I Was Weird Because I Liked You

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Southern contemporary watercolor artist CourtneY Khail Sugar and Vice Collection, original green watercolor painting

Courtney Khail “I Was Weird Because I Liked You” Original painting, 18”x24”, watercolors, inks, and graphite on paper. Part of the 2022 Sugar & Vice Collection

Courtney Khail “I Was Weird Because I Liked You” Process Photo

I Was Weird Because I Liked You

The doorbell rang while I was upstairs. I crept to the top of the stairs just in time to hear a strained “Can I help you?”

Holding your little sister you explained that your car had broken down

That you knew I lived close by so you walked over to use our phone.

At least that’s what I thought you said- it was difficult to hear from my perch.

(An important note to anyone born after 1995: at this time cell phones were still novelties. He was asking to use our landline.)

I think you’d been given a phone by the time I walked downstairs. Had I been called down or did I try to act like it was a coincidence that we were both somehow in my foyer on a Tuesday night?

The mood was strange- awkward and tense. Like you’d stumbled into a private party, unwelcome and uninvited. (I had worried my parents wouldn’t approve of you, but I didn’t imagine it would be that bad.)

I’m sorry I didn’t make it better. That I didn’t do something to make you feel more at ease. To make you feel like you belonged.

You’d think after all the imaginary conversations I’d played in my head that I would have worked out how to speak to a crush.

Scuttled

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Southern artist Courtney Khail, rainbow red blue and yellow original watercolor, Sugar and Vice Collection, Scuttled

Courtney Khail “Scuttled” Original painting, 18”x24”, watercolors, inks, and graphite on paper. Part of the 2022 Sugar & Vice Collection

Courtney Khail “Scuttled” In Process Photo

Scuttled

One Saturday during elementary school, my sister and I accompanied my mom on her errands. I use the word accompanied, but let’s be serious. We were young and didn’t have a choice. On our way home, my mom stopped to get gas and told us we could come inside and each pick out one thing from the gas station. I wouldn’t say this was necessarily a rare occurrence, but now that I’m older I have a feeling my mom had witnessed a lot of other kids having absolute meltdowns during those aforementioned errands and wanted to treat us for not being little terrors. OR maybe it was a bribe. Either way, it was exciting. To kids, gas stations are magical little shops with bright lights, tons of candy, and an ICEE machine. It’s paradise. (As I write this, I’m realizing parents spent far too much money on having kids birthday parties at Chuck E. Cheese when they probably could have just driven us to Circle K and told us to go wild. Add some balloons and I would have been quite content.)

So my sister and I walk into the gas station and immediately turn down the junk food aisle. We both bypassed the chips and pretzels and such (we weren’t amateurs. This was no time to play with savory treats) and made a beeline for the candy. Airheads, Fun Dip, Twix bars, Snickers- our little eyes could barely process the seemingly limitless amount of choices. Pretty much everything was fair game except bubble gum (thanks to an unfortunate incident regarding me, my mom’s velour car upholstery, and bubblicious watermelon wave.)

Jessica picked something like Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups- an amateur move no doubt. Why you ask? Because while delicious, Reese’s is essentially only two pieces of candy. She’d be done with that in under a minute. I, on the other hand, went with Skittles. Its bright red bag promising at least five to ten minutes of chewy, sugary goodness. I was nothing if not a rational person.

Back in the car, my prediction came true. Jessica was quickly out of candy. (I may have laughed.) What I did not anticipate was the possibility of a hostile takeover. Obviously embarrassed by her poor candy choice, Jessica retaliated by attempting to take mine. (I think she even tried to use the word “share” as if that made it less ridiculous.) Unfortunately for her, when it came to candy, I fought back. 

Unfortunately for me, my mom had long arms. Long arms which she used to reach into the backseat and grab my Skittles, before proceeding to throw them out of the car window onto Skinner Mill Road. “If you girls can’t behave, then you don’t get candy!”

