The World's Most Embarrassing Moment, episode 2

Last year, I wrote about this unfortunate gaseous incident that occurred in 10th grade geometry.  Unfortunately, that was not the only embarrassing occurrence in my high school career.  Oh, high school.  I spent a LONG time looking for a picture of our high school's cafeteria so you could envision what happened to me.  I couldn't find one but I sure did find a lot of links to my old high school that I had to spend some time perusing.  Looking at some of those sites made me feel kind of weird.  High school was okay, I guess, but I'm glad I'm not in it anymore.  If you read some of my old diaries, you would think my high school career was the worst time period of my life.  In retrospect, I'm not so sure that it was.  I just THOUGHT it was.  I think I spent about 98% of my time wishing I had a boyfriend in high school.  Didn't happen, although I did go to the prom with a gay guy.

Anyway.  My embarrassing moment.  This is probably not going to be very well written, nor interesting, so I apologize in advance.  Okay, so the high school cafeteria was kind of in between the two floors of the school, if that makes sense.  A split level, if you will.  It had white tile walls and navy blue, skanky carpet.  There were lots of white tables with navy blue chairs at each of them.  A BUNCH of kids ate lunch at one time.  You could either enter the cafeteria through the bottom floor where you went up this steep, long set of stairs or you could enter from the upper floor where you went down about 4 steps, got to a landing, then went down about 4 more steps.  When you were on the stairs and landing, you could see the entire cafeteria (and they could see you).  Clear as mud?  I thought so.  

When I was in 11th grade, I had chemistry, which was upstairs, before lunch.  We ate lunch in the middle of class, I think.  It was time for us to go to lunch so we all stampeded down the hallways and pressed ourselves into the cafeteria through the heavy glass doors.  A girl in front of me was dragging her purse behind her, instead of holding it like a normal person.  Somehow, my foot got tangled up in the very long strap of her purse and when she noticed it was snagged on something, she yanked it as hard as she could.  Of course, the crowds had emptied from the steps at this point, which cleared the way for me to fall all the way down the stairs.  In front of half of the high school.  

"OOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!" was the first thing I heard when my butt hit that dirty white step.  Then all I could hear was the ringing in my ears and the whispers, "Did you see that girl?  She fell on her butt!  She looks so stupid!  I'm glad that wasn't me."  I wanted to die immediately and vaporize on the spot.  I somehow picked myself up and stumbled over to a table.  My butt hurt so badly from landing on the concrete steps that I could hardly sit down.  My eyes were filled with tears but I had to act like it wasn't a big deal.  I wasn't embarrassed!  I just fell down the cafeteria stairs!  A couple of kids that I was sitting with asked me if I was okay, but I just wanted them to leave me alone.  You know how when you're upset and someone is nice to you, which makes you more upset?  Yeah.  It was like that.

Really, that's all I remember about what happened.  I think I wanted to kill that girl who was dragging her purse and I didn't want to go to school for a few days but I must have gotten over it.  Although, not COMPLETELY over it, since I still remember it to this day.  Oh well, it makes a great story to tell my students.