The poetics of rule-breaking

& the story of my very first friend

It was the first day of first grade when I met Christina.

I was the new kid in school—a place named after an 18th century evangelist, in which boys’ hair was never to touch the collar, and girls’ skirts were never to rise more than four inches above the back of the knee.

It was a remarkable school, to which I owe more than I can say. But the sheer rigor of the place hung heavy in the air.

There was a headmaster—a very Hogwarts-esque term to me—who came to visit us at recess. Tall and gentle, this enigma of a man commanded such a reverence that I distinctly remember confusing him with Jesus. Clearly I hadn’t spent much time in the pews.

I learned that on the back of every assignment, we had to pledge our honor that we had “neither given nor received unauthorized aid.”

If a student’s integrity was ever called into question, they stood trial before the honor council—a hush-hush court of peers. This, too, commanded such a reverence that I confused it with an actual court of law.

I was putty in the hands of such a system. But this was not the case for Christina, who had already been there a year when I arrived.

She approached me on the playground like a miniature, jaded employee on a cigarette break. Pointing to the Peter Pan collar of my blouse, she said, “Nobody buttons the top one.” And thus a friendship was born.

Christina and I were opposites in every way. I spent my after-school hours at ballet and musical theatre. Christina spent hers holding her own in soccer and touch football with the neighborhood boys.

In my diary, I wrote flattering poems about my teachers. But likely, in their diaries, they were writing about Christina.

“Today she super-glued a quarter to the ground in the hallway, so she could watch people try to pick it up.” “Today she highlighted the word ‘sex’ in the Bible.”

Christina and I dressed as “ceiling fans”

Christina accrued more than thirty detentions over the course of her time at the school. Once, she got three in one day.

To be fair, they weren’t exactly hard to come by. She got one of them just for entering a classroom with the corner of her shirt untucked. But it meant that regularly, she had to arrive at 6:15 am to sit and stare at a wall.

This was, as far as I was concerned, a prison sentence. The detention itself was survivable, but the blemish to the reputation? It was more than my goody-goody heart could bear. So in all twelve years, I never got one.

It wasn’t the accomplishment I thought it was. It made me, in a word, high-strung. When I was ten, my skirt measured more than four inches above the knee, and I begged my aunt—who happened to be babysitting—to spend the evening ripping out the seam to make it longer.

During a fifth grade spelling test, our teacher accidentally left posters of the words hanging on the walls. I erased every single answer that I might have come to by looking at the posters.

I knew all the words without the posters. But just to know I could have cheated terrified me so much that I intentionally flunked the quiz. What other choice did I have? I was pledging my honor. I couldn’t lie under oath!

Christina took the rules more lightly. And I didn’t judge her for it; it just didn’t seem like an option for me.

Take, for example, cell phones. They were to be off and in our lockers, so mine was. I checked obsessively between each class. When I accidentally took a Tamagotchi to class, I spent the entire time in silent panic, willing it not to get hungry and start beeping.

Christina thought that rule was silly, so she left her phone wherever she left it. At some point, it went off in her backpack when she wasn’t even in the room, and they still managed to give her a detention. They’d identified her by her ringtone, T-Pain’s “Buy U A Drank.”

Christina wasn’t interested in being a rebel. She was curious; in fact, I think curiosity is what we had in common. But mine was buried under an eagerness to please, while hers had her poking her own holes in the ground.

And mostly, she felt that every rule should pass through the filter of her own judgment first. If it didn’t make sense, she discarded it.

I can remember us asking to watch TV while eating lunch at her house, but being told we “couldn’t leave the table” until we’d finished. So she had us lift the entire table and carry it to the TV. Technically, we didn’t break the rules.

And she had something else going: bravery. She once flung herself off my porch to avoid losing a game of manhunt, dislocating her shoulder in the process. When she went missing from my birthday party, we found her twenty feet up in a tree.

us jumping into a pond that we’d later discover was infested with alligators

This combination of traits meant that the cracks in any system were always evident to Christina. And as I reached the end of middle school, I started to see them too.

In eighth grade, the dean of students called me to his office, where he slid a single piece of paper across the desk. “Our records indicate you searched this on a school computer.”

I looked down at the paper and saw—in a small text box in the center—nothing but the word “butt.”

He told me this was a serious offense, and I immediately burst into tears. As it turned out, it was a mistake of the system. Searching for a reference photo in my art class, I’d typed what is perhaps the single most innocent phrase in the English language. “Butterfly on a flower.”

Still, he called my mother, who—and I love her for this—laughed hysterically. He said he would let me off with a warning.

It wasn’t long before Christina, too, was a victim of the monitoring software. The guidance counselor pulled her out of study hall to discuss her latest search, “how do I know when I’m pregnant?”

But Christina didn’t burst into tears. She burst into laughter.

It was determined the system had flagged a dropdown suggestion when she was researching how to do a chemical reaction. But while I was trying everything to rid myself of my scarlet “B”, Christina embraced hers with open arms.

It was homecoming week and the theme was “holiday,” so she dressed up as Mother’s Day. Sporting a fake baby bump, she told the whole school she’d already named the baby… after our guidance counselor.

Shortly after graduation, Christina found an old telescope in her parents’ basement. Years later—with a bit of her famous curiosity—that became a degree in astrophysics and several internships at NASA. She’s now about to complete her PhD.

So her thirty detentions didn’t close any doors. In fact, they were likely just the spent fuel of her launch into the real world—evidence of the same fire that still drives her.

And eventually, I took a page from her book. I learned to loosen up enough to let my ideas rattle around.

I started publishing my poetry (though not the ones about my third grade teacher). I moved to Madrid, a city Christina now passes through on her way to the Canary Islands, where she and her team service a one-of-a-kind telescope.

And still to this day, whenever I wear a blouse, I leave the top one unbuttoned.

Happy (early) birthday, Tina. May you keep breaking rules that need breaking.

🐱
Emma