Excerpt: What's in a Name?

Kelly had always felt that her parents had copped out when they named her- really- how imaginative was it for them to have named her Kelly? And her last name was Smith, so no excitement there either. Seriously, they fell down on the job when they decided her name, but they were her parents so she tried not to hold a grudge- they seemed to do pretty much everything else right.

When she was a little girl, Kelly kind of planned to grow up and change her name to something much more exotic like Tatiana or Jacinda or even Princess Oliviana Buttercup Marie, which in retrospect wouldn't have been all that great a choice. Still, Kelly always held the idea in the back of her mind that there must have been something better out there for her name-wise and that one day, maybe when she least expected it, the perfect name- her real name , the one she was meant to wear for the rest of her life- would come to her. And then she could change her name and everything would be sparkly unicorn rainbows and her real life would begin.

When Kelly went to college at State and she met her new roommate, she was immediately, irrationally, and immensely jealous. Her new roommate's name was Alexandra Leigh Kopinski-Martin- Xanda to her friends. Xanda had the perfect name- it was pretty and interesting and even just a little bit ethnic. It had a hyphen and Leigh spelled to cool way. Xanda had four nicknames to choose from- Alex, Lexi, Andi, and Xanda, not to mention how she could have chosen to use her cool middle name, which Kelly was sort of hung up on. (Kelly's middle name was Mildred- enough said.)

Of course Xanda turned out to be a fantastic roommate and a really good friend, so Kelly had to keep a lid on her jealousy. Xanda didn't deserve to have her roommate hate her solely on account of her name being inherently interesting- just the same way that Kelly hoped that people didn't judge her as eternally boring and white bread because of how sleep inducing her name was.

Anyway, all that tells you a bit about how Kelly felt about her name- and Xanda's name- and, when you really think about it, about names in general. Now, she truly didn't feel that her name was the full cause of her life being very uneventful, but it certainly didn't help matters any. In fact, she and Xanda got into their very first argument over that idea at the end of the fall semester of their sophomore year. Kelly pointed out that they were both nineteen years old and while Kelly had been over the border into Canada when she was on a class trip to Niagara Falls, Xanda had been to Poland every summer since she was three years old in order to visit her Grandmother Kopinski, not to mention the European tour she took with her parents the summer she was twelve years old and the vacation trip to Mexico Xanda managed to scrimp together enough money for during last year's Spring break. (Kelly, on the other hand, spent last year's Spring break visiting her grandparents in Cleveland.)

Kelly also cited the fact that she had had only one slightly annoying and way too uptight boyfriend during high school- the kind of boy who had too much respect for both Kelly and her parents for him to ever bring her home even a minute after curfew. Xanda, however, had dated more boys and men than she could remember. She was always recounting stories of where this boyfriend or that boyfriend took her (and the fellas' names were never the same twice). Not only that, but the stories were always along the lines of how this one time they had gone to an afterhours club and Xanda and Abed met Charles Nelson Reilly or the other time when they hiked this mountain trail and found panther cubs- so cute- until the mother showed up and Xanda and Sven had to run for their lives or even the time when they joined a protest march because one of the history professors had been teaching both Creationism and Holocaust Denial as fact and Xanda and Yaakov got arrested by the campus police and spent the night in junior jail until the dean finally saw reason, fired the professor, and granted a pardon to each of the protesters. (Kelly had stayed in that night to study for an exam she had early the next morning.)

"But you can't do that- compare just two people who have very different lives and very different names and say that that proves anything, Kelly," Xanda protested. "It's not scientific at all."

"You know what, I've lived my entire life with this drab anchor of a name and I'm telling you, I may not have followed the scientific method, but baby, I have got more than enough empirical evidence to make a conclusion- I would be a different girl, have a different life- a more interesting and exciting life, id I had a better name," Kelly countered.

Xanda did that thing where she puts her hands on her hips and wiggles her head from side to side when she talks to tell the person she is talking to that they are being ridiculous. "Seriously, Kelly, you can't say that- your name isn't who you are, it's just a way to tell you from some other person in conversation and written correspondence."

"You are only saying that because you are living on the other side of the exciting name divide. You never suffered the consequences of a name like mine, so you can't understand." Kelly was as sure of this as she was of anything- she'd been contemplating the exciting name divide all of her life- she of which she spoke.

"All right, let's put it to a test. We have got the whole month-long winter break coming up- let's see about getting some scientific evidence to prove or disprove your theory," Xanda said, true to form- she was always proposing that they do experiments to figure out weird things they wondered about, for example they polled the students in the dining hall to figure out what was in the mystery meat (they were pretty sure that is wasn't dog or muskrat), they took readings with a decibel meter to find out how loud they could be before the really mean librarian would shush them (6 decibels, 3 is she'd already shushed them before, and -2 if they just looked at her funny), and they did a scientific study to determine once and for all whether or not Professor Tonkin's hair was a bad toupee or real and just a terribly unfortunate style (that one was inconclusive- the debate rages on).

Kelly usually had to be dragged into these experiments, but she always had fun when she went along with them. "How would we do that?"

"Well," Xanda began, squinching up her face as she thought about her answer, "I'll get a job- one of those temporary holiday jobs- and I'll use a different name- I'll use your name. And we will see if my life gets suddenly ultra boring."

"Okay. I can guarantee that it will. The life of Kelly Smith is a life of extreme vanilla, there is no way around it."

"Wait, I'm just the control group- you have to do something, too," Xanda ordered "You have to gather more subjects for the experiment- go out and interview as many people named Kelly Smith as you can in the month and see if they are at all anything like you are. I'm sure that you will find at least one Kelly Smith with a life you consider interesting- more interesting that your name should allow."

That sounded like a lot of work to prove a theory that Kelly already knew was the absolute Truth (with a capitol 'T'). "I doubt it, but I guess I could try," she finally agreed, and then Kelly's phone rang because the pizza delivery guy was waiting down at the dorm's front desk with their dinner.