I hated being the smallest kid in the class. All legs, all teeth, no butt. Everyone else was growing up, getting facial hair, getting their period, growing boobs. But not me. I had the longest, thinnest legs that anyone had ever seen, and my nickname was ‘Sexy Chicken Legs.’
Once a year, we got to send carnations to our secret crushes. One dollar bought a flower and a note, and you could drool to your heart’s content over that year’s target of your affection. That year, I sent four carnations to Jim Harris, the tall, blond, smart senior captain of the lacrosse team. I bought the flowers from one of the many eager members of the Anchor Club, for which the annual event was a huge fundraiser.
The day after the carnations were given out, Jim Harris stopped me in the hall to say thank you … and I wanted to melt into the floor. Who had told him my identity? Why wasn’t the ground opening up to swallow me and my red face? I just wanted to disappear, to run away. I felt so exposed. That afternoon, my girlfriend told me that the entire school was talking about the flowers that I’d sent to Jim. I’d managed to buy the carnations from – of all people – his girlfriend of two years, pretty homecoming honey Janie Millerton. My reputation as “Sexy Chicken Legs” was now complete.
Thirteen years later, I came back to school for my tenth-year high school reunion. I saw Jim Harris at the homecoming tent, and he came over to tell me that he still thought of the flowers that I had sent him in the ninth grade. Even as a grown woman, I still remembered how to blush.
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