Author: Charles Dickson
I met Vygis in 1982 when we both joined Explorer Post 1275 at around the same time. We were both juniors in high school, but not in the same school; I was at Duval High in Prince George's County, Vygis was at Atholton in Howard County. Vygis had already spread Leeches around his school, and wasted no time getting everyone in the Explorer Post up to speed. It's funny how I remember it spreading through the Post; it wasn't intentionally stratified there as we were all nerds taking refuge from the outside world together, but Leeches were something that started with the new members and the older members gradually were allowed to become aware of, lest we accidently offend them. This kind of self-ranking is for some reason just a natural thing with kids even where there is no reason for it. Vygis explained the whole leech ecosystem to me one day when I visited at his house, and he showed me some drawings he'd done a long time ago which showed what they "really" looked like. The hand gestures were supposed to represent the creature's full appearance as he imagined them. For instance, wing wings are your forefinger and thumb pinched together; this represents how they are very small; if you were to look at them under a magnifying glass you'd see that they were tiny little guys in tuxedos with gnat wings. Leeches' actual appearance will probably require a whole other post to explain. Anyhow, all this stuff made crystal clear sense to me, and I began telling my tiny circle of friends at DuVal all about it. My soul bro David Schrader got it and we did leech jokes continuously. Most of the kids that I had classes with at DuVal all ended getting splattered with it too. I don't remember having much of a relationship with my classmates at all in High School; I pretty much distrusted them all (Dave was one grade ahead, and until he graduated ahead of me I only hung out with him and two or three other similar misfits). And being 15, as absolutely shitty as it is, also gave me super powers I didn't realize at
the time that I had. Because I felt like I didn't fit in, I really stopped caring what anybody thought. They all knew about the things that I liked because I didn't have any reason to keep it a secret. I was drawing leeches continuously and having them attack and talk to people, otherwise just broadcasting everything because I was pretty sure nobody understood or was even listening. Which brings me to this picture of my senior American History class. This was the highest level class taught in the school; Dr. Sparks was the "scary"
teacher, the only Ph.D. in the whole place, about 65 years old and also didn't give a rat's ass what anybody, particularly her students thought of her. She wasn't particularly mean, but she expected college level work out of us and I think we alternated between trying our best and sinking under our desks in d
espair.
By the time the end of Senior year rolled around, though, we were all starting to feel nostalgic and had a little party in this our hardest class. We had one picture taken, the first one with me of course acting up in the back row making a leech. Somehow from that moment the second moment happened, with everybody making leeches, and coaching the scary Dr. Sparks who is obviously about as amused as can be, into how to do it too. It turns out that my classmates and teachers had been paying attention and had some opinion of me after all. And they all knew about leeches.
