This is going somewhere

When I was in grade 8, our school took us on a trip to Quebec City. It cost maybe $150, maybe $250 per student...I can't be sure anymore. But I remember I was very excited to go. There was a big buildup to the trip, and we did fundraising by selling very large boxes of microwave popcorn. I remember when the shipment of the popcorn came in, we stored it in a supply closet on the main floor of the school, and when you walked past the supply closet, you would be hit with the unmistakable aroma of fake salty microwave popcorn butter. As a bright-eyed eager beaver and Student Council Vice President (coming in second to Kim Russell who blew me out of the water with her KFC - Kim For Council campaign, but ahead of Kevin Poon who was a very good friend and extremely well-respected brainer who walked to the high school to take grade 9 math every day), I actually think that I participated in the distribution of the popcorn boxes after school.

In Quebec City, I roomed with Nina Nayar, Karen Gaettens, and Jenn Rees. I think the third girl was Jenn Rees. I'm fairly certain. In any case, our room was one of the best, it was huge, and very very comfortable. My mother bought me a black purse that converted to a fanny pack, so that I could safely store the $50 she had given me for spending money. I remember that one night we went to have a nice dinner, and Nina ordered fettuccine alfredo, which is one of her favourites. But there was egg in the dish, maybe in the noodles. And Nina is allergic to eggs, it makes her tongue super itchy. That's why every year for her birthday, her mom would make ice cream cupcakes. So she sadly couldn't eat her dinner. After dinner, I got a tea with milk and sugar.

I got a caricature drawing of myself in Quebec City. It was the first comical caricature I had ever had, and I got hooked. I would later go on to have caricatures drawn of myself in any city I visited where I could find caricaturists. This particular drawing turned out to be the most racist one I would acquire. I had tiny slanty eyes, and huge - nay, gargantuan buck teeth, and the only thing that caused it to resemble me were the glasses and the little mole-freckle I have on my upper lip. The drawing also depicted saggy breasts and large saggy hips. I was only 13, and I was very skinny, with no boobs to speak of. But I loved the drawing...I had long since developed the ability to laugh at myself. Aware of my awkwardness, I wanted to be the first to laugh, because that way no one could make me feel bad.

On the bus ride home, Liz Reynolds got sick on the bus and threw up in the coach toilet. (I'm quite sure that this was the trip - there was another trip we took in grade 7 to Ottawa, and that could have been the actual vomit incident, but I am fairly confident that it was the grade 8 trip to Quebec City when this occurred). Liz Reynolds would go on to become the first of my friends to lose her virginity. She had sex with Steve Potter in grade 9. It was all very gleefully shocking, and I clearly remember her telling me that they knew they were young, but it "just felt right". I also remember that Bon Jovi's Always was their song. Maybe two months later, the relationship had degenerated, and it was "all about the sex". So they broke up. Liz owned a cream coloured sweater that I always admired.

The smell of Liz's puke on that grade 8 (or 7) day was really terrible. It was several degrees beyond sick, and I'm surprised that no one else started yakking in response to this odour. It's all the worst things you can imagine about the smell of vomit, times a hundred, because you're on a bus for 6 hours driving home from Quebec City. Plus you're only 13, and the days of puking weekly on a university building after 20 drinks at Alfie's and humping some horny dude on the dance floor who tried to put his hands in your pants while you gyrated in his face were still far in the future. The smell of the hot sticky vomit in that stuffy cramped coach was beyond anything I had experienced before. And I was trapped.

Everyone else on the bus agreed, and some of the girls got out their aerosol cans of some cheap underage whore fragrance. This was the kind of thing you can buy at Shopper's Drug Mart for maybe $4. I want to call it "Malibu"-something, but I can't say for sure, because my strict classy Chinese mother would never in a million years let me buy something so trashy. As much as I wished that she would. The girls emptied their pre-teen stripperwhore fragrance cans into the air in an attempt to mask the odour, while poor Liz sat on the floor of the coach with her head between her knees.

The result was a sickly sweet tropical perfume smell, with strong, occasionally overpowering under notes of vomit. It was a sickly sweet tropical vomit smell. The perfume smell was a relief, but the vomit smell underneath could not be ignored, because you KNEW it was vomit. The entire ordeal lasted for a good long time, and the scars are still on my soul.

Okay, this is where I was going with this:

I didn't have to go the washroom all morning today. Usually I'll go about twice in the the morning, and one of these trips will involve poopie. But today, nothing came down the pipes until after I had eaten my lunch. This is unusual, but no matter. The important thing was that stuff was indeed moving. I walked down the hall to the washroom and pushed open the door.

THE WASHROOM SMELLED LIKE MALIBU-SOMETHING AND LIZ REYNOLDS' VOMIT.

The nasty smell hung in the air like a thick moist cloud, and as the odour met my nostrils, all these vivid memories of that Quebec City trip came rushing back to me, and suddenly I was a 13 year old girl again sitting on a bus trying not to breathe in the stench surrounding me.

The assault left me so disoriented, I didn't even think to turn around and use another washroom. I confusedly found a stall and went in and lined the seat with tissue, and sat down. I sat, pushing and waiting desperately for the smell of my own feces to travel up to my violated olfactory area. When it hit me, the relief that flooded through my body made the blood rush to my head. I was gratefully sucking in lungfuls of my poo smell, just to avoid the nightmare smell of Liz Reynolds' vomit.

Of course, as my pooing came to an end, the Malibu vomit smell came pushing back in, persistent, insistent, and all-pervasive. I held my breath and wiped my bumbum and pulled up my pants, and flushed the toilet and ran out and washed my hands, and staggered towards the washroom door. Upon stepping out into the hallway, my stomach gave a great great lurch, and I stood there gagging and coughing, trying to expel the malodorous gases from my poor besieged body.

It was horrible. Horrible.

I don't have anything else to say. I'm physically and emotionally drained.

Hold me.