“MOM! THOSE WERE MINE! JESSICA ALREADY ATE HERS!”

I recognized the look in my mom’s eyes- the look of “sh*t. I made a mistake.” But it was the 90’s and unless you were in a Nickelodeon sitcom, parents did not admit making mistakes. That showed weakness. Plus it was my parents’ date night, so she wasn’t about to turn around to go buy me more Skittles so she just turned up the radio and told us to quiet down.

Fuming, I looked over at my sister, who just smiled and then looked out the window. Content and full of Reese’s.

Last Day Of Play

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Courtney Khail Athens, Georgia contemporary watercolor artist - Sugar & Vice Collection

Courtney Khail “Last Day Of Play” Original painting, 18”x24”, watercolors, inks, and graphite on paper. Part of the 2022 Sugar & Vice Collection

Courtney Khail “Last Day Of Play” Sugar and Vice In Process photo

Last Day of Play

For his tenth birthday, my friend Andrew had a slumber party.

Andrew and I had been friends for as long as I could remember. We went to Pre-K together, then elementary school- arranging our red and blue mats side by side for naptime and challenging each other to four square battles at recess. He was apparently my first kiss- outside our K-4 classroom back when kisses invoked nothing besides a fear of catching cooties. (I say apparently because neither of us could recall if it actually happened, or if it was just a repeated story told by our parents until it became accepted family folklore.) 

I was the only girl invited to the party, a guest list primarily made up of boys from our fourth grade class. We played tag, ate cake, and trampled in and out of his house on Johns Road. Around dinner time, my mom came to pick me up. The invitation for me to stay over was extended, but my mom declined. (In the car she ended any further discussion stating it wouldn’t be appropriate because I was a girl.)

Summer break started soon after and by the following school year I felt everything had changed. I was no longer “one of the boys,” dropped from the world of freeze tag and double dog dares right into the unfamiliar world of butterfly clips and glitter lip gloss. 

If I would have known that would be my real last day of play, I wouldn’t have let go so easily.

Shadowboxer

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Courtney Khail Sugar and Vice Collection, purple and green watercolor painting, Southern contemporary Artist

Courtney Khail “Shadowboxer” Original painting, 18”x24”, watercolors, inks, and graphite on paper. Part of the 2022 Sugar & Vice Collection

Courtney Khail Sugar & Vice “Shadowboxer” In Process Photo

Shadowboxer

I am not a good dancer. I have the love and enthusiasm for dancing, but I lack the ability to effortlessly glide from one movement into the next. Instead, my dancing looks a bit like those embellished wooden toys; the ones where you push the button under the pedestal and the animal collapses into a clumsy collection of legs and arms before popping right back to its original rigid pose. 

So what possessed me to sign up to dance in the class talent show I am not 100% sure. Even more befuddling was why I chose to perform an original dance to Fiona Apple’s “Shadowboxer.” I’ll blame it on the simple fact that I was ten years old and had- as my husband calls it- the unearned confidence of youth.

Whatever the reason, it was a very bad idea. At this point in my life I hadn’t yet experienced the shame and embarrassment school can hold and therefore did not realize the full extent of viciousness and cruelty a pack of 5th grade girls could administer to someone doing anything they deemed “different.” Had I known, I might have saved myself a lot of pain.

Unfortunately, as I said, I was still innocent to those realities, which is how I found myself waiting in the hallway to perform what could only be described as a failed attempt at modern interpretive dance.

You’ll be relieved to know that some level of self preservation eventually kicked in and allowed me to completely block out that three minute performance from my memory. Which is for the best because if the class mean girls’ reactions were indicative of anything, I have a strong feeling that it closely resembled the dance one does when they walk through a spider's web. 

(If by chance you’re thinking this taught me to never perform dance in public again, you would be correct, but sadly I attended a fine arts school so I was subjected to that particular horror for many more years. I tried to think of it as character building as opposed to context for future therapy.)