It was the middle of the second semester of my freshman year at UT, and more importantly, only my sixth month living in Texas since I was two years old. I’d traded in my t-shirt and converse for a dress and boots on game days and started to pick up saying “y’all” instead of “you guys”, but I had no idea what I was getting myself into by going home with Ally Wild for the weekend. We had both somehow cheated the UT registration system and ended up with no Friday classes, and Ally had invited me to go back to Nacogdoches with her to see where she grew up.
We had only known each other for a few months, but my family knew her as my 5-foot-nothing, blonde hair teasing, pink lip gloss wearing friend who lived by the motto “the higher the hair, the closer to God”. My mom said “Well, you sure didn’t waste any time finding a friend who’s a real Texas girl!”, and thought it’d be fun for me to see a real small Texas town. We took off early Friday morning in her little white car with pink license plates that read “A <3 WILD”, and a few hours later we pulled up the dirt road to her house in Nac. Ally’s mom, Miss Tracey, was waiting for us at the door holding their yorkie, Lily.
Later that night, Ally took me out to Banita Creek Hall with her high school friends who now go to SFA. Surrounded by thick accents and teased hair, I walked into a dance hall where the live band was playing their hearts out, singing The Everclear Song by Roger Creager. Before I knew it, every boy had grabbed a girl and started dancing, spinning and dipping her around the room. Ally took my hand and started dancing me around just like everyone else, and all I could do was try to keep up – this was nothing like the high school reunion parties I had gotten used to after going back to Oregon for winter break.
Apparently, The Everclear Song was ‘the song’ of Ally and her friends’ high school years, and they all convinced the band to play it over and over again throughout the night until I’d learned the words myself. We danced and danced all night long, went back and did the same thing the following night, and by the end of night #2 I had (sort of) figured out how to dance and learned every word to their favorite song.
Truthfully, I’d never even heard of everclear before college. When Miss Tracey found this out, she decided to take it upon herself to convince both me and Ally that we’d never want to really find out what Roger Creager meant when he sang “Until I wake up and I’m face down in the hall, / Hey, I’m completely naked, for a reason I can’t recall.” She poured some in a glass and offered us each a sip, but luckily for us, we both started coughing from the smell and turned away.
Two years later, I’ve still yet to experience a single thing more country than that dance hall filled with teased hair and cowboy boots. Just in case I ever forget, Ally and her mom still love to play that song to remind me just how terrible everclear is, and how much I missed out on by growing up anywhere that wasn’t the great state of Texas.
