I had the weirdest feeling of deja vu while walking home from work last week. It was one of those intense, full-body flashbacks. A college kid rode past me on his bike, and I could swear that he was the doppelganger of the boy who made gym class my 7th grade year a living hell. In 1987 my family was living in Bakersfield, California, for the year. In a way, it was one of the best school experiences that I had, because we actually lived in the neighborhood that the school was in, so the friends I made were within walking distance instead of scattered all over the city. But then there was this kid...

I can't even remember his name now, and I wouldn't have thought I remembered what he looked like well enough to pick him out of a police lineup. He was short and scrawny with a kind of ratty little face, and that's about it. What I do remember is that when our gym class had to spend several weeks square dancing he would pointedly hold every other girl's hand during the dance, but make a deliberate effort to avoid touching mine. It wasn't like he was someone I had a crush on either, which I think made his rejection seem all the more significant, in a bizarre sort of way. I mean, that's an age when you're just starting to seriously struggle with what will and won't make guys look at you. And to get this completely unprompted rejection, like you have a quarantine zone around you... Well, let's face it. It should make you angry, but the way little girls are socialized to be nice all the time it makes you turn it inward and you end up internalizing the lesson that there's something wrong with you.

I think that feeling, that there was some secret aura that made me unpretty, stuck with me all the way through high school, only started to lift in college, and still sneaks up on me to this day if I don't consciously fight against it. For the typical teenager, there are more ways than Philip Larkin dreamt of for people to fuck you up.

Which brings this all back to the kid on his bike. As you grow up you gloss over and subsume a lot of the stuff from your childhood. Before last week I couldn't tell you of the last time I thought about this middle school memory, and I certainly hadn't ever connected it to my self image. But then this doppelganger comes by from out of nowhere, and as he passed I could feel my hand ball up in a fist, and all I wanted to do was hit his memory so hard it would ache for years.