Imagine if you will,  a young lady full of promise, who always got A’s on her report card.   The very thought of seeing disappointment on her parent’s faces prompted her to never disobey their rules.  She played quietly, said “thank you,” and helped her mother, (who had her dishwasher ripped out of the kitchen in order to create more cupboard space) every night with the dishes.   She attended a ridiculously strict Baptist school for fifteen years, where she was forced to wear culottes and brainwashed to believe that pants were evil.

<————- (if you can’t pronounce culottes [koo-lots], I don’t blame you, considering most of the world has no reason to ever say that word) 

Now I’d like you to imagine that you are that girl. One morning, you walk into the same Baptist school, which required you to be clad in a turtleneck and an ankle-length-non-denim skirt, carrying your Lisa Frank trapper keeper, only to be told that you were on the verge of expulsion for “being in a gang.”

That’s right.  A gang.  You know, like those scary groups of people who loiter around the bad areas of town and shoot people for no good reason, cover themselves in piercings and tatoos, and often participate in the distribution and usage of illegal substances.  Yea, those people.

That was me, Gangy McShoot’em up.  Of course, after making it through gang initiation, you’d of thought I would have gotten over my fear of getting my ears pierced.  But no, that had to wait til well after high school. 

I can’t even bother to get into all of the details as to how on God’s green earth this school came to the insane conclusion that I was in a gang.  But, given my background, wouldn’t you think they could have given me the tiniest benefit of a doubt before telling me I was expelled?  Or i don’t know, maybe asked me about it?

They called my mom, to bear the bad news.  Her response, between the bouts of hysterical laughter, was:  ”We live in the middle of nowhere and my daughter doesn’t even own a car.  She collects stickers and whines about her acne.  I think I might know if she was in a gang.”