Susan.

I feel so boring lately. No new stories to tell. Nothing to blog about.

My bad guys.

So instead of telling you about how many wheat thins I ate watching Forest Gump last night (probably the most exciting thing I have to say), I am going to tell you my favorite funny story.

You're welcome:

My freshman year of high school my best friends Jenna and Jessie convinced me to try out for the basketball team.

I had never played basketball before outside the vicious games of speed we played in my driveway growing up, but I liked sports and trying new things so I went for it.

I had fun and after try-outs the coach pulled me aside and said that I had made the team based on "potential."

This is not a promising reason to be placed on the high school basketball team and in the end just meant that I could run fast and hit girls and they were hoping that would translate into me putting the ball in the basket.

Their assumptions proved to be wrong after all as I was a soccer player at heart and soccer players do not do well in sports where you can't hip-check the other girls.

However, me being terrible at basketball is not what this story is about.

This story is about Susan.

Susan was a large Native American senior from my high school whose real name is definitely not Susan, but whose name I changed based on the fact that this story still really freaks me out.

You'll understand by the end.

Susan was the biggest, meanest, roughest girl's basketball player in southern utah.

As a freshman girl what kept me up at night was the fear that one day coach would say "we're doing a shooting drill and Katie will be guarding Susan."

Ultimate panic.

It was our first weekend trip and we were taking all four grades of basketball girls up to northern utah on only one bus.

As a freshman this meant trippling up on a bus seat for seven hours,

and it just so happened that I was trippled up on a seat directly across from Susan who had somehow managed to obtain an entire seat for herself.

We drew straws and I was somehow designated to sit on the outside of the seat closest to Susan. I was nervous at first but after a while she fell asleep laying flat on the seat with her legs bent over the end that faced the aisle.

For Christmas that year my mother had made me a large, yellow, fleece pillow and I had brought it along with high hopes of sleeping through the worst parts of the trip. After awhile the two other girls and I had worked out a system where, if we all leaned on each other and I stacked enough bags between me and the seat in front of me, we could sleep for up to fifteen minutes at a time. However, it wasn't long after I fell asleep that I woke up disoriented, realizing that my pillow had gone missing. Still groggy-eyed I looked around, saw yellow fleece and grabbed it.

It just so happened that Susan had decided to wear yellow fleece pants that day.

I will never forget the look on her face when she sat up, eyes raging, to a hysterically panicked freshman girl who had just experienced accidentally groping the upper thigh of her worst nightmare.

I don't remember much of what happened after that, but I do remember vowing to burn that pillow, and all pillows ever, as soon as I got home.

That is, IF I made it home.

I slept the rest of the trip with one eye open, convinced that Susan and her yellow fleece pants were coming to take their revenge with every footstep outside the hotel door.

Ironically, Susan and I became friends a few years down the road and she turned out to be an incredibly nice girl.

But the moral of this story is not that everyone has some good in them once you get to know them.

Because no matter how true that may be, it still does not keep me from feeling a little queasy every time I see yellow fleece.

Life is funny.

That was not.

Love,

Katie