HAVE A GREAT SUMMER KEEP LOVING COOLIO

When I was younger someone told me a story about this guy whose house was full of all this frog paraphernalia. Ceramic frog figurines and Beanie Babies and magnets and shit. And one day they asked him Yo so, what’s your thing with frogs, when did you realize you were a… Frog Guy? And he just gave them this blank stare and said, I don’t give a shit about frogs. My aunt or something got me a frog sculpture and then someone else came to my house and apparently saw the frog and took a mental note—This Guy Loves Frogs—and lo and behold, for my birthday, I got more frog shit. That’s been happening for like a decade and I don’t have the heart to tell anyone that quite frankly, frogs make me feel nothing.

It happened to me, but with Coolio.

In third grade my teacher was Mrs. Newton and I was entranced by her. She was young and pretty and had a sexy British husband and a noble, kind dog named Bishop. One time my mom invited her over for dinner and I was so excited when the doorbell rang that I bolted downstairs, double-fisting American Girl dolls because I couldn’t decide whether to first show her Samantha or Molly, and ate shit down an entire flight of stairs, face first. Mrs. Newton walked in to me lying face-down in a pool of my own mouth blood, a jagged sliver of tooth impaling my lip.

ANYWAYS, Mrs. Newton had this morale-boosting activity we’d do once a week. It was called Warm Fuzzies and the gist is this: one person per week momentarily leaves the room, and meanwhile, your classmates write kind assertions about you on the chalkboard. You walk back in, see the glowing praise of your peers, and voila: Warm Fuzzies. It was my turn at last, and fiercely private little nerd child that I was, I felt that this warm and fuzzy moment would herald in a new era of Meaghan. An era in which to be understood! To be known and maybe to sometimes get invited to shit, me, their friend Meaghan, about whom they can name several things!

I walk back into the classroom, eyes wide, ready to bask in the glow of this newfound intimacy with my peers. On the chalkboard my name is written in large letters, and around it are 15 or so counts of “NICE.” The rest are about Coolio. “Loves Coolio!” “Biggest Coolio fan I know.” I am trying to make my face behave while I silently try to process what is happening because Coolio is fine. I like Coolio all right. I listened to “Gangsta’s Paradise” as much as the next person, I thought. Did I listen to “Gangsta’s Paradise” more than the next person?? How was one to know?! I really liked his contributions to the intro theme of Kenan & Kel, but did that constitute loving Coolio? I smiled and thanked my peers. Thank you, classmates, from the bottom of my NICE and Coolio-saturated heart.

Coolio was a mystery, but “NICE” was a personal assault. “I am NICE?” I turned it over and over in my head on the walk home from school. “But I am filled with an all-consuming rage, a spite that drives almost 100% of my decisions! When Jenny Levens recently changed the spelling of her name to J-E-N-I my immediate impulse was murder!” Later that week I decided I would try to stick my middle finger up at Anthony Rios. I had heard about this gesture and I didn’t know what it meant but I did know that it was not NICE. I got a detention but it was all worth it for the half second of recognition that flashed across Anthony’s face—I knew he had written “NICE” and I knew he would never make that mistake again.

At the end of the year everyone wrote in my yearbook: “Have a great summer! Keep loving Coolio!” I don’t know if I upheld that promise. I am unsure of Coolio’s current whereabouts. I think he went to rehab and hopefully that worked out for him, but I haven’t taken the time to Google it. I did not keep loving Coolio and I would wager that I did not even have a great summer.

But the next five years of my Catholic school experience were an extended crusade against niceness. I knocked the wind out of a girl in basketball and did not extend her a friendly helping hand from the ground. I poured an entire bottle of Lemon Lime Gatorade on Ben Morgridge because he broke my best friend’s heart, and was dragged from the cafeteria by my ear by the Vice Principle. And at the end of eighth grade, when we did the thing where you hypothesize as to where we will all be 20 years into the future, I was elected “Most Likely to Take Over as Host of the Weakest Link.” Or in other words, an extremely 2001 way of saying: “You’re a bitch.” And my heart swelled with pride.