Admirable

        I was minding my own business, and it wasn’t my fault. But it’s not exactly like I could ignore her, there. She practically fell through the chair when she sat down as hard as she did. She wasn’t okay, and her long, curly, nasty hair was flying in front of my face in my personal space. The fact that there were at least twelve other open seats in the room didn’t really matter to her, but she plopped down right next to me. And her shampoo smelled like strawberries, which I’m allergic to.
        “What’s wrong?” It doesn’t look like she’s even listening to me, but my conscience is tamed because I’ve asked, and hey, that’s all I can do; I don’t even know the pathetic looking girl.
She whimpers. I’m unschooled in the language of whimpering. Why do people always think they can get your sympathy with a whimper? Is the logic that when dogs whimper they get petted and kissed and cuddled so when humans do it they must obviously want the same thing: attention? Maybe people are just attention whores. Either way, I don’t what the hell she wants when she sits there whimpering, but it’s definitely weighing on my conscience. So, I try again.
        “How about we start with names?” I suggest, trying to see her face, but she’s moved her long hair in front of her face and it’s tangled in a million different directions, covering most of the skin that would otherwise be exposed. “I’m Miranda,” I prod her, and she moves the hair out of her face. Not that it’s much of an improvement. I kind of wish she’d have left the hair where it was.
        “Bonnie,” I think I hear, although I can’t tell because her hands are still blocking her mouth. Her small, unevenly sized, green eyes don’t really meet mine, but if they were hands they would have fondled each other, which understandably made me feel like I had just cheated on my husband. So I look away, hoping she’s doing the same but not counting on it, since I’m not really counting on any normalcy from the crazy next to me.
And when it registers that the name of this strawberry-smelling, different-sized eyes, ratty girl sitting next me is Bonnie I have to hold back a laugh. Her parents must have been hopeful, but I wonder if they’re still around to see how ironic her name is, now. Either that or it was some cruel joke by the universe that she would look the way she does now in front of me and still have the nerve to go by “Bonnie”. “Bonnie,” of English origin, meaning “pretty girl.” Bonnie would be an appropriate name for Carmen Electra, not Sasquatch, and this girl was definitely closer to Sasquatch. It’s nothing of the fitting name that Miranda is to me. Miranda, from Latin, meaning admirable. Miranda is a name to aspire to. Admirable. Plus, bonus, Miranda is a character in The Tempest by William Shakespeare.
        Names are so perfect. A person’s name tells me more about a person than I ever need to know to have relationships with them. If a person’s name is ironic like Bonnie’s, well, it always gives me a good chuckle. Some people just don’t know what they’re doing when they name their children. They don’t get it. Names are everything. Everything is in a name. The fact that this sniveling, ratty, strawberry-smelling girl is named “Bonnie” is proof enough of that.
        But as the time passes it’s becoming increasing awkward for me to just sit there now that I’ve introduced myself, so I take a breath to hold back the giggles and try to figure out what this girl wants from me.
“How’s it goin’?” I ask, keeping everything casual but feeling like a pretty big idiot, because really, who says, “goin’”? And I knew I was anxious to break the awkward moment but I didn’t honestly believe I was anxious enough to talk like some hick from the Smokey Mountains. But I’m mentally crossing everything that she doesn’t just give up talking to me because I only have half a brain cell when I find myself confused as to when I started actually caring what this girl has to say. Because five minutes ago I didn’t know her name and didn’t consider her worth the time.
         “Good, good,” she says softly, sorta lifting her head a little higher like she’s more confident talking to me, but she doesn’t say anything else, so I figure she’s not that into a conversation with me. The only problem with that is that as she sits there, the silence gets awkward and she whimpers a couple more times, that puppy with his nose in his pee whimper that drove me crazy in the first place and made my conscience annoy me into talking to her. And I figure with all the work it’s going to take to get her to talk about it, she’s lucky I’m such a nice person. I have a moment where I’m dreading the effort I’m going to have to make for this interaction to work, and my conscience kicks in again like some annoying mother-in-law who sleeps over at the house of her newly married son and daughter-in-law: always there, always annoying.
         “Good,” I acknowledge, although I’m having a hard time keeping myself from exposing her lying, sorry ass with the first words I speak after her lies. That’s when I really think about how difficult it is to maintain this ridiculous conversation wherein “Bonnie” knows I don’t care and I know she’s lying through her sorry, crooked teeth. Although I’ve had plenty of practice, because it’s basically the same conversation I have with anyone else at other place, any other day. Social interaction is getting so predictable.
         “What’s wrong?” It’s always a mistake to move straight from ironic names to that question, but I chance it, giving her the benefit of the doubt. Her face scrunches up, and I noticed it actually makes her look more attractive and think she should walk around like that all the time: her nose crinkled up and her forehead all furrowed. It’s ugly, but it’s better than before. I’m thinking that any minute now she’s going to tell me that her problem is the fact that she’s too ugly to live but she can’t decide how to off herself. Not that I could help her with that problem, but at least it’s honest.
