities about being a woman in society. but at a certain point, it became like, more difficult to die on the hill of not wearing bikinis than to just accept my body for all of its flaws.
- you hear that, capitalism? laziness got me, not your advertising.
my first bikini was fairly lowkey, as far as bikinis go. it was blue and white, had pretty strong coverage, and tied on both the bottom and the top so you could adjust how tight it was. that was great for when i wanted to jump off things and needed it not to fall everywhere, but also sometimes wanted to lay out in the sun and didn’t want my legs to fall off from lack of circulation.
- haha, just kidding. if i’m out in the sun for more than 20 consecutive seconds, my whole body bursts into flames.
i caved and bought it because i was in the seventh grade and we were going on a family vacation to the bahamas. well, it was sort of a family vacation. my brother couldn’t come so i just brought a friend. that’s the same, right? her name was jane* and she was the kind of great that meant eventually we had to stop being friends, because she was into all the same things i was into but was slightly better than me at all of them.
- her name was not really jane.
as an adult i probably could have made that friendship work but as an insecurity-riddled twelve-year-old, it was doomed.
- sorry, jane.
- not to inject a dose of reality is sad into this funny story about a bikini betraying my trust, but. you know.
- that one’s on me, pal.
this was way before the tragic but inevitable breakdown of our friendship, however, when jane and i were still thick as thieves. she came on vacation with my wonderful but admittedly weird family and was a real trooper, even when i made her dance the cha cha slide up to sixteen times in one day and insisted on wearing a billabong t-shirt with an orange butterfly on it everywhere we went. also, at the end of the trip, when she was sad because she’d met a boy and their love was doomed, i just said “aw, hey, bud, bud, aww, heyyyy,” over and over because i didn’t then and don’t now have any idea how to respond to people who are crying.
- “pineapple hurt mouth? mouth want less acidic fruit????” – me, panicked and confused, every time someone starts crying near me.
- like, i consider myself a fairly empathetic person, it’s just that the concept of crying in front of someone is so horrifying to me, molly mccriesalone, that i never know…what it is…that other people want. because i would want us all to pretend that it isn’t happening.
- “me? crying? oh, no. no, i’m, uh…. i’m just cleansing my cheeks using the natural saline in my body. it’s a whole new thing the beauty blogs are doing. get into it.”
- but apparently some people like to be “comforted” in their “times” of “need”. or whatever.
she even helped my mom talk me into swimming with dolphins, which i was excited about theoretically but, due to my well-documented fear of being in bodies of water that sustain life, couldn’t quite make myself commit to.
- it’s not that i’m afraid of water, per se.
- it’s just that everything that is in water, including water, can kill you.
- like, no offense, but anything bad that happens to you while you’re swimming is your own fault. you put yourself in that situation!!!! you knew the risks!!!!
- humans are land animals. i just think we need to acknowledge and respect that, as a species.
dolphin day arrived pretty late in the vacation, one of our last, which would end up being a good thing. and i was ready. i was fully committed to meeting my dolphin best friend, becoming a dolphin trainer, and living the rest of my life swimming in the ocean with an army of dolphins to protect me from all the scary things in there. i had even talked myself into believing that if i stared longingly at the ocean for long enough, someone–probably an attractive twenty-something man with a strong jaw and square shoulders, but i’m just guessing–would notice, and see that i was ~meant to be a dolphin trainer.
surely he would take me under his tutelage. i had a natural gift but it would need to be harnessed. would it be our fault when, during the process, we fell in love and got married and lived together in a house with a glass bottom where our dolphin friends could swim? no. it would not be. that’s just what happens when two people work long hours training dolphins.
but that’s not what happened.
what happened was: when my time came, my moment, i pushed off the dock and into the water, ready to meet my new dolphin friends with open arms.
but i didn’t get that far. i got about … five inches, and then my bikini bottom caught on a nail sticking out of the dock, and i got no further.
