You Were a Party But I Wasn't Invited by Megan Lent
When I was fifteen or sixteen, just for a few months in that time frame, I was very close to a girl named Shannon. We sat next to each other in Western Civilizations class. She was fascinating and strange. Beautiful, all freckled, had good genes (her parents were still fucking each other, which I knew because she told me she could hear them, this bothered her but I was jealous she was the spawn of people who were still attractive enough to do that), I liked her. She made me feel special. She was bizarre, obsessed with the concept of evil (she kept an ongoing list of the Most Evil Man in History, updating it as the West Civ class progressed, eventually putting Stalin in the coveted number-one slot and then floundering between uncertainty and assuredness that the gulags were much much worse than anything Hitler did). She said a psychic came to her house once and said that in a past life she had been her brother’s mother. I loved knowing her. When he had to do book reports for our Literature and Composition class, we both chose Fahrenheit 451. I cared about book burning. She cared about the future. |