True story. This one time in elementary school I remember sitting next to a girl named Lorenda Salazar. Now, Lorenda preferred to be called "GiGi" (pronounced jEE-jEE) and I remember the first day she transferred to school she specifically asked everyone including the teacher to call her "GG" instead of her legal given name, Lorenda.
So one day we were doing math and it was probably long division or something of the sort. It was just past lunch and the teacher had asked us to take out our math books and turn to the section we had left off from yesterday. Our in class assignment was something along the lines of 20 long division problems and she had set aside an hour in class for us to work on them. Being the overachieving well behaved Asian child I was, I furiously worked through the problems as I had been trained from birth to do. Five minutes into the assignment I found myself on question number nineteen of twenty with one question to go. I leaned back in my small blue chair with a smug self satisfied look before re-gripping my now dull number two pencil (which was freshly sharpened no more than six minutes ago) and leaned forward to attack the last question. Suddenly, GG Salazar, who sat at the desk to my immediate right, tapped me on the shoulder.
Now, before I get to the next part, let me explain one thing. If you hadn't caught it yet, the family name Salazar typically belongs to individuals of Hispanic descent and not surprisingly, GG was Hispanic. Now, I'm not sure if this is true for all Hispanics but from my very limited experience, Hispanic girls tend to grow into Hispanic women much sooner than girls of other nationalities, if you catch my drift. If you still don't understand, let's just say GG was much more, how should I say, "developed", than most of the other girls in our sixth grade class.
So here I was sitting at my desk furiously dropping zeroes and carrying decimal points when GG leaned over in my direction to ask me a question. To this day I still am not sure what the exact question was; all I can remember was that her pink v-neck was sitting precariously low and that, combined with the altitude and obtuse angle of attack plus the sine of the inverse tangent of the height of my vantage point, gave me a very, very clear picture of the female anatomy. Safe to say, it was my very first view of a girl's cleavage that was committed to my memory, forever. But, before the one thousand thoughts of guilt and confusion and intrigue and curiosity and disgust and wonderment could flood into my facial reaction and reveal to her the passage of a boy into manhood, I caught myself and very calmly asked her to repeat her question. Somebody please invent a time machine, go back in time, and give my ten year old self a Klondike bar. After providing a satisfactory answer, I straight poker faced and finished question twenty of twenty, my heart still racing from what had just transpired.
But the story didn't end there.
It just so happened that the very next week, I was on the playground taking a break from a vigorous game of national ball when I passed by a group of girls on my way to the restroom. As I passed by, I couldn't help but hear one of them in the middle of talking trash, "...yeah that GG, you know she totally stuffs..." For those of you not in the know, "stuffing" is a term used to describe a method of artificially inflating the size or girth of certain body parts through the use of padding materials underneath the clothing where it would be indistinguishable from the real deal. In this case, they were making the unfounded assumption that due to GG's very developed body that she obviously must be stuffing her brassiere with tissues to inflate their size. Now, I don't know why, but I could not let this stand. I stopped mid step, turned about face and marched right up to the group of girls and in a very matter of fact pattern of speech said, "GG actually does NOT stuff, and I only know this because she asked me a question during math last week and I accidentally saw" making sure to place extra emphasis on the 'accidentally'. The girls stared blankly at each other for what seemed like an eternity, then like a pack of ****roaches in the kitchen when you turn the light on at night suddenly scattered. Shrugging my shoulders, I turned and continued on my way.
It wasn't until later that day that I found out the girls had run off to tell GG what I had said. Later, as I was standing outside getting ready to walk home, GG marched straight up to me and I winced, not sure of the degree of punishment she was about to inflict on me. But instead of punching me in the groin, she laid the biggest, tightest, longest hug I had ever gotten from a female that wasn't my mom up to that point in my young life. Then, before she left she thanked me for sticking up for her. And all I could do was smile sheepishly and say "you're welcome".
So, the moral of the story? NEVER let anybody tell you math is useless.
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