Betty and Jane

When we were kids we didn't really have friends. We had cousins.

Don't get me wrong, our cousins were our friends and they still are.

But it never really occurred to me that other people didn't have cousins to hang out with all summer and stay the night with and just generally cause a commotion.

The one exception to the cousin rule that I can remember, was the Triplets*. Roommate*, Baldy*, and their sister Braids*.

The Triplets grew up in a house that was located on the grounds of the local high school, where we would later attend. Their mom was a teacher and their dad worked in the maintenance department. Match.mom also worked at the high school.

I know that the Triplets and I went to school together from kindergarten on, but I think there may have even been a shared preschool class in there at one point.

To say we have a history, is the world's greatest understatement.

I spent so many nights at their house and so many years in school with them, that I sometimes felt like they were another extension of my family.

During the summers in the weeks before school would start, our moms would be working at the school to get their classrooms ready for the year, and the three of us would run around the school wreaking havoc!

I mean to tell you that we would meet up in the morning and we would have our run of the place all day.

Their mom taught business, so there were typewriters and phones at all of the work stations in her classroom. So we would spend a part of the day in there making fake phone calls and typing up memos. Then we would head over to Match's science classroom and play with the sinks and experiment stations in the back. Once that got boring, we would find another friend whose mom was the librarian and we would head to the library to play some computer game for hours.

Sometimes we would just run around the campus, checking out lockers and seeing what we could find.

There was a kid who was a little older than us, I think he would work at the high school during the summer and we would call him Lugi Saliva because his real name was similar to those two words. We really weren't very nice.

So one year in high school chemistry class, Braids and I were supposed to do a project. I really can't remember the parameters of the projects, but I know that we were supposed to do an experiment and then write up the results and give an oral presentation to the rest of the class.


Well, it turns out that we didn't really care too much about the project so the weekend before it was due we were kind of scrambling to find something. We went to Match's classroom and starting looking through some science books to find an experiment, and somehow came up with our own that included smoking a lot of cigarettes and measuring breaths. Or something like that.


Really, all I can remember was that cigarettes were involved. I can't even remember how we got the cigarettes because we certainly weren't old enough to buy them.


So, on a Sunday afternoon, we drove her car behind the community center in town and did a series of physical activities. Then we smoked like five cigarettes each and did them again. 


We recorded whatever needed to be recorded and wrote up a report.


Then we went to class the following week and told everyone how "Betty" and "Jane" reacted to smoking cigarettes and then doing physical activity.


Apparently we wowed someone because I got an A in that class.


And I don't think I've ever wanted to smoke another cigarette.