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Why I Took a Dead Cat to School
It’s complicated
If you want to convince people that you don’t worship Satan, take a dead cat to school. This was sound logic to my teenager brain. That week, a rumor mill was started in my junior year high school that my friends and I worshiped the devil. I’m not sure why. Maybe because we wore shirts of metal bands like Metallica or Rob Zombie. Or maybe because we enjoyed the game Dungeons & Dragons. Teenagers are idiots.
To top off the perceived slight, it had come from supposedly the richest kid in school. This blonde haired, cherubic do-gooder, who was a notorious brown-noser and wore makeup to cover his freckles. My reputation was being put on the line by this guy? Someone who literally got everything he ever wanted, including a brand new cherry red Mustang for his sixteenth birthday? I couldn’t let this slide.
Being accused of worshiping the devil in our small town was no small thing. This was rural Kentucky. Everyone took that shit extremely seriously. Literally everyone was a Christian. If you didn’t go to church, something had to be wrong with you. It was worse than having head lice.
So, a couple days after learning this rumor was flying around the cliques of the popular kids, I was taking out the trash at my workplace. I had started working for my stepdad, since turning 16, at his “Southern…
