"John!" a woman's voice called behind me as I walked across the parking lot.
Turning around, I saw no one I knew. This happens all the time when you have an incredibly common name, so I moved on.
"Yo John-NIE!" I turned around again and saw a young woman bounding happily up to me. I had never laid eyes on her in my life. I know this because she's a porcelain redhead with enormous, Disney-character blue eyes. My confidence in my memory is nil, but my confidence in my shallowness remains intact. I would not forget this person.
"Uh, hi....you."
I'm also super-smooth.
"Ashtyn! I worked at the ice cream place during high school."
"Oh, right! How are you?" I seriously had no idea who this girl was.
Like all women, she correctly assumed I was lying. "You used to come in and get the peanut butter chocolate chunk, like, every day?"
Now I believed she had the right person. Faintly, a memory flickered.
"Did you always have your nose in a book?"
"Yes! And you made me read Watership Down!"
This was totally me. We chatted for a bit. What a vibrant, super-sweet woman that little bookworm had become. And then she got serious on me.
"You know, you said something to me once that I think about all the time."
Fuck. Here it comes, I thought. You ruined another kid's life with crap advice. You really do need to learn not to talk to people. Like, ever.
But no. I'd implored her to go to college, to ensure that she was never dependent on someone else, lest she get stuck in her hick little peninsula town. That's commonplace on my peninsula: uneducated women trap themselves into dependence on crap men. (Unlike in Seattle, where highly educated women trap themselves into crap men's dependence on them.) But not Ashtyn. She got her degree from the college where I once taught. She got a job and moved to the city. She just wanted me to know, I suppose. Delighted, I asked what she does for a living.
Modeling.