“I was a Goody Two-Shoes all through school.”
The one with all the answers in class, but
polite enough not to raise my hand every time.
The one who spent Sundays at church, even
in the evening, the one who knew about the
beer at the party, but never took a sip. The
one whose skirts never fell above the knee.

Hard to fathom that transition, though, to a
freshman year of Marlboro’s, black coffee, scotch
(neat) and the splitting of innumerable
pitchers at Mayola’s, with boys who fancied
themselves men, their names now forgotten,
the tendency toward profanity, even when,
especially when, things were going well.

“I was a Goody Two-Shoes all through school.”
So they reminded me fifty years later, that
high school reunion crowd, over wine
at the country club none of us could have
been part of, no matter how well-behaved.
And I suppose they were right,
for all they knew of my life back then.
 
This poem is a response to Miz Quickly’s Day Ten challenge in which we were to use a sentence from a book we’re reading as the first line of a poem. My quote comes from Natalie Goldberg’s book, Writing Down the Bones.