Somewhat Irish Girl

Cadet Flitterman sounded like her name. She was a flighty little thing with a pointy little face, mousy brown hair and beady soulless eyes that darted around restlessly. Not much more than 5 feet, she had a high shrill voice that went up an octave or two when she yelled, which was all the time. 

Her nervous bug-like energy bounced off the walls until it landed on whatever unsuspecting freshman ventured into the hallway at the wrong time. 

It seemed she had chosen to target me more than  the others, though others may have felt the same. She was annoyed at my natural and unshakable resting bitch face. A face that turned out to be problematic for many that first year, though it couldn’t be helped. It’s just my face. Even when I was trying, I looked like I wasn’t.  When I cared, it looked like I didn’t. The only time it changed was when I smirked. I smirked or laughed when I was nervous or confused or thought something was ridiculous.  And the first year at the Air Force Academy is very ridiculous and you are always nervous and confused. So I was either smirking or looking like a huge bitch.

In real life, I would have swatted Flitterman away and never thought of her again. I think she knew that. And she was offended.

But here, in this simulated environment, I could not swat her away and forget she existed. She had all the power simply because she was two years older. She knew that too.

There were two types of upperclassmen at the academy. The type that had better things to do than yell and harass, and the type that got a weird satisfaction from making an already shitty freshman year even shittier. 

She was the latter.

There were two types of females at the academy: the type that was confident and didn’t have a need or desire to prove themselves in a male dominant environment (the ratio of guys to girls was 8:1 when I was there), and the type that had an intense compulsion to prove themselves, even at the expense of other girls. 

She was the latter.

Back then, if she saw me in the hallway, a simple  trip to the bathroom would turn into thirty minutes of yelling and push ups and pointless stress. But if you are a freshman at the Air Force Academy, and an upperclassmen tells you to drop for push ups, you have to drop for push ups. If they tell you to stop walking to wherever you are going so that they can yell at you, you have to stop and let them yell at you.

I dreaded dealing with her so much, that I had an idea of her schedule and if I thought she was around and couldn’t hold it, I peed in the sink in my room. A not uncommon practice for freshmen who were just too fatigued and overwhelmed to risk being berated outside their dorm room. This sounds crazy to any outsider, but it was acceptable and normal behavior in our bubble. We were fine with it.

More than a decade later, she’d see me in another hallway on my way to the bathroom. This time we were in the Pentagon.  I was a captain and she a major. 

She smiled and waved and tried to catch up as if we were old friends who had somehow gone through something together, and she wanted to exchange war stories. The fact that she had been the one to put me through the something escaped her. Or maybe she thought it was all in good fun. All part of the  simulation. 

But there is no recovering from treating someone  like dirt when they are at their lowest, even if it was because I was just a freshman and she was a mighty upperclassman. 

So I put on my best bitch face, the one that had offended her so much,  pretended not to remember her at all and walked to the bathroom to pee in a toilet and use the sink only to wash my hands.