of me leaning over a bit too far to see the board: “this wouldn’t be happening, kimberly, if you’d sit in your own damn seat.” of me muttering an answer, only to turn bright red: “gooooood job, miss parker!” of euphemisms for sex (yes, this comes up far too often in 300 level classes): “i can see by kimberly’s giggle that she certainly knows a few.” of me avoiding a french professor’s gaze: “the question is not where you were last night but with whom.”
yes, professors love me. correction: they love to pick on me. i’m the easiest target they’ve ever known. they go for the quiet girl with the five (or six) perfectly aligned pens before her (should pen one’s, two’s, three’s, or four’s ink miraculously run out). the girl perpetually 10 minutes early (or 6 minutes late), who dates every page of her notes before writing a word. the girl who can’t control her smile when a professor cracks a remarkably inappropriate dead baby/ sick child joke. the one who fidgets nervously whenever someone’s in her seat, and who shows up frazzled with wet (read: frozen) hair, mismatched shoes, and her grandfather’s (stolen) flannel shirt that reaches to her knees.
i’m the rare exception in that peers have never teased me. the adults in my life have. the pattern was established early—from the time my aunt told me my aunt carol had shot off my uncle joe’s leg, through elementary school during which i managed to fail astonishingly at one sport after another, and ALL through highschool when the “let’s swear at Kimberly and see if we can make her blush” and “parker, that is NOT how that word is pronounced,” began.
and all of that simply to say, at college i’m right at home.
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