JILL!

Can you tell which one is me? Exactly.

I always thought of myself as pretty nondescript. Just one of the crowd. Not really standing out in any way. This, by the way, has always been fine with me. When I see someone I haven’t seen in a long time, my default assumption is that I remember them, but they won’t remember me. Is this normal? Huh. Maybe I should check with a therapist. (Just kidding. I don’t care in the least whether I’m normal or not.)

“JILL!”

One day, in high school, my theory got a crack in it. The bell rang and somewhere around a thousand people began to flood the halls to change classes. I had to go up a floor, so I stacked my armload of books on top of my binder and headed up the stairs to my next class. Just as I reached the top, I caught my foot on the last step and fell onto the landing, spilling my books all over the place. In the exact same moment, a guy two grades older yelled, “JILL!”

This kid is doing a loose reenactment, using Easter eggs to represent my books.

I didn’t even know this guy knew me. I knew him, of course. And he picked the moment I fell in front of a crowd of people to yell out my name. After that, I’m sure a lot of people knew who I was, at least by first name.

God bless him, he yelled out of concern, not to mock me. I appreciated that, after the shock wore off. He asked several times if I was okay (I was, aside from the embarrassment) and he helped me gather up my things, along with some other kind people who’d witnessed the incident.

*sigh* At least I look cute.

All these years later, this would have been long forgotten, except for my astonishment that I wasn’t quite as invisible as I had imagined. That’s kind of a nice thing, I suppose. Except that it means I have to keep on wearing pants…every dang day.