Back to school. Each year it brings bac

Back to school. Each year it brings back the same memories. Some good some bad. Good ones like the fresh pack of crayons, Trapper Keeper notebooks and new backpacks. Buying new clothes was another thing I always looked forward to. I used to get the Fall issue of Seventeen Magazine in the late summer and start circling pages and pages of clothes. I wanted to be so trendy. I wasn't very popular in school. Always kinda stuck between the freaks and geeks...never fitting in with either. I remember one year I got an entire outfit straight out of the pages of Seventeen Magazine. Yes. I was entering the 7th grade. I chose a red sweater vest, a black & gray plaid shirt to wear with the vest and black jeans. (OK not entirely the same outfit. The Jeans in Seventeen were by Guess and the ones I got were by Palmetto..the cheap rip off of Guess Jeans.) My mother decided it all needed to be washed prior to wearing it to school. Not paying attention to the washing instructions, everything shrunk. The day I chose to wear the new outfit, the sweater vest was too tight, the sleeves on the shirt were at my forearms and the pants barely buttoned. I HAD to wear the outfit because I was lectured about HOW MUCH MONEY my parents spent on the new outfit. I wore the outfit to school but it was awful on me. The sweater seemed to cling to any roll of fat (real or imagined) on my torso. It was unusually hot that day so I was sweating in my "new" outfit and by the end of the day my back and underarms were damp from sweat. I raced home after school, took off all my clothes, changed into something that hid all my flaws and ripped up the entire outfit. In a fit of tears and sweat I stuffed all the "evidence" into a garbage bag and secreted it under my bed until such time that I could put it in the trash without my parent's noticing. They never once asked me about that outfit nor do I think they even noticed I never wore it past the first day. The 2nd day of 7th