Chicka-Cherry-Cola Culture (or, Confessions of a Teenage Mutant Awkward Turtle)

Before rolling up my jeans and stepping into the bathtub, I put on a definitive mix in the bathroom. We’re talking Spice Girls, Will Smith, Savage Garden, N’Sync, Backstreet Boys, Sublime: the works. My best friend was kneeling on the floor, arched at a seemingly impossible angle to get her head over the rim of the tub. Her hair was nearly down to her butt, and I wondered if there was enough brown goop in the bottle to cover it all. As we both wailed along with perfect inflection to “Say You’ll Be There,” I stepped into the tub and began slathering her head with hair dye.

It could’ve been ten years ago. But it wasn’t. It was five weeks ago.

My best friend and I have been dyeing each others’ hair for most of the eleven years of our friendship. In one particular instance, I, being of less than sound mind and stubbornly brown hair, decided to go blond. Halfway into the box-recommended time, my better half peeked under my shower cap and gulped, “I think we should rinse. It’s looking more orange than not.” Between the two of us and over the course of our adolescence, we covered more than half of the color wheel on our respective heads, with varying forms of red, orange, purple, and a batch of neon yellow stripes. We’ve also endured varying pierces, fake tattoos, real tattoos, terrible haircuts, braces, glasses, episodes of severe eyeliner, and one botched leg-waxing attempt.

And that’s just in the beauty department.

It isn’t any wonder that her husband has a hard time keeping up with us when we’re together. After all, as I pointed out in my toast at their wedding, she and I have been together longer than they have. (I’m not that much of a jerk—I also added that he and I now had something very important in common: loving her for the rest of our lives, in very different capacities.) She and I speak in a kind of shorthand, collapsing eleven years of shared cultural, historical, and personal experience into a language with a fluent population of two. I must admit he is a very good sport, and I can’t blame him when he eventually backs away slowly, hands aloft in surrender. Good man, that.

My best friend and I are a matched set. I, for one, feel remarkably lopsided when I haven’t talked to her for a few days, like a nestled peppershaker without its salt: just a weird little figurine hugging nothing. We shared the travails of a deeply awkward adolescence and came out the other side similarly scarred, mutually stronger, and bonded for life. Sometimes I wonder if my proclivity for people of similar teenage awkwardness traces its origins to her: I look for people with similar scars, because we’ll probably have a lot more in common than people who don’t.

It’s an honest truth that I am just more comfortable with people who were uncompromisingly awkward in their teenage years: we of the early-onset acne, the bad bangs, who said we liked Tool, actually liked Cake, and secretly loved Billy Joel. We who watched Star Trek: TNG and had enormous crushes on Commander Riker, Counselor Troi, or both. We who appeared voluntarily in public wearing the comically outsized but mysteriously desirable “raver pants.” We, for whom the “Men in Black” dance was the equivalent of the “Thriller” dance. We who wanted desperately to be Full House’s DJ Tanner.

We, who were about to die from embarrassment for many teenage years, salute you.

As someone who was intensely self-conscious and deeply insecure, I spent a lot of middle school and high school trying to triangulate what I should like, what I shouldn’t like, and what I secretly did like. I tried to formulate who I was against other people: if I wasn’t a popular, beautiful person, then I wouldn’t like what they liked; I had to like something different. All of this is to say that my anxiety tended to get in the way of acknowledging the things that made me happy. I have a remarkable capability of getting in my own way sometimes.

It was so strange to get to college and suddenly, inexplicably, be able to own all of my likes and dislikes; to find that the things that I thought made me a mutant, whom only a best friend could love, actually made me kind of interesting. More miraculous still, some of my perceived “mutant” qualities weren’t even unique: I found people who had somehow reconciled a love of classic Paul Simon with a love of the Spice Girls at their peak. I found people who loved Star Wars and the Muppets, danced like maniacs, told fantastic bad jokes, and used big words with joy and without pretention.

It was like the promise land for a weary nerd like me.

To this day I take sincere comfort in finding something of a late ‘90s vintage in common with a peer. Popular music tends to be a good jumping off point: say “chicka-cherry-cola” to just about anybody of my generation and odds are that person will know exactly what you’re talking about. It is no longer shameful to like things that were popular and things that weren’t, all at once. I came into my own in college, and every time I freely admit to something that would’ve made me die of embarrassment years before—yup, I own a Star Wars shirt, and I bought it XXXL at Baby Gap—I feel like I’m redeeming an episode of angst gone by.

It’s an amazingly freeing feeling to simply like the things I like and be fine with who I was, even if only in retrospect. I always do remember, though, that at least one person always liked me in the depths of my awkwardness.

She’s a woman who recognized my toenail polish color, which I applied more than ten years after we met as tragic teenagers. She knew that the color was an homage to a polish from years before, one that I stole from my sister when we were fourteen. She even remembered the unlikely name of the color (“Daisy the Pig”) and commented on it as we were getting her into her wedding dress.

I may not have been sure of much, but I was always sure—at fourteen, twenty-four, and beyond—that since she is the half that makes me whole, I couldn’t ever really be any more than half bad, and therefore never a total loss.