Drink your juice.

Because I was overindulged

as a child, I was allowed to name my sister when she was born. The only stipulation was that my parents could ultimately veto anything that they fundamentally disagreed with, which was a fair enough deal for me at seven.

There were a few contenders, but the frontrunner in my heart was Nicandra. Babynames.com is telling me it’s not even a real name, but google suggests that it’s some sort of flower. So let’s just go with that. Nicandra.

Really there was just a chick in the second grade who was a total babe and all the boys liked her, and I wanted to bestow such good fortune onto the tiny woman my mom was growing. My wish was that she’d grow to have dark, racially-ambiguous skin and light eyes and pin-straight hair and know all about sports stats and how to talk to boys and