- this never would have happened in a one piece!!!!
i hung there. probably knee-deep in water but very definitely not touching the ground. not really breathing, because have you ever gotten a wedgie so intense you can, like, taste it?
- let me tell you!!!! it doesn’t taste good!!!
here’s the thing about having a wedgie that you get when you are suspended from a height: you can’t…fix it. i had no leverage. i couldn’t haul myself up enough to untangle myself, because i didn’t have that kind of arm strength and i’m frankly suspicious of people who do. and the longer i hung, the deeper the rip became.
on my left, my mother who bore me, who pledged to love me for the rest of my days, who fed me and cared for me and made sure i was vaccinated so that i would die of polio or infect some other poor kid with polio, was absolutely losing it. she was collapsed on the dock, hand over her eyes, laughing so hard that no sound was coming out.
- off the top of my head, i can think of about 12 instances where my mother collapsed into laughter instead of helping me solve a problem, and more than one of them is caught on videotape.
“mom,” i said.
she flapped her hand at me to indicate that she had heard but that no help was coming.
on my right was a tall gentleman in floral bathing shorts. i’d guess he was in his late forties or early fifties. he was a dad. i knew he was a dad because a) he looked like he was born with a grill spatula in his hand and b) he’d been taking pictures and videos of his two kids all morning. he was still filming.
he was not filming his children, who his wife bore, who he pledged to love for the rest of their days, who he fed and cared for and made sure they were vaccinated so that they wouldn’t die of polio or infect some other poor kid with polio. he was filming me, wedgie mcwhygod?, flopping around on the side of the dock in an attempt to rip my bikini enough that it would break and free me from the dock’s clutches.
he was also laughing so hard that he was doubled over, hands on his knees, the camera only half-heartedly pointed in my direction.
“why?” i asked plaintively, and through his laughter he managed to kind of shrug his shoulders in that universal human way to signify i don’t know, i can’t stop.
the way that i got down, by the way, is not that either adult rescued me. my bathing suit just finally ripped. in fact, it ripped so badly i had to tie both sides of the rip into a knot so it wouldn’t fall off. the dolphins were unimpressed. i was not taken into the care of a dolphin trainer that i was destined to love.
- still waiting on that, tbh.
i think, sometimes, about that dude and his vacation video. i wonder if it got weirder every year to have possession of, or if it’s the kind of thing that you just become used to. “here’s us at the beach, here’s us drinking daiquiris, here’s us snorkeling, here’s that girl hanging off the dock from her bikini, here’s that girl hanging off the dock from her bikini from a different angle when dad was bent over laughing, here’s that girl hanging of the dock from her bikini’s mom howling with laughter, here’s us riding jet skis.”
what does that family imagine i grew up to be?
- i feel like….it’s probably nothing good.
well, whoever you guys are, if you’re reading this and still have it: i’d love a copy.
as a high school freshman, i was in love with a senior boy. his name was something like, but not exactly, harry. my high school did have a handsome boy who was older than me named harry—although, now that i’m writing this, i’m remembering that actually his name was dylan.
- were there any harrys in my grade? were there any harrys in my school? there had to have been. that’s a pretty common name.
- “why are we still talking about this?” you’re asking.
- the answer is: i don’t know! i can’t stop! my brain is a nightmare!
a n y w a y, whatever. the point is, my whole freshman year, i was in love with not-harry (actual not-harry, not the not -harry who was in fact dylan). he was very tall, and more importantly, he was very sweet to me, a pigeon-toed and badly socialized fourteen-year-old who really believed she looked good in low-riding boot-cut jeans with leopard print patches on them. not-harry and i met because he was the student waiter at my lunch table, and we stayed acquaintances because of a peculiar and excellent thing that happened to me, which was that for the entirety of my high school career i was not in my school’s lunch attendance system.
the thing you have to understand for any part of this story to make sense is that my boarding school had a lunch system where most days you had an assigned seat. every other lunch period, you were seated at an arbitrary table in order to like, help you make friends or something. student waiters would bring your food.
