Have I really not told this story? It contains those silly aspects of teenage strangeness and high school mirth that one cannot make up. No? Okay then.

Around tenth grade I was still a rather quiet kid. I had not gotten my growth spurt yet. (Which, when you are the scrawniest kid in gym? Including the wispy girls? Is fan-flippin’-tastic. “She can lift the bar on the bench press. Why can’t you? There aren’t even any weights on it?” Sigh.)

My dad was a scientist. My mom was a nurse. I was genetically predisposed to having some curiosity about anatomy. I thought that dried blood was cool. Also, our family reading that summer was Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, so I was a little too focused on fractals. Droplets from a bloody nose changing color due to oxygenation and then forming crystal patterns as it spread over the Kleenex… Cool, right? (It was also around this time that I started following comic books. My adult-self’s loyalty to Fringe was pretty much assured.)

Anyhoo, being a teenager, I did stupid things. Which is how I hit my foot hard enough for my toenail to come off. I do not remember what incident caused the break. I was too busy trying to figure out how to work lockers and why the morning announcement crew cared about my opinion of Connie Lingus (which is a story for another time.) Suffice to say, I had a toenail in my pocket.

I thought the toenail was cool. I had broken off in one piece and it still held its shape! Keratin, the same material that makes up our nails also makes up rhino horns. Come on! That is cool! Science!

That sound when you finish your thirty-minute work out? Or when you finally complete knitting that sweater that you promised your friend two years ago and you just now managed to get around to it? The sound of no one applauding? Or caring? Or looking at you like you are very much out of synch with what others care about? That was the response I received. Paired with folks backing away from me slowly.

The only person who seemed to get it was a fellow I will call Stu. Stu was short, wore questionable surfing shorts, and seemed like one of the first teens to grease his hair back. He thought I was hysterical and called me, “Toenail.” Nobody else really cared. We each had our wacky lives to obsess over.

I was weird enough that I took notes on yellow legal pads. My parents had them lying around. The paper had the requisite lines. Who cared if I turned in yellow pages instead of white? And all the pages were held together with a thin strip of glue on top. Once you used enough paper you could pick off little pieces of adhesive. (Or were they wax? Sixteen-year-old me thought it was glue. So I will continue to call it glue.)

Why pay attention in class when you could jot down a sentence, try to get a large chunk of glue off, and then look at the clock? Scribble. Write a phrase down. Pick. Look at the clock. Wonder why only two walls were made of brick. Pick. Jot down the historic date that clearly mattered to the Social Studies teacher. Pick.

One day the bearded teacher, clad in plaid flannel shirt (naturally), stopped me from leaving class.

“Look,” he said in an attempt to be stern. “I don’t know what’s up with this ‘Toenail’ thing, but I really don’t have time to pick up your clippings after class, got it?”

I had to stop and think. Clippings? I clip my nails after a bath, not after class. Why would he think that I was cutting my nails in class?

Ohhhhhhhh.

I did not know how to politely tell an authority figure that those were not fingernail clippings that he had picked up. But from then on, I made sure that I gathered up the little pieces of glue I plucked off the pad. He did not need to deal with my garbage. I was a weird teenager, yes, but not a jerk.