I used to feel sorry for junior high girls.

Well...Some of them I still feel sorry for. Being a junior high girl can be an exercise in rejection, uncertainty and depression. My junior high years were. I'm glad to see some preteen girls today sure of themselves and taking the world by the horns. Except that so many of them drive me nuts. While I wouldn't wish the evils of my preteen years on them, they can bloody well celebrate their adolescence somewhere else, thanks.

Point in case: there is a flock of 13ish year old girls who keep our "hokey fluff-manga" section in business. (Not to be confused with "hokey fight-manga" for boys. Or, for that matter, "freaking amazing and cool manga," which is a much rarer beast than the previous two.) They pull vast quantities of books off the shelves and sit in the aisle, commenting on how attractive various characters are. (ie: "Ewwww! I would never read that! He's totally ugly!" Or "That's not even cute!" They're loud and annoying and wost of all--in my way. The other day during the huge snowstorm, they descended on the store and made nests of books back in Graphic Novels. Their squeals and yapping rang through the mostly empty store. They trooped up to the register with their purchases. There, thanks to the indescribable indescisiveness of jr highers, the poor clerk stood there 20 minutes trying to reverse a transaction one of the girls had made with a Visa gift card. She'd then decided she want to pay cash for so she had the kicks of knowing there was still 30 dollars on her card. (Did anyone mention that the card is the same as cash? You can use either of them anywhere.) But no--the whim had taken her, and she was adamant.

While they waited I heard things like, "The only reason I love Justin Timberlake is that he looks like Orlando Blooooom." Agreeing sighs and oooohs from the rest of the flock. Or "Did you see such-n-such (awful) film? It was soooo cool. Orlando Bloom wasn't in it though. But it was still sooo cool." Tee-heeing and pushing each other around ensues. One particularly perky (used in the worst sense of the word) girl felt the need to loudly comment on how everything everyone else liked was "so retarded." What a jewel. It was when she pulled her hands into her sleeves and started slapping the other girls with them that I began to gnaw off my own arm. One ill-timed slap and a display of Burts Bees's moisturizer in a glass jar smashed from the counter to tile below, shattering. The was a moment of silence, then the princess declared shamelessly, "That's sooo retarded that they had that there!"

Yeah. So stupid that we display merchandise at the counter, where people will obviously be slapping their empty sleeves. Still, a spark of something in me that wants to protect people from embarassment manifested itself. It always does. I pretend not to see if someone trips. I try to make people feel better for some reason. Save their dignity or something. My big mistake was that this girl had no dignity. One of her friends started picking up the pieces of the broken jar, and apologized. Maybe it was for her sake that I said, "Don't worry about it. It was just a sampler." What point was there in telling her that it was a $12 jar and she'd have to pay for it? She didn't have the money. She'd just spent it on fluff-manga. I took over for the dear little friend who was trying to be helpful. Bless her. Find some new people to hang around with, Chica. Princess hopped on one foot and whined while I cleaned the mess she'd made. Then she began to---what??--- slap people with her jacket again. I finally gritted my teeth and snarled, "Considering what you just did, I'm amazed that you're still flapping your jacket around." Apparently my wording was too complex because she looked at me as she slapped and said, "....Huh?" I finally yelled, "Will you STOP IT???" Whereupon she turned a little red (Thank GOD, maybe there is some hope.) and reverted instead to hopping on one foot until the register snaffoo with her indecisive friend was complete.