- there was a rotation freshman year in which every student had to be a student waiter, and if you were good at it, you could stay on and make money.
- i was so not-good at it that they took me off rotation early, which feels pretty on-brand for me.
for whatever reason, i was never assigned a table. in the land of seated lunches, i was king.
some people might have used this opportunity to sit with their friends or maybe with a teacher from whom they wanted to hassle a better grade, but i was a simple child and all i wanted to do was have many opportunities as possible to ask not-harry, who always remembered my name and never called me out for knocking things over all the time, to bring me the vegetarian option.
the teacher assigned to that table was a teacher that i never had, and never bonded with, and was constantly perplexed as to why i always insisted on sitting at his table and then never spoke to him.
“so weird they keep assigning me here,” i would say, and mr. wilcox would answer, “but they didn’t. i have the list. you aren’t assigned to sit here.”
“so weird,” said i.
- the other great benefit of not having an assigned table at lunch is that i did not have to go to lunch. i could go to nap.
- alternatively, i could go back into the kitchen and cajole the cooks to give me extra dessert, which i also did all the time. they made these peanut butter and chocolate bars that slammed. i kept some hidden in the freezer wrapped in paper towels because i am never more like a dragon than when somebody asks to share food.
everybody who knew that i existed knew that i was in love with not-harry. my school was very small, and probably even people who didn’t know me could have pointed at me and said something like, “whatever that girl’s name is, she’s in love with not-harry, who is tall and cool and has lots of friends.”
let’s break here to talk a little about not-harry. i, of course, was miserably uncomfortable in my own body, extremely uncool, and hadn’t yet figured out the difference between being sarcastic and just being mean. also, i once wrote and recorded a song called, “sweet like elk bladder,” which is something i don’t exactly regret but am also not exactly proud of. and if it sounds like i am being unkind to tiny baby molly, please know that despite being objectively unbearable, i love her. she was trying her best, and would improve rapidly between the ages of seventeen and twenty. she was a late bloomer.
but, at fourteen, if i could boil down my whole personality it would be: your least favorite cousin.
- you know the one.
- you don’t have to tell anybody who it is, just visualize them in your mind.
- that was me.
not-harry, on the other hand, was devon sawa in little giants. he was sean biggerstaff in harry potter. he was what’s-his-face in a walk to remember. (you know. not matt damon but the guy that kind of looks like matt damon?)
not-harry:
- in high school freshman molly’s fantasy of who not-harry was, he played the guitar, is what i’m saying.
i do want to say, in my own defense, that i was aware of how out of my league not-harry was. it’s not that i thought i had a chance with him. first of all, he had a girlfriend, who was blonde and beautiful and also very nice, which was rude because it meant i couldn’t even spitefully dislike her. she played field hockey and once helped me pick up an armful of books when i inevitably dropped them.
secondly, i have never in my life expressed an emotion and even if he had been moved by my letter, i am confident that if he’d approached me about it i would have simply sprinted away at top speed.
thirdly, like, a bird can love a fish but where would they live, you know what i’m saying?
anyway, all this exhausting set up is to say that i was obsessed with not-harry, and he did not know who i was except probably to have noticed that i was assigned to his lunch table a lot.
- “she’s actually not. i don’t know why she’s here all the time.” - mr. w, still not getting any answers.
every year for valentine’s day, my school would do this fundraiser thing where you could buy carnations and have them sent to your friends (or, you know, if you were the kind of person who got asked out, you could send it to your babe or whatever. that…wasn’t really a concern for me).
or, of course, some people sent them anonymously to people they liked.
“no,” you’re probably saying to yourself. and i get it!!! i get it. looking back at my own self, i am also saying, “no.”
- that’s a pretty common theme, for me.
i think that i knew, at the time, that it was a bad idea. i kind of remember thinking to myself, this is a bad idea. i know that this is a bad idea. and then immediately following it up with, yeah but how bad of an idea can it really be?
pretty bad, molls!!!! preeeeetty, pretty bad.
you know, looking back, i think that the worst thing wasn’t even sending the carnation. like, that’s pretty embarrassing, but not end of the world embarrassing. but i didn’t just send it, i sent it and i included a note, and that note said, with painful earnestness, “this is the closest i’ll ever get.”
- god. god!!! i know!!!
- like, what??? was i thinking?? what a horrible, creepy, incredibly vulnerable thing to just put in the universe!!!! lil’ baby molly, somebody is going to read that. he, and all his friends, are going to know that you have feelings. feelings are embarrassing. we’ve been over this.
honestly, at the time, i think i was kind of just like … screw it. you know? i was young. i knew high school was going to be the time in my life where i was the least likeable person i’d ever be. everybody knew i had this huge embarrassing crush on him, so, like, what was the worst that could happen? you only live once!!! you might as well just be the most embarrassing person you can be.
- obviously, i did a complete 180 on that opinion the second it was too late to take it back.
- as soon as the carnations went out i started making plans to dig myself a hole and quietly die in it.
everybody knew it was me. i mean, everybody. not a single person saw that note and was like, “gee, i wonder who sent this. could it be the awkward, long-armed monster child that spends the entirety of lunch drooling at not-harry with her chin in her tiny troll hands? haha, no. that’s crazy! it must have been someone else. what an unsolvable mystery.”
i fruitlessly tried to talk my way out of it. i sent an email to my entire grade that i am deeply grateful has been lost to the internet abyss that said something like, “hey just in case anyone was wondering who sent that carnation to not-harry, uh, it wasn’t me. i’m not saying anyone thinks it was me, but if they do think it was me, it wasn’t. they’re wrong. i definitely didn’t send a carnation to not-harry. that would be weird, and am i weird? no. as this email proves, i’m a normal person who does normal things only.
- “normal things only,” is going to be the name of my autobiography, and it’s going to be a bald-faced lie.
in hindsight, this wasn’t even the most embarrassing moment of my high school career, though it certainly ranks. but it does hit a very specific and tender part of my memory: high school molly was so young, and so earnest, and so terrible at everything, but she was trying so hard. you know? when i think about myself writing that horrible note, i remember thinking, “obviously he is not going to read this and dump his beautiful, kind girlfriend to date me,” but i also remember thinking, “…yeah, but he might.”
i feel like this attitude toward things has lowkey been a guiding principle in my life, and possibly all of human history, for better or worse: this isn’t going to work, but it might.
humans are such heartbreakingly optimistic creatures, even when we try not to be. think of all the times that we have done things just to do them. just to prove we could! just to do something impossible. we are impossible animals who do impossible things.
like, people built airplanes!!! how dumb is that? people built airplanes and gave humans wings, even though it definitely wasn’t going to work, except that it might, and it did.
i like the idea of that, i think. every once in a while, it does. it does work. against all odds.
- to be clear, in this particular instance, it did not.
not-harry never talked to me about it, because not -harry took one look at me and probably realized that i had enough problems. i know he got it, because i watched him get it in the lunchroom. i chose not to sit at his table that day, because i was an idiot but i wasn’t stupid. i knew i didn’t have the acting chops to keep a straight face when he opened it.
not-harry looked at the note, and then looked around like, “what the hell kind of john-hughes-movie loving moron sent me this?”
we locked eyes.
dear god, i thought to myself, if he puts the note away and no one ever talks to me about it again i swear i will find a new table.
not-harry held the note up. i looked at it, and then back at him. i don’t know what my face was doing, but i can only assume i looked like little foot in the scene where he realizes the thing he thought was his mom was just his own shadow.
very slowly, and very kindly, not-harry put the note in his pocket.
“i haven’t seen you at lunch in a while!” mr. w said to me months later, in passing, and i did the sign of the cross as i said, “so weird!” and kept walking.
(i looked not-harry up on facebook just now, and he’s still beautiful, and i still love him. reader, should i friend him? probably not, right? it’s probably a bad idea.
…yeah, but how bad of an idea can it be?)
