It all started as a joke. It was a Saturday afternoon early my senior year, and I was a fresh, bright-eyed 16 year old girl that had no idea what it was like to be a high school legend. My friends and I sat in a Dunkin Donuts that was next to our high school. We had been at the school since early that morning to set up for a Thespian President's Brunch. Our conversations were like any normal conversation between a bunch of teenagers— vulgar and stupid. My friend, Jessica, who was in the same grade as me and now spends her time going to small coffee shops around Florida, raised this question: “Doesn’t it kind of bother you guys that we haven’t really made our mark at this school?” She was right, it did kind of bother me, and by the way, our other friends suddenly went quiet and told me that it kind of bothered them, too. However, it wasn’t something I was actively thinking about, my “mark” at the school. I was already pretty well known at my school, I had gone to a lot of parties, I used to play sports and I was very active in my school’s theatre program. “You know what would be funny?” I said. “If I got a tattoo on my ass that says ‘ASS’.” My friends laughed, made their own jokes about it and then moved on from the matter. A lightbulb went off in my head – that’s how I was going to do it, that’s how I was going to make my mark. I was going to become the Girl with the Ass Tattoo.
Earlier that day, while precariously stacking bagels in a pyramid, my friend Natalie told me that she had gotten a Stick-n-Poke kit for her birthday. For those who don’t know what a Stick-n-Poke is, it’s basically just a thick needle, like a sewing needle, and tattoo ink, and then you literally get stabbed hundreds of times with a sewing needle and kind of shady ink. Since I’m the Queen of Bad Ideas, I sent a message to Natalie offering 20 dollars and the rest of my iced coffee in exchange for the tattoo. She responded quickly with a cool, “Meet me in the parking lot.” Originally, I was going to excuse myself from the group I was with to go meet her, but Jessica insisted on coming with me. As we left the gas station Dunkin Donuts, which is as bad as it sounds, I knew the next time I returned, I was either going to be the funniest kid in school or a huge disappointment to my parents.
Over the years, I had become known for doing a lot of dumb things and for taking jokes way too far. My freshman year my friend challenged me to not use a spoon for a day, though, now that I think about it, I have no idea why he dared me to do that. Not only did I not use a spoon for an entire day, I have gone four years without using a single spoon. A few months after the spoon incident, my friends and I stole a lemon tree out of someone’s lawn because of a reason I can’t even remember. Last week I called a woman in a Trader Joe's parking lot a "precious bitch" after she lightly backed up into my car. So, me doing stupid things wasn’t out of the ordinary, but it was also never permanent. Spoon habits could break, lemon trees could be replaced and that woman has probably forgotten who I am by now. So I knew that me getting this tattoo was going to be pretty big.
Jessica and I met Natalie in the parking lot, who sat on the bumper of her mismatched colored car with the trunk open, showing off her kit. We were quickly faced with a problem, though. Where were we going to do this? We didn’t want to do it in the parking lot of the school since, because of the President’s Brunch and a soccer practice going on, there were a ton of people walking in and out of their cars at the time. “I know where we can go,” Natalie said, with a smirk that told me that we were going to do something even more stupid. Despite this, we all piled into Natalie’s car that we had lovingly nicknamed the "Deathtrap 2.0." Natalie’s grand idea on where to do the deed was the parking lot of an elementary school. We quickly came to the realization that the faculty were at the school that day because of a campus wide meeting, but none of us could think of anywhere else to go. I had no other choice but to get the word ‘ass’ tattooed on me in the same place that young minds were shaped.
I soon found myself in the backseat of a car, with my pants down and something poking me. It was oddly reminiscent of my freshman year of high school. I wish I could say the process was quick and I took it like a champ, but it wasn’t, and I didn’t. It took 20 minutes to tattoo three letters on my ass, and every time my friend would stab me with that sewing needle, a tiny yelp would come out of my mouth. For comparison, I recently got a tattoo done by a professional, meaning not by my idiot friend in the backseat of her car. It’s four words roughly the size of an index card on my right shoulder and it only took 15 minutes and hurt exponentially less.
Later that night, news broke, which meant that I had tweeted a now deleted picture of the tattoo and my classmates went absolutely wild about it. I had achieved my goal of being known in my high school for doing something absolutely crazy. Periodically throughout the rest of my senior year, people that I didn’t know would come up to me and say, “You’re the girl with the stupid tattoo, right?,” to which I would always reply with a gracious and over enthusiastic, “Yes I am!” A stupid joke made in a gas station Dunkin Donuts helped me achieve my goal of being the legendary Girl with the Ass Tattoo.
