"I'm Saving the World One Fake Eyelash at a Time"

I have to credit Julia with that one.

Thus far that evening, we had stood sentinel by tables of sixteen-year-olds and told them they could go and get their dinner now. We had cleared their plates as they'd craned their necks impatiently toward the desserts. We had whisked away the precious cans of beer they had been allowed to drink prior to dancing.

If you've ever been compelled by your job description to stand on the outskirts of a school dance, you've borne witness to that excruciatingly transparent combination of boredom, social anxiety, and frantic thirst for being noticed. Being "an active adult presence" as we were that night can be translated as "killjoy" or "birth control" depending on where you are, but here I think our role here was "witness to awkwardness, complete with music we don't know."


The girls greeted each other in sky-high heels with kisses on both cheeks, as if they hadn't seen each other mere hours before in Biology class. They swarmed the table where drinks were being served, pretending with all their might that it was a cocktail party with an open bar. They winked at each other over the hors d'oeuvres. The boys finished their drinks too quickly.

Now, I should count myself fortunate that that all I had to do was be present in case of untoward behaviour.

A visiting friend of another teacher was saying that the worst night of his life (I think he dropped that distinction none too casually) was when he was forced to stand in the middle of a mass of teenagers at a similar gala-type event. As they say, Cringe. All I had to do was linger on the fringes and that was enough.

But back to the eyelashes. Apparently the false kind have become popular enough that a girl had purchased a pair for this very special evening. Much to her chagrin, one had come loose from her eyelid, perhaps while she was whipping her hair (though much to my chagrin the DJ did not play Willow Smith's insta-hit Whip My Hair, viewable here). I gather it freed itself in a manner that fairly common, but the situation was no less emergent for its predictability.

Julia came instantly to the rescue and helped this poor girl limp to the loos, where she would hopefully gather up the remaining shreds of her dignity, or just stick the thing back onto her eyelid. I sincerely hope it was the latter, and that eyelashes a-dangle aren't the sort of thing you talk about in therapy twelve years down the road. I wouldn't know, I thought as Julia ushered the afflicted girl down the corridor; when I was in high school they weren't quite as popular.

And it was at that moment that I realized I had arrived on the other side. I had fully inhabited my role as chaperone. Awkward teacher. Oblivious to the fake eyelash trend. Adult (cue heavenly music).

And I was breathing a sigh of relief that I did not have to the do the pounding-music / crowded dance floor thing anymore if I didn't want to. Back in high school, it was an obligation. Now that I'm what my father terms a GAW (a grown-ass woman; say it with a twang), I can do what I like. Which, in this case, would be literally anything but losing my fake eyelashes to an ill-timed hair toss.

My very own eyelashes, and not an awkward prom in sight.

The blessings do pile up.