         “Nothing,” she finally decides, as she gets this longing in her eyes and unscrunches her face. But I’m not really paying attention to her anymore because she seriously just “nothing”ed me. Nothing? You come in here plopping on chairs, flinging your hair in my face, whimpering and looking like you belong on the forbidden mountain and you tell me there’s nothing wrong? How stupid do you have to think a person is to be begging for this kind of attention only to turn it down? Only I’m not really sure if I’m more angry or hurt, seeing as how I’ve just spent the past however long trying to get her to tell me what she obviously needs to get off her chest only to be rejected like a bad novel at a publishing house. Don’t beg for my attention and then throw it away. What a waste of time!  I hate it when people waste my time; there’s only so much of it in life, anyway, and people have to tug at my conscience and waste my time getting me to pay attention to them when they have nothing of consequence to share.
         She’s looking straight ahead at the blackboard, now, with her hair out of her face, and I resist the urge to bitch slap her. Her confidence is definitely up, but she had to waste a lot of time to get it there. A lot of my time. People should come equipped with automatic confidence. It’s totally impossible to succeed at anything without the confidence to do so and it would waste a lot less time of already confident people if the incompetent, low self-esteemers would go to a black hole and waste time there or simply give themselves their own confidence boost.  That’s the problem with the world; everybody needs somebody, whether they want to admit it or not.
         “You sure?” I’m kind of on edge because of her inability to live with the truth, but I give her the chance to clear her name to me, even though I highly doubt she’s going to fess up. And even as I ask I am increasingly aware that she will lie to me again to throw attention I could give her because her eyes are down in her lap and as far as I can tell there’s nothing very interesting in her lap other than her twisting hands, which might be more interesting than I think given the fact that her fingernails are painted at least five different colors.
         “Yeah. It’s cool,” Bonnie assures me, her voice shaky but her body steady. I’m not getting anymore mixed signals from her, but I’m still convinced that she’s lying from her sorry state when she entered the room. But she’s so steady now I’d have a hard time believing anything was wrong if I’d walked in, now. I look her up and down again, searching for a sign that she’s a little uncomfortable or upset, but I don’t find anything. For a nanosecond I start to think that maybe I’m slipping and I imagined the whole thing. However, now I’m just drawn to the ugly girl and even if she is okay, I kind of want to know about her. Which is pretty much a first for me, because I can usually ignore the people sitting next to me pretty well. Like the five or six other people who walked into the room since we started talking and are congregated in a corner carrying on about some party they’d all been to recently. But I can’t take my eyes off this girl. I need her; I need to talk to her.
         “So…you like this class?” I ask, changing the subject and finding neutral ground, because even if I could stop talking to her, it’d be so awkward until class starts. But I haven’t been staring at her while I’ve said this and when I turn back to her, she’s sitting up straighter than I’ve ever seen her, looking more confident than a peacock and it sets me off, again. Because who is she to have any kind of confidence at all---this ugly girl in a general education class that any idiot could pass? She’s not pretty and she’s certainly not intelligent, so what does she have to be confident about? And all I really want is for her to slouch back down in her chair like no one can see her and whimper like a little puppy again to return the balance I felt when she first came in the room.
         “It’s alright,” she’s giving me these two word answers and not helping much between awkward silences, so I feel like I’m going to give it up and stop talking to her, which should give us both what we want. She got her attention and I’ll get my balance back when she slouches back down because I’m not showering her with attention or conversation. The pull I felt to her mere moments again is broken and I go back to thinking about whatever it was I was thinking about before. Oh, right. The name “Olivia,” and how it’s ironic for our professor to be named an English word for “Elf Army” when she’s nearly six feet tall.
         But Bonnie catches my eye again, and I have to respond. I can’t just leave the conversation hanging with her last words, no matter how much I want to never look at her hideous face again.
         “Yeah, gen eds,” I shrug, trying to say, “Okay, we can stop talking, now,” in a polite way that gets us both out of awkward silences, but not sure if it’s actually working. But I reason that I’ll find out soon enough, because goliath Olivia comes through the door, and I want to roll my eyes to the back of my head and leave them there for an hour and fifteen minutes but I know it will never work, so I resign myself to sitting in class pretending to listen and nodding every few minutes as I see Bonnie slouch down into her chair again and realize that it’s all been a colossal waste of time. I should always follow my gut instinct about people with ironic names. They’re not worth talking to or listening to, because everything they are is a lie. It starts with a name that doesn’t fit and turns into a lifetime of “nothing’s wrong” when their worlds are falling apart. They don’t make friends because no one’s good enough, even though they wouldn’t know what good enough was if they were the Queen of England. They’re too picky to find any real connections in people and they’re always over analyzing everything because something is always not quite right. So I brush off the feeling that Bonnie’s staring a hole through me using her peripheral vision and think about how great it is to be me: Miranda. Admirable.