I was really flattered when I saw that Carly wrote a snippet about me on her blog. She says, “I recommend alexieileen. just started following her a few days ago, but I love her posts. I think she’s so funny and, I can’t quite tell yet, but maybe kind of a badass too”.

One of my favorite memories from high school was this one time when I was sitting at the Senior Picnic Table. Yes, singular. Because I had a graduating class of fifty-one. Well, so I was sitting there with some girls, and this was rare due to my antisocial nature (I had Too Cool Syndrome). A guy in our class came up, looked around, and said, “Whoa. This must be The Badass Table.”

I scrunched my forehead up in confusion and took inventory. Lauren Russell, Dawn Reese, Katelyn Carr, and me. He was right. Here we were: The Lady Badasses of Bayside Academy, Class of 2005.

In our junior year, Lauren had choked me in our Peer Counseling Class because I called her cute; she also once paid me $100 to write an English paper for her on the writing style of Oscar Wilde (it’s been over five years, I think she won’t beat me up for admitting that). Dawn was always cheating the system somehow, and she would get Lauren and me to tag along pretty often. Katelyn was just classically cool and independent; I’m not aware of whatever havoc she may have caused. And me. I wore dark makeup, ripped tights, and accidentally laughed when I saw a kid run into a door I had just opened.

Okay, so I wasn’t badass as much as I was fashion-impaired and had a sense of humor about misfortune. But I had that one guy tricked. And I relished in it. It was a dream come true to be in a gang of Kim Kellys.