Inappropriate

“You’re gross.” He chuckles, his smile hidden by a fluffy beard. “You are. You’re gross,” I say, but I’m laughing regardless of the grossness.

Moments before, my work partner and I had walked through the double doors at one end of the long hall, and 100 feet away at the other end, in her Catholic school girl skirt, shirt dangling messily over her waist on one side, tennis shoes on her feet, she was smiling, engaged in a conversation with another student. My work partner had said something about the student, something sexual, possibly even a mere noise, and the exchange that followed between us was not abnormal. The student to whom he was attracted was cute, naturally tan skin, moon eyes when she smiled and always smiling, but my coworker’s attraction still discomforted me, although just momentarily. I have met so many people, only men in my life, that have a school girl fetish, and my old pal was one of them. My old pal and I had a gross history of our own; when I was a bright-eyed, cocky freshman in high school, and he a 19-year-old senior, we kissed. He drove an old Jaguar, and he lived uptown; I was enamored until I found out he had a girlfriend named Claire. Then, I thought him pathetic and strange for withholding the truth from me. I hadn’t seen him since I was 15 until ten years later when we both ended up working in the same, all-girl high school; after working together for a while, our history came up, and one of our mutually favorite students thought the situation hysterical, particularly that we couldn’t agree on his having a girlfriend at the time. To this present moment, he was my favorite friend with whom to work. We shared so many laughs, crude comments, and shrimp po-boys.

Not long after the hallway scene, I chaperoned a school trip to Mexico where we lived at an orphanage for ten days, working the farm, feeding the kids, doing laundry; the girls at the high school where I worked adored me, and the other two chaperones used that as an excuse to kick me out of the room with the fan. “The girls would love it if you slept in their room,” they said with whispered enthusiasm. So, I slept in there on a top bunk with my face as close to the open window as possible, imagining there was a cool breeze, and I had a dream about one of the students, a volleyball player, who slept on the bunk directly across from me. Smart, talented, passionate, she was one of my favorite students, so dreaming about her – in any way – was not strange. I dreamed that I was walking along the breezeway at the orphanage, and this student suddenly opened one of the doors I was passing and forced me into the room and on the ground. She straddled me and then started kissing me. I woke up the next morning and terrified, strained my eyes to the side to see if she was awake across the room. She wasn’t, but my slight panic followed me throughout the whole trip, especially two days later when she was dancing around the 110-degree room in a thong. Somehow, I thought she’d known about the dream, that she had somehow invaded my dream space, causing me to have this semi-erotic dream about her. I suppose that was what the me from the hallway scene would have called “gross,” too.

At one time, I adored and craved the innocence of those younger than me; I absorbed the experience I had working in a high school for one year – the untouchable energy, enthusiasm, ripeness. My own adolescent experience was pungent with aching, longing, and self-destruction; if anyone could relate to a troubled teen, I felt I could. But, I left that environment of self-knowledge, growth, and thrill to return to the university. There’s a different energy in academia, an energy of superiority, of uselessness and theories but no practice, of the obtaining of knowledge for oneself and only oneself. Generally, I have found that college students lack the desire of adolescents, because they think they have already found whatever they sought. I have never had semi-erotic dreams about any of my college students; their certainty about life dampens my common fervor. However, regardless of what I perceive as a lack of heart in academia, my friend and coworker had no deficiency of desire for the incoming students. Full of comments and desirous noises, her lust permeated the air before her bejeweled blue eyeglasses and dark hair mussed from her bike ride into work.

If any of us had actually taken these feelings or dreams as symptomatic enablers and justifications, then more than a few would have muttered stronger words than “You’re gross.” Something along the lines of “repulsive” and a lawsuit would have fit the bill.