I still clearly remember the first time I skipped. My best friend of the week and I had ditched our eighth grade Health class to spend the 45 minutes rebelliously hiding out in the girls’ room, complaining about our monstrous parents and counting the paper towels stuck to the ceiling. It was glorious and it was the start of a long love affair with truancy.
At that age, though, just about everything I did was driven by a pubescent desire to stick it to the man; and, man, what was cooler than skipping? I could be both completely unproductive and have the time to be as catty as every fourteen year old girl needs to be. The basement bathroom became our lair; we would sit there for the period, trying to avoid both teachers and leaky toilets while discussing the more important things in life. Who had yet to develop a new set of womanly goods, who was slutty enough to French kiss a boy and how grossly inappropriate the Gym teacher was.
It wasn’t until I left for my exchange year in Switzerland that I discovered how much more of the world was open to me when I wasn’t confined to the classroom. I could easily spend my time visiting my friend the town over, on a shopping spree or, better yet, seeking out apples to hollow out for later use. By the end of the year, I decided to go back to a Français class I had been systematically avoiding, only to have the teacher exclaim that she had believed I had left the country a couple of months prior. Either way, it wasn’t like my time would have been better spent learning literature or chemistry in a language I barely understood.
Of course, I didn’t spend any of my time bothering to learn chemistry once I got back to my home soil anyway (after all, it’s not like knowing the melting temperature of iron is going to help me on my path to literary infamy), and my teachers quickly made a habit of congratulating me when I made it to class on time, if I managed at all. My homeroom teacher, however, had the misfortune of being both anally retentive and responsible for my attendance, and my love of truancy can be faulted for several of his panic attacks. At one point, my mother was called in to discuss my perpetual ditching, to which I kindly informed her that if I could maintain the sort of grades that would land me in any university I wanted, my attendance record could go stuff itself. What followed was the greatest maternal reprimand of my life.
“You are an asshole, Tanysia,” she told me over dinner that night, “and nobody is going to like you.” She was, of course, referring to the apparent lack of respect my absenteeism shows to both my teachers and classmates, but it was nonetheless one of the best and most inspiring quotes of all time. It was at that moment that I decided to prove my mother wrong. I would continue to spend as little time as possible in my classes, run in panting half way through a lecture and still somehow have friends.
So far, so good. As a matter of fact, I have yet to be called an asshole by any of my professors, nor by any of my friends; other than, perhaps, the time or two that I’ve directly insulted them (but that’s beside the point). The last couple of years at UVic have allowed me to determine I can avoid both class and being called an asshole. Take that, Mom.
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