On KJZZ's SOAPBOX, The Show turns over the mic to listeners. In the latest series, listeners tell their own true stories on the theme of Misbehaving.
I am not a troublemaker. Well — I wasn’t in high school, anyway.
My hand was so often the first in the air to answer a question that teachers would say, “How about we hear from someone else?”
My senior year I was dress-coded for the first and only time in my four-year high school career. On that particular day I was wearing a T-shirt tucked into cutoff denim shorts. The shorts were new; I had worn them to the beach a couple of times but never to school. I underestimated how uncomfortable they would get as I sat in a plastic chair all day, and I was constantly adjusting them in between classes.
At the end of lunch period on D-Day — Dress Code Day — the bell rang, I threw my stuff in my backpack and stood up. As I reached back instinctively to pull down my shorts, someone tapped my shoulder.
“You. Front office. Now.” The voice behind me belonged to a new staff member who was cracking down hard on dress-code violations.
I was marched to the front office, past the large room where my next class was filing in. It felt like literally everyone was watching my walk of shame.
The adult who dress-coded me held out a pair of red P.E. shorts. My cheeks burned as I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror. I felt stupid. And angry. It wasn’t fair that I was missing class because some random lady decided my shorts were too short. Why did she get to decide what was or wasn’t appropriate?
I held back tears as I came out of the bathroom. The truth is that I knew my shorts were probably too short. I had pulled them down so much throughout the day it had become a mindless habit. But I was supposed to be doing a presentation in class, and I would have rather died than stand up in front of everyone in a pair of basketball shorts with DRESS CODE written across the leg.
I would not be going down without a fight.
I demanded to see exactly what rule in the student handbook I broke — which led to a trip to the vice principal’s office. Mr. D pulled out the dress code rules and pointed at No. 5: “Shorts or skirts must cover the student’s entire backside.”
After even more debate, Mr. D agreed to let me change back into my jean shorts so he could see for himself. I pulled them down as much as I could before walking back into his office. I turned around slowly so he could see the back.
As I walked back to class in my previously too-short-shorts, I tried to make sense of what I was feeling. Triumph, because I got my way. Discomfort, because two grown adults had just spent what felt like an eternity deciding if enough of my backside was covered. Rage, because what I was wearing resulted in me missing 25 minutes of my advanced humanities class.
The embarrassment over the whole dress-code debacle hurt more than the world-class wedgie my shorts had been giving me all day. When I got home that evening I shoved them far into the back of my bottom dresser drawer.
I never wore them again.
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