Idiot - Laura Clery Page 0,2

books for fun. I was the annoying loudmouth comedienne that everyone loved. (Right? Right?) All I ever wanted to do was make people laugh.

When I became painfully shy and quiet at school during those years, it was VERY out of character for me. Luckily, that’s when I met Maggie, my childhood soul mate. I was in third grade, and we were in the talent show together. She was singing Karen Carpenter’s “Top of the World” at the top of her lungs. I remember she was so loud that her voice became shaky trying to handle it. My mother had been rehearsing my sisters and me in a roughly harmonized rendition of “Chapel of Love” and getting up on that stage absolutely terrified me. I knew how difficult it was to sing in front of people, and because of that, I was SO impressed by Maggie. I remember being enamored by her and thinking she was the bravest, most confident person I had ever seen. And then when she got off the stage, she punched a boy for making fun of her. That’s seriously badass.

I approached her, told her I liked her headband, and we were attached at the hip after that. We spent every waking moment with each other—either she slept at my house, or we stayed up on the phone with each other. (I would have stayed at her house too, but we just got away with much more mischief at my house.) With her, I finally came out of my shell. We really were oddballs together. It was finally okay for my strangeness and humor to come out.

I even loved her family. Maggie’s mom was a stay-at-home mom who went back to college in her late forties and started working again. Her dad was this slick FBI agent. He was very strict, so different from my own parents. #whatisstructure?

The best part of Maggie’s family was her older sister. To the rest of the world, she was a high school theater nerd. To me, she was the most incredible actress I had ever seen. We went to see her high school play once. It was a comedy and she had complete command of the audience. Laughter rang out at one point and I remember thinking to myself, I want to do what she’s doing. I was eleven years old, and it was the moment I decided I wanted to be an actress.

Being in Maggie’s atmosphere made a huge impact on my life. We loved to try to thrill each other. It became kind of a contest as to who could be the most shocking. In school, we would write each other the most fucked up notes we could think of to see who could get a bigger rise out of the other person. We knew some curse words at this point in our lives, but we didn’t exactly know how to use them. So we inserted them into sentences where they sounded good! That’s how words work, right?

She passed me one that said: “My arm shits smell. It really fucks that we can’t go to Six Flags Great America this weekend.”

To which I’d respond: “Can you ass me some water?”

We were pretty legit.

In sixth grade, Maggie’s note was intercepted by the principal. The principal read the note and then told Maggie, “You need to read this aloud to your parents.” We both looked at each other frantically. Her FBI agent dad would NOT be cool about this, to say the least.

“Oh SHIT,” we both muttered to each other, finally using the word correctly!

Not only did we both get so much detention, but the next day there was an assembly for just the girls in our school about the importance of being a lady. Our principal had a bold opening line: “When you say ‘shit’ or ‘fuck’ or ‘bitch’ it is very unbecoming, girls.” I avoided her eye contact at all costs, while Maggie nodded along, sardonically, an air of fake concern about her. Like I said, Maggie was badass.

Next on Maggie and Laura’s list of shocking activities? Public urination. Maggie and I would pee in public all over the place. That’s normal, right? She would go outside of a Walmart, I would go on her neighbor’s lawn, we both took turns outside of a public library, again and again until we ran out of places. Or until the neighbors started to notice spots of dead grass on their lawns.

But as expected, our game of “Who could pee in the