Being 14 was about on par with being invisible. A couple things happened that I was proud of; I got highest marks in my music year on a test, which went vastly unnoticed rather expectedly by the other students, but also by the teachers; I won an art competition which would mean that my winning drawing of beetles and worms crawling through the dense mud of the rainforest be immortalised as a mural across the arch into the library, a project that never ever saw inception never mind completion. This, teamed with the entire fact that I was just a kid in a school full of kids, meant I went unnoticed. If I had a plan, this was certainly the objective, just for survivals sake, but it got boring. I wasn’t close to being celebrity.
Some of the others who walked around the halls had stature and menace. These kids had almost certainly already had some form of sex, which was still something you did when you were older, as a grown up, as far as I was concerned. These were the kids that you laughed with when they would verbally torture other kids with some of the meanest and funniest comments, while praying that they would never do the same to you. They played football and their mums let them have GTA. And they smoked. Probably.
It was at this age that I went Skiing in America with the school. I can remember being practically passive aggressively shoved into going through a series of psychological guilt trips from my friend, who was desperate to go. I was little more anxious because we would be the only few year 9’s going, everyone else being a lot older; not just celebrities but the older siblings of the celebrities in my year. I imagine it’s how the friends of the younger Baldwin’s feel before they meet Alec. Except Steven’s friends, of course. They’re all ghostly, angelic hallucinations that linger from his formative years.
Eventually, I was convinced. After a journey which consisted of a stopover in Iceland on the shittyest airlines in the world that only played Robbie Williams and R.E.S.P.E.C.T by Aretha Franklin through a headphone jack for hours on end (remember, these were the days before parents would buy an iPod for their child, the days of CD players that died after half an hour on two AA batteries, so we were forced to either listen or start pulling out each other’s teeth in boredom), we arrived.
Boston was beautiful, the snow was thick and the breakfasts were heavenly, massive things that shortened my life by each bite. The skiing was hard. The first day was spent on a slope crowded by miniature ski suits in oversized goggles that slalomed past at breakneck speeds whilst I hesitantly skidded with my skis tapered to an arrow and my poles held tight. Not only did you have to master the ability to not be scared of falling over and hurtling down a 5% decline slope, knocking down children like skittles, but you had to master the chair lift.
Sauntering closer, swaying slightly, it looms downward as you and your three ride-mates stand with bated breath. Then, as it moves behind the revolving pillar and out of sight, you position yourself like the pretty boy of a prison that just wants it over and done with, face grimacing in preparation. You think you know when it will come because you’ve monitored the speed at which it has approached. You think you’re ready. And then suddenly, almost the second it’s gone from your sight, it moves like a camera shutter and thwacks you in the calves, swooping you away. No matter how many times I embarked on the chair lift, I was never ready. I could have sworn there was a sadist in booth somewhere playing with a speed dial, the bastard.
Waiting in line for a chair lift, therefore, took some time, as people seemed to be falling off or being knocked aside every now and then, holding the line up. And so the ‘celebrities’ got bored. When we were waiting in line, the year 11’s would harass in such a way that you weren’t entirely sure if they were actually harassing or if they had become mentally retarded. While waiting in line, to bide their time, they would poke their ski polls between our legs from behind and move them up. It didn’t hurt, it wasn’t done in a way that they were trying to hurt us, but they got a right fucking laugh out of it. The pole would appear between your ankles and then quickly move up past your knees. When you looked round, they would pull it out and fall into hysterics. I wasn’t sure if I was being bullied or raped.
Anyway, as well as this, they had many other little games that were obviously designed to piss off everyone else through sheer bemusement while they found much mirth from seemingly nothing. One was to yell, “Here it comes.” as people waited for the lift to take them away, the chair obviously being nowhere near to coming, hopefully causing them who were waiting to brace prematurely and fall. This never happened. However, one fateful accent, as a group of ‘celebrities’ gathered on the launch pad, or whatever, one guy, one heroic and clearly aggravated guy piped up and softly called, “Here it comes.” Two looked over in the general direction of the voice and, before their hideously underwhelming minds had time to process the concept that someone had stolen their game and used it against them, they were catapulted forth off their skis and face first into a pile of snow, shortly thereafter receiving a blow to the back of the head from the chair lift as it swung back forward and up the slope.
I was rather glad not to be a celebrity. They were douche bags.
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I’ll post about being 15 later on tonight.
PnL.x
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