Antisocial: adj
an excerpt

Chapter: 1

Antisocial: Adj- Preferring not to spend time with other people.

I closed my handy dandy Webster dictionary in wonderment, and placed it on the table. That didn’t describe me at all. According to my mom, I was antisocial.

“You’re antisocial!” she ranted.

See, I told you. I was sitting on the black leather couch, facing her as she paced back and forth on the other side of the coffee table. My dad was behind his newspaper sitting in his recliner, a cold Pepsi can not a foot away from him on the end table.

I glanced over to the window as my mother went on with the ramifications of the antisocialism…

“…no friends, no life, no reason to live!”

Kids were playing out side my house. Running up and down the sidewalk and then darting into our yard to hide behind bushes and trees. They were enjoying our true to form perfect Californian weather.

“…lead to mass destruction!” my mom went on.

To say she was a drama queen would have been the understatement of the year. Her arms were flailing, her nostrils flaring, her feet stomping into the plush rug…

My dad calmly turned the page in his newspaper. Apparently, he didn’t worry about the eventual fall of the modern world due to my being anti social.

“…And that’s why I’m sending you to summer camp!”

My eyes snapped back to my mom. She stood directly in front of me now. Her hands on her moderately sized hips. Her skin flushed. She was the only caramel colored person I had ever seen who could turn completely red when agitated. Her hair was a curly mess, pulled back into some semblance of a pony tail. Her eyes, an ocean blue like mine were darker than ever.

Before I go on, yes, she has blue eyes as do I. It seems to be a family trait passed down by the women on my mother side from some Sweden background way down the family line. Getting people to believe that yes, I am a black girl and yes my eyes are blue is too complicated to even go into right now, so I will continue with my shock about summer camp…

“Summer camp?” I finally said.

My father snapped his paper straight and continued reading. I was sitting in the same room with him and I hadn’t seen his face in nearly twenty minutes.

“Summer camp,” she repeated, going back to pacing. “A coed summer camp.”

“Coed?!” I screeched.

Let me pause the action once again. Why would coed be such a big deal for me? Well that would be because I have been going to an all girls school my entire fifteen years of life. The product of this is me being socially awkward when ever I’m around guys.

…I sigh because, I’ve always been awkward. Not just around boys. My body makes me awkward. I am constantly called gangly. Not a good description. My limbs are long and skinny. Curves do not exist on my body. And my feet are too small for my five feet seven inch frame. When I’m on my feet, I lose my balance every seven point three minutes. Seriously, I’ve counted. This leads to my nick name that the cruel, evil girls at school gave me; Double A. This could mean Awkward Angora or it could be a reference to my bra size. The topic is still up for interpretation; my bra size being in the lead.

Yes, Angora is my real name, now I need to get back to the action…

“Yes, a coed summer camp and your father and I have also decided…”

From the corner of my eye, I saw the paper lower from my father face.

I looked at him feeling panic rising. It must be something really serious if he lowered his paper.

“…that you will be transferring to a public school for your sophomore year.”

“What?!” I screeched again. “You’ve been drilling into my head that public school will kill me as in I will probably get shot on my way to third period and now you want me to go there?”

She was nodding. “Your father and I—”

Again I would like to interrupt. My mom is going on and on about how my father and she blah, blah, blah which is bull. I’m sorry, but it is. She makes the decisions. Dad nods and gets behind his paper. When she decided to name me, Dad wanted Angela after Grammy, and she wanted Angora, because that’s the type of sweater she was wearing when I was conceived…which is way too much information, by the way. But if only my dad had manned up and put his foot down or knocked her out with a baseball bat until he could secure my name as Angela on the birth certificate…

But as she was saying. “…feel that you need the exposure of a diversified student body to aid in your social skills.”

My mother is an adolescent psychologist which I’m sure you know can get old really quick. Every time we talk, she refers to a previous case. I’m less of daughter and more of a home study to her.

Dad is an accountant who is almost always inside his head. He’s really quiet which is probably why she can walk over him so easily.

“Daddy, I don’t want to go to camp,” I pleaded, giving him my best pleading look; lip out, eyes glassy, head cocked to the side.

His thick salt and pepper eye brows rose up on his coffee colored wrinkled forehead.

“Now Angie, you mother and I have decided.”

And with that, he snapped his paper back open and disappeared behind the black and white text.

My mother, who was in front of me, nodded. “But back to the camp. You leave in two weeks for Camp Whatamonga—”

“Whata, whata?” I said.

She was meanwhile getting a colorful brochure from her briefcase, which she handed over to me.

“This is a well rounded camp located near Yosemite,” she recited. On the cover of the brochure, a boy was smiling widely as he kayaked down a stream.

Do I really strike you as the type of person who would be impressed by kayaking? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

I opened the offending object seeing more pictures of things that don’t interest me; hikes, water skiing, basketball. I don’t have the hand/eye coordination to do these things without severely injuring myself.

Obviously, my parents hated me now.