NAME ORIGINS — NORA BONNER
/I named all three of my kids after kids I picked on. Angelica was actually angelic, more than mine. In the front of the second grade classroom, she doodled prodigy depictions of our teacher, Ms. Halsworth, down to the mole below her left ear and her pouty expression when we were too loud in the hallway. One day I spread a rumor that Angelica had a crush on a boy named James who had a reputation for picking his nose. Angelica had a hard time making friends after that, but relationship dramas don’t linger among the so-young. We forgot about it the next year, when she won the school-wide art contest for drawing a detailed Machu Picchu during our unit on South America.
My middle child is named after a kid from middle school, Kalvin Cross, though mine is Calvin, like the cartoon. Kalvin, bearded already, looked like he was in high school. Maybe he’d been held back. He smoked, even as an eighth grader, behind the backstop before classes began. I stole his cigarettes and showed them to everyone, until the lunch aid confiscated the pack. When she asked where I got them, I told her. The next Friday, we all endured an assembly about gateway drugs. Kalvin got suspended for smoking on school property.
Penelope dropped out of high school when she got pregnant over the summer between our sophomore and junior years. We called her Penny, but my daughter is just Penelope. I flirted with her boyfriend, Lance, then dated him after she left. Lance was all right, though he got mean during video games. Not as interesting as Penny, who was a very good volleyball player. I nicknamed Penny "Tree Trunk," because she was tall and formidable and looked like she could kick a soccer ball from here to Machu Picchu. But the second part of her name is what caught on. “Trunk,” the boys would shout at her. “Shake that trunk, Trunk.”
My kids are fifteen, twelve, and ten, respectively. They haven’t asked about their name origins. Others have. I say they run in the family. I say I just had a feeling. Maybe I am telling the truth: that feeling is power, or the fear of power.
I’m not saying I believe I ruined these lives. As far as I know, I did not. But I could have.
I don’t know one person who hasn’t been ruined, in one way or another, by the people who brought them up. We all have the potential to ruin each other. We all have to find ways to remember our potential to ruin each other.
Nora Bonner is a fiction writer and writing instructor from Detroit, Michigan. Her stories have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, including Shenandoah, Quarterly West, Fiction Southeast, Juked, the Indiana Review, the North American Review, Hobart, and the Best American Non-Required Reading. Currently, she lives in Atlanta where she is a PhD candidate in the creative writing program at Georgia State. You can find more of her stories at www.norabonner.com.
