The Trophy Room: August 2009

This is a continuation of a series previously published elsewhere.
Vanessa had black Reebok pumps and was my best friend. We were in the same class and rode the bus together too. And it was here, every afternoon, hunched over and cackling in the back, that we made up stories to pass the time and brutally destroy the kids and teachers we didn’t like.
Man, those stories were fierce. They were savage, epic sagas; of love affairs, explosions and violence; of deranged teachers with incredible artilleries and a blood-thirst for only the goriest, most venomous means of revenge. They were the fictitious extravagances of 9-year-old minds, a series of gasping and then-and then-and thens, and the only plot device we ever used was to balloon scenarios completely out of control, taking turns to propel them in escalating trajectories not dissimilar to a tumbling Trapped in the Closet extent.
They would begin, for instance, with two teachers entangled in the throes of extramarital passion. A third teacher would stumble upon them and, shocked to see the woman (who he was deeply and delusionally in love with), would whip out the grenade launcher he just so happened to be carrying at the time of his casual stroll. He would destroy the man and consequently enrage the woman, now leaping over the remains of her lover to slash with her machete, just as another teacher showed up and blasted them all away with her M-16, the bullets of which would be intercepted by some dipshit kid we didn't like—and so on and so forth, the violence rising with each character, the love triangles wheeling into catastrophic love dodecagons, the means of destruction soon involving tanks and blimps and fighter jets and this was every single afternoon, without fail. (Except for the one week that we were suspended from the bus. Different story).
The stories always ended with the same grand finale too: the two bosses, face-to-face. Steely-eyed Assistant Principal Mr. Lambert would rise from the ashes of his annihilated colleagues, only to find his jet-packs and nun-chuck mastery futile against the flame-eyes and atomic bombs of Principal Mrs. Hoff, and he would die the most explosive, fireball death ever. Principal Hoff, victorious again, would fly away cackling, the entire 4th grade nothing more than blood and guts and steaming rubble beneath her, that nerd Justin from math class no more.
I'm not really sure where two little girls would get such violent minds. Either way, we defaced our yearbook too. Of course. Because to us the 4th grade was nothing but a bunch of weenies, dickheads, and jerks.
This is what we thought was funny:
Tits

Satan
Satan + Tits
Butts
Nerds
Animals
Face Diss
Bulbous Head Formation and Miscellaneous Head Dress
Emasculation, Notably By Means of Hair Bows (My friend Sasha says she drew bows on boys pictures too. What is that?)
Pizza Beards

Poorly Managed Facial Hair
Secretions/Sloppy Tongues
Skinnies
Fatties*
*Making fun of fatties was not my fault. It's ESL's. English as a Second Language. I was a cherubic child until I had to learn English--the devil's language, apparently. In ESL, I was repeatedly asked to identify fatties, which earned me encouraging smiley faces and other such praise. So basically, I was trained to be an asshole:
Anyways...
Machiavellian Grins
Tramps
Cryptic Markings of the Occult
Statue of Liberty + Beards
Nonchalance
And...a Special Shout Out to:
The best thing about Fartwoman is that Fartwoman was my friend, named thus because she had gas and embraced it. Every time she farted we all just laughed. There's something so beautiful and awesome about a 10 year old girl being cool enough with herself to laugh at her own farts, and to be down with the name Fartwoman. It makes me think that Fartwoman probably turned out okay. Hell, Fartwoman probably grew up to be hilarious. I bet she's the life of the party. So Fartwoman, if you're out there, let's hang out sometime, okay? I'll buy you a drink.