When I was in high school, I drove a Toyota 4-Runner. It was fucking enormous, and I was very bad at controlling it. My parents bought it for me with the mentality “Better she hit things than things hit her,” a sentiment I took far too literally and thus proceeded to hit all the things.

The parking situation at my high school was a certifiable shitshow. If you couldn’t wake up in time (so for me– every day, my whole life, always) to get one of the ten parking spots alloted to students, you had to parallel park on the street. You could only do so if you had a street permit claiming you lived in that neighborhood, which I obviously did not. Luckily, my oddly resourceful boyfriend (the kind of guy you could be like “I need a talking komodo dragon that knows karate and is wearing a tutu, stat,” and he’d be like “I know a guy”) was able to procure a fake permit for me, so I was one of the 1500 lucky students who got to illegally vie for a parallel parking spot within a .5 mile radius of the school every morning. It was a battleground.

One day after school I walked up to my car and found a note stuck to my windshield.

“Learn how to park, you fucking bitch. Your car is taking up three spots.” Then, scribbled in pencil at the bottom someone chimed in, “She has a $35,000 car and she doesn’t even think that’s expensive. She’s a spoiled cunt.”

Which is just completely unfair.

I had no idea how much that car cost.