Reinventing Mona Read Free

you meet me for an early lunch? You sound distraught.”
    Distraught? Forty? I am misunderstood by the only people who bother to listen. The only one who sees me as who I really am—who I’m going to become—is the ass of a Shell oil truck. It’s a start. A meager one, but a start.
    I wasn’t lying when I said I had no friends. There’s Greta, but she only moved back to San Diego a month earlier. Greta and I met a few weeks after I moved in with Grammy, which was my junior year in high school. We were inseparable nerds, which earned us the nickname Mona and Groana. We were charged with the high crime of being “lezzies.”
    Grammy used her many social and political connections to enroll me in one of San Diego’s most elite private schools. Most were rich kids who had either been on the waitlist since gestation, or had parents who were surgeons, attorneys, and CEOs. There was one lottery kid, a fact that, once discovered, sent her social status on a downward spiral from which there was no recovery. I certainly did not let anyone know that a month earlier I was living on a commune in Montana with four other families. Or that I’d never been to a school with chandeliers and mounted animal heads on the walls. In fact, our home school desk was a kitchen table made out of an old barn door, and my parents, along with the others, taught us about calculus, chemistry, and the history of the labor movement in the United States.
    As it was, my brown corduroy pants and embroidered peasant shirts made the other girls maintain a four-foot distance from me for fear my dated style might be contagious. I wasn’t about to add to this misery by letting these privileged snots know where I was from, and why I suddenly showed up at their school in the middle of the year. I didn’t even tell Greta until our senior year. Not that she didn’t ask. Even then, her career as a therapist was taking shape.
    After a few weeks at the Coronado Academy for Girls, the rumors about me started. Popular student culture cast me as a drug addict who had to live with Grammy after being kicked out of multiple rehab centers for a love affair with crystal meth. “Hey, new girl,” Greta said to me in the lunch arbor. Great, I thought. Now even the loser girls are going to taunt me. I shuddered. I begged Grammy to let me finish high school through correspondence courses or tutors, but she refused. Consequently, I decided that if I was forced to attend a real school, I’d try to be as invisible as possible. I never raised my hand in class. I wasn’t part of any clique. Only accidentally did I ever make eye contact with my classmates. If there were an eraser for human flesh, I would’ve paid any price for it.
    “What?” I folded my arms at Greta’s call to me at eleventh grade lunch period.
    “My, my, aren’t we defensive?” she shot back. I couldn’t tell she was trying to be friendly. “I was just gonna ask if I could sit with you, but if you’re gonna have an attitude, forget it.” She turned to walk away and I realized Greta was my only chance at having a friend at school.
    “Greta,” I shouted after her. She turned around and scrunched her mouth to one side with snide skepticism. “I’m sorry. I just thought you were going to, I don’t know. I didn’t think you were going to ask to have lunch. I thought you were going to say something mean.”
    She sat down and leaned toward me conspiratorially. “It’s so easy to think that way in a hellhole like this. I mean, have you ever met a bigger group of bitches than these girls?”
    I could honestly answer that I had not. The reality was that I hadn’t met that many people in my sixteen years. We lived in a farmhouse with nine adults and ten kids, but other than them, I had little interaction with the outside world. We knew the folks who worked at the food co-op, and everyone who shopped at the Missoula Farmer’s Market where we sold produce, hemp macramé, beaded jewelry, and wool sweaters