"Be excellent. Don't be average." *

"But you see, it's not REALLY a Snickers, because it has no nougat! It's an imposter. ImpostiSnickers."

Rachel punctuated her disdain by smacking her fist on the lunch table in our high school cafeteria. She purchased an Ice Cream Snickers, not for the first time, but had only then discovered why they'd not achieved post-lunch taste bud satisfaction. The so-called Snickers bars had the requisite chocolate, caramel, and peanuts, true, but made a costly error in the decision to substitute the ice cream for nougat.

"So?" another friend of ours asked.

"It's not a Snickers without the nougat! To be a Snickers, the nougat is inherent! Just like the chocolate, peanuts, and caramel! To exclude one of those makes the claim of being a Snickers null and void!" She defiantly tossed her hair over her shoulder.

"Wait, but if the components of "Ice Cream Snickers" in and of itself are ice cream, chocolate, peanuts, caramel, and no nougat, that makes it its own separate entity!" our other friend countered.

The table was silent for a minute. "No!" Rachel laughed.

"It doesn't matter," I added. "For all the big deal they make out of copyrights and trademarks, the Snickers name brings a certain expectation to the product. The Snickers label should bring, at the very least, the chocolate, caramel, peanuts, AND the nougat. Ice cream is the modifier, and should be added on top of everything else. Or, I guess, inside."

Rachel nodded approvingly, flattened out the wrapper of the misnomed frozen bar, and wrote IMPOSTER! on it in menacing black Sharpie. I bought one too, ate it, wrote the same, and we stapled them to our backpacks in solidarity against The Man. When they frayed and fell off, we bought new Ice Cream "Snickers" and again with the ebony letters sharply branded them IMPOSTER!, hanging them by staples to the gallows on our backs. We realized later that we'd only fed The Man by buying more, but we wrote it off as a necessary expense as a means for providing greater damage.

Sticking it to The Man was kind of our thing back in high school, when we became friends during her senior and my junior years. It manifested into a mutual decision to "become" punk on the way back from the first speech tournament of the year, chalupas in hand and Green Day on the tape player. She threw away her Blink-182 cds ("They say they're real punk, but they're pop, and it's because they cater to the mainstream instead of defy it. When they traded their drummers for someone who was more appealing, that was the end of their real punk days") and we made rainbow bead rave bracelets that read "Fuck Authority," without having been to an actual rave.

Neither one of us went to the extreme of dying our hair pink, slathering on eyeliner, wearing spikes, or filling in the bubbles on Scan-Trons in class to make pictures of Nixon with a knife through his eye. But we listened to plenty of NoFX and Green Day and Janis Joplin, used obscenities freely, shopped at thrift stores, and small-scale rallied against the district's ban on teaching the Communist Manifesto in class.

Yes, we knew that clothes didn't make the punk, and sometimes it was hard to say exactly what we were rebelling against, but going to school in the middle of Chesterfield while growing up on the outskirts, it was hard not to say "everything" and be pretty much on the mark. The Facebook group isn't so far off the mark when they say West St. Louis County is like the Orange County of Missouri. So even the acts of reading literature, not dropping triple digits at Abercrombie and Hollister, not attending Mizzou, and having parents that worked at jobs instead of the school store was in opposition to a large chunk of what the rest of the school stood for. We were against assimiliation, against the desperate clinging addictive desire to conform that reeked from so many of our peers like too much Hugo for Men cologne. We wanted to be original, and if we could achieve that, maybe we'd finally make some sort of impact. Damn it, The Man would not get away with denying us our nougat.



*-Mr. Bekemeyer, who taught AP Euro, and with it, the Communist Manifesto.