I’ve been tagged

…by my agent, Deidre Knight, to share five little-known facts about myself. But I’m an open book! What facts have I failed to share? Okay:

UPDATED TO ADD: Robin has shamed me with her confessions. Way to up the game, Brande! What kind of confessional-series writer am I, anyway? Time to get personal.

1. My favorite flowers are tulips. Yesterday, someone told me that tulips have no scent, but I disagree. In fact, one of the reasons I decided that tulips were my favorite flowers is because I remember a bouquet of tulips I got many years ago that smelled just like a loaf of fresh-baked bread. My editor gave me a bunch of tulips this week, and you can only detect a faint aroma if you stick your nose right into the bloom, so I suppose the scene is dependent on the type of tulip you’re looking at. I wasn’t kissed until I was 16. It only happened once. Then I hit a long dry spell. Like…. long. After that I learned not to wait around for the kisses.

2. I’m a huge slob. Actually, that fact isn’t little known at all to anyone who knows me in person. The only time in my life when I avoided being a huge slob is when I was living out of whatever could fit in my backpack in Australia. Yeah, this one is embarrassing enough.

3. I studied Latin for seven years. I even had a Latin class with the Man-Who-Would-Be-Sailor-Boy, but we didn’t know each other then. My Latin now? Sucks. Sailor Boy’s version of the story was that when he met me again, he totally remembered me as the girl he used to avoid in Latin class. I didn’t remember him because I was barely conscious in that Latin class. Hence the avoidance.

4. For most of my life, my favorite color was blue, but in the past decade, it’s changed to red. I’m not sure why. I just find myself drawn to that color more often. I wonder if it’s a sign of a shift in my personality. On my sixteenth birthday, I took a nosedive with a glass of OJ in my hand and sliced my face open. Down to the bone. 28 stitches later, I have about a four inch scar on my cheek and jaw (Dontcha just love photoshop?). I’m still a klutz. I’ve also broken most of my toes and once, my tailbone.

5. The scene in Secret Society Girl where Amy was in a bathroom stall and overheard a total stranger talking about how unworthy she was of her ex actually happened to me in college, though not in the same way. Unlike Amy, I found the whole situation too funny for words.

So, it was just after having broken up with my first serious boyfriend. It was an awful awful breakup, which he’d punctuated by coming to a performance of a play I’d been in, and making out with a girl in the front row while I was on stage. (He was probably lucky I didn’t vomit all over them both). Later in that performance, I was in the stall, and the girl and one of her other friends were redoing their makeup in front of the sinks (I guess he’d kissed it all off), and she said, “I don’t even know what he sees in her. She’s a senior, and it’s not like she’s the president or the editor of anything.”

*That’s* when I started laughing. Yes, I was old, and clearly lacking in status.

I tag… Susan Adrian, Amanda Brice, and Robin Brande.