The piccolo seductress

When I started at North Mesquite High School, I was still green 'n' keen enough to arrive early - before 8:00 am. Since first period didn't start until 8:25, I usually stopped by the band hall, where the Varsity band practiced during what was called zero period, beginning at 7:30. I would quietly take a place in the back to read and listen to whatever they were working on. My aim was to go unnoticed, but it didn't work - it led to meeting a girl in the band who I've since dubbed The Piccolo Seductress.

My normal method for finding dates in middle school had been almost completely passive; I often let my sisters do all the work. They usually had friends who were interested, but too shy to approach me directly (tell your brother I like him!). I was so accustomed to this indirect, through-the-sibling approach that I was taken by surprise the morning during my freshman year when a senior girl, who played piccolo in the Varsity band, walked over after rehearsal and introduced herself.

She was surprisingly smart and funny, and I found out during our conversation that I had unintentionally become the talk of the flute/piccolo section. She, the sassiest piccoloist of the bunch, had decided to act. She asked if I would be back the next morning, and we began meeting regularly between zero and first period. She was seventeen, I was fourteen - a huge age difference, or so I thought at the time (there's a picture of me in an earlier post from around the time we got together).

A wild and eventful six-month fling followed, during which we saw a lot of movies - she managed to get me into my first screening of A Clockwork Orange at fourteen (after we discovered we'd both read and loved the book). I was struck by how independent she was - she had a car and an after school job, and seemed to come and go as she pleased.

It was a relationship that couldn't last, though, no matter how great the companionship, conversation, and sex were. The same take-charge personality that led her to seek me out had a dark and abrasive side to it. The independence I admired was driven by a desperation to escape a mother she despised (I was witness to one particularly harrowing screaming match between them). We both soon moved on to the next lucky person that our practice of high-school-serial-monogamy demanded, but I'll always recall The Piccolo Seductress as the first girl in my experience to reverse the roles of hunter/hunted, which wasn't such a bad feeling for a change.

on the dvd player: A Clockwork Orange, deluxe edition.
on the reading table: 2600, Winter 2008-2009.