Thursday, April 3  

Pretend

When Vic was a kid, she was a big fan of games that started with a giddy "let's pretend..." She liked to be what she wasn't.

pretend: verb 1. to behave affectedly or insincerely. 2. to contrive and present as genuine.

There was the time she unbent a paper clip and wore it in her mouth for 2 weeks straight, telling all her classmates that she'd gotten a retainer. She wanted a retainer rather badly after Nadja, the most popular girl in her grade 6 class (though it's worth mentioning that she was popular for her huge bazooms rather than her braces) got braces.

There was the time she told her best friend that she actually wrote the song "I don't like Mondays" by the Boomtown Rats. That pretend went quite well actually and lasted a surprising amount of time without anyone catching her out. Vic even got several members of the school choir together at recess to rehearse her already popular song. She thinks in the back of her mind she may have had an alternate recording in mind. Perhaps a world (or at least, city) tour. The grade sixers of Brookmill Public School singing I Don't Like Mondays by child/rock star/prodigy, vic wiseman.

Vic often thanks god that her pretends were never given serious attention by adults or those in the know. She was never called up for the fraud she was. Until junior highschool.

To get out of gym class one sunny afternoon, Vic told the school secretary that she had consumption. She'd just finished reading Anne of Avonlea or one of those later Annes in the series. The one where Anne actually dies of consumption, leaving Gilbert to raise their beautiful red headed children alone. Anyway, Vic was possessed with the beautiful tragedy of consumption -- not knowing that it was the old name for TB and definitely not something a junior highschool girl could walk around claiming to have.

Though that pretend was promptly pointed out by the secretary for the hoax it was, it still didn't stop her from loving pretend.

Today, Vic plays more adult version of "let's pretend." For example, go to a bar and play let's pretend we're a vastly interesting person with many, many redeeming qualities and boobs a size larger than they really are (thanks to the wonders of padded uplift). Vic detests the way she throws her head back and laughs like a breeding mare in heat whenever a potential-candidate-for-some-serious-shagging makes a joke in her general direction.