Navy Blue Converse

Her eyes scanned your body as you walked toward her. Those heavily-mascara’ed brown eyes bulged and froze on navy blue converse clad feet.

“What, are you like, Goth now?”

Your early morning smile faded. You felt small and lonely and… Goth? Wait, you thought, what the fuck does she mean? Then you corrected yourself. What the heck does she mean? You are trying not to curse as much. You have had the mouth of a sailor since elementary school, and one time, this same girl and her suburban cronies denied you the opportunity to play dodge ball because, as they said, you had a potty mouth. At the time, you thought, fuck them. Now you are desperate for them to like you. This whole converse thing really throws a kink in your plans.

You want to run back to the front of the school and see if your mom is still in the car-rider line. Maybe she will take you home so you can change shoes, or even better—let you skip school and go eat Mexican food. You quickly realize this is an absurd fantasy. Not too absurd, though, because on a pretty regular basis you do skip school and your mom does take you out for Mexican food. It is suh-weet. The strange part is you don’t really want to run away. You want to tell this little middle-school biotch that she can shove it up her ass. Converse aren’t Goth. You aren’t Goth.

“No, I’m not. And converse aren’t Goth. Goth kids wear combat boots and dog collars and read anime,” you say.

“Oh, okay. I mean, they are just kind of different,” she says.

“Right,” you say.

From that moment on you realize that being a converse-wearing Goth kid would be so much better than being friends with these ass-holes. You stop wanting to be invited to their farms (the term “farm” is applied loosely, it simply refers to a home built outside of a residential neighborhood, though still located thirty-feet from a residential neighborhood and 1 mile from a large suburban sprawl). You stop laughing at their jokes. You stop passing them notes in Algebra. You start thinking about what you like. You start listening to good music, as provided by The O.C. Mix 1 Soundtrack. You start wearing converse.