There was a term, 'scamming' , which may have been indigenous to our
junior high and high school. No one not from there seems to know what
it refers to. I actually didn't know what it meant when I started
junior high I just pretended to know what all the kids in the know
kids knew. I kept up faking until I overheard someone condescendingly
explaining what it meant to some poor naive baby. In the
characteristic euphemistic subtlety of a teenage boys locker room he
explained that scamming was, 'going up the shirt and down the skirt',
classy and it even rimes so it makes it easy to remember. I think the
medical term is heavy petting. I have to give you that background
into the local lexicon because I was shortly to be accused of
'scamming pretty hard'. After my movie date I had to walk across town
to the extraction point and my date walked with me cuddling up close
and talking to me about her plans for us. Whoa, plans? She had a song
picked out for us to be our song. Oh. . .Oh. . .kay. By the time we
had walked the two miles to where I was going to be picked up she had
our 75 year plan in the books and on the table. I was looking for
something a little more short term and hedonistic and less
long-termy. I resolved to tell her that I was not that into the
situation and that is precisely what I didn't do. I kissed her good
night and waited for my chronically tardy mother and stressed over
how to pinch this bud off before it got out of hand. I did the mature
and responsible thing and just never called her back. Luckily we were
at different schools so I didn't have to see her in the hall but she
did call for a week or so which made me feel horrible but I was too
much of a coward to tell her the truth and be a man about it. Her
friend actually tracked me down outside my bus at the high school and
called me out accusing me of using her friend and being a jerk. That
was mostly true, actually all true. She had told many people that we
were scamming pretty hard and then I just dumped her friend. Now that
was not true, we had not been scamming hard, pretty hard or soft for
that matter. Furthermore, I had not dumped her because we were not
going out. She was not concerned with the exact legal ins and outs of
the situation and just called me an effing a-hole and let me get on
the bus to hear it from everyone who had seen that go down. It was a
fun ride home hearing echos of my verbal beratement. Still that was
better than being locked into a 75 year deal.
