Too Hot For This

In fourth grade, my mom took me shopping at Kids ‘R US for back-to-school clothes.  There was a denim mini skirt set with a matching, long-sleeved jean jacket.  Maybe it wasn’t mini, and it only felt mini because I had gotten my period the summer before, and my hips had filled out to a young woman’s size and not kids' size, but there wasn’t a store for that that also fit my very small younger sister, so here we were.  This skirt had black bows and white pearls, and I distinctly remember thinking I was going to beg her to buy it for me to impress MATT.

I would look so. hot. in this.  

Who is Matt?  

Fuck if I know.

Some boy, some kid. Maybe I am misremembering his name thirty years later because in 1995 there were a LOT of Matts.  I thought he would think I looked really good in this skirt and matching jean jacket.  I knew enough from learning the birds and the bees by reading late 70’s and early 80s romance novels to know that looking good was a value system I needed to adopt.  The male gaze in fourth grade was going to be prime time real estate.  

Cali Loria was coming in hot.

In fourth grade, strangers thought I was a boy. My mom was of the opinion that girls could have long hair when they were both old enough and responsible enough to tend to it themselves, so she took us to a little quickie cut place next to a Piggly Wiggly for the freshest cuts in Kansas City.  My hairdresser complained that my hair was uneven after drying, so she would start with me, cut my sisters’ hair, and then, as mine dried, take me back for some more uneven lines.  Somewhere between mullet and bowl cut, I looked like the eighties sitcom little brother who was up to mischief.  Put that in a mini skirt, and watch out, world.  I was delusional.  

Welcome to fourth grade.

My elementary school, for reasons unknown to me, had various classes meeting in small trailers behind the playground.  We walked as a class in a straight line through the halls, then fanned out into friendship polycules when the sun hit our faces.  I typically walked alone, with my nose in a book, paper bags hiding the covers of my aforementioned romance novels.  When my feet hit gravel, these same feet, in a perpetual pigeon-toe gait from femoral anteversion, tripped.  My knees took the brunt of the fall, gravel finding its way into the pudgy dents.  I said something like, "ow," and then I’m sorry, apologizing for my legs, my fall, the pearl that dove from its hot-glued home onto the ground.  The heat of my classmates stares bored into me.  It was the end of summer, before Fall took hold, and humidity still hung in the air like the fumes from hairspray. My classmates wore Peter Pan collars and jelly shoes.  I had a long-sleeved jean jacket.  My elbows were safe, and my armpits sweat into the denim, creating sharp, jagged edges where the seams gathered moisture.

In the trailer, our school counselor came to talk to us about subjects like friends, peer pressure, and drugs.  He had a dolphin hand puppet named Dusso. He would clothe his arm in this puppet and then sing songs.  I was Tracy Flick in the classroom, sitting straight up with my denim jacket’s shoulder pads making me look like a studious linebacker who would most certainly never do drugs.  Most students didn’t take this counselor seriously, and so we ended class early.  The heat of the trailer was oppressive, and I sweat in beads as perfectly circular as that downed pearl.  My face turned pink and then red, while other girls remained summer-tanned and waxen.  To get the class back on his side, the counselor announced we could go outside and play Red Rover.

Red Rover is a cutthroat playground game in which classmates line up across from each other in teams and dare a selected child from their opposing side to run toward them and break the chain they form with their sweaty hands. You can imagine how hilarious it is to ask the most unathletic child to run first.  I knew I would be taunted to run first.  Gym class had always been my academic weakness.  I was the Ross Perot of the Presidential Fitness Test.  When my name was called, and I moved forward like a newborn foal struggling to find its legs after coming out of its mother's womb in a bloody show, my thighs had become permanently stuck together in a seal of flesh and fear.  My small step led to a fall, my second for those keeping track, and the armpit of my jacket ripped from the flailing way my arms tried to catch my body’s motion.

I stood up and walked to the side where those who had gotten out were forced to sit.  The rest of the day, I wore grass stains and bloody knees.  If Matt noticed me, smitten, he never spoke up.  I kept wearing this jacket, shielding the hole from my mother’s eyes by never putting it in the wash.

I was hot.