0% Compatible With Everybody

The administration at my high school really wanted us to have more sex, I guess.

They forced every student to participate in a match-making service, basically an analog version of online dating. As a fund raiser.

It was weird.

Programs like this still exist, apparently, which blows my mind. Here’s how it worked: in home room they passed out this personality quiz with a Scantron for the answers, and everybody was required to take it. Then a month later, after mysterious pro-hookup forces worked their magic on our scores, they created a personalized list of the 10 students in the school you were most compatible with. For $10, you could buy your list.

Isn’t that crazy? “Look, we need new textbooks. Give us a couple bucks and we’ll tell you which classmates are most likely to have sex with you.”

Actually, that’s way too optimistic. Probably it was, “Our football team needs new massage chairs for their backup sauna. Give us $10.”

I was a punk kid, so I thought this was all a bunch of fascist bullshit and I didn’t want to do it. Come to think of it, I must be a punk adult, because I still think that. What a bunch of fascist bullshit.

But I took decisive action to undermine the integrity of the process. I took the test, which had asked you to pick which of four statements best described you and mark the corresponding letter on the answer sheet: A, B, C, or D. But the generic Scantrons they bought had bubble A through E, so I filled out E for every single answer. I know. What an incredible, selfless act of non-violent protest. Ghandi, MLK, Alex Falcone (age 16). All the big ones.

What I didn’t realize, was that in addition to the 10 most compatible kids to bang, $10 also bought you a list of the five students you were LEAST compatible with. And your boy, King Rebel Alex Falcone, he was the only person to pick the answer E for any question. Which meant that every single girl in the school who paid the fascist bullshit $10 got a printout saying they were 100% NOT compatible with Alex Falcone.

Every. Single. One.

You can’t buy that kind of publicity. Well, you almost certainly could, the school would do anything to raise money for those massage chairs. But for $0.00, I became the #1 bad boy of Galena High School (go Grizzlies).

I was largely unknown at the school. Banksy. Anonymous. Alex Falcone (16). All the big ones.

So as I walked around the hallways I would pass groups of girls talking about me. And I had no idea why.

“I heard he’s really evil.”

“I heard he hacked the system.”

“I heard he’s dating a college girl and rides a motorcycle and Ferris Bueller was based on him and when he misses curfew, he just tells his parents to suck his balls.”

Actually no. What I heard a lot of is “Who the fuck is Alex?” which is a weird way to move through a school. The opposite of the Truman Show.

Somebody figured out where my locker was, and I got a note with a phone number on it shoved through the little vent. And I didn’t call a single her because I’m WAY better on paper.

Here’s the thing that gets me now. If there was one girl who answered all Es in her own act of radical non-violence, we would have actually been great together. The test would have worked. But we never found each other because neither of us bought the stupid answer sheets because it was all fascist bullshit.

Sometimes when I see a Scantron, I think of her: the punk kid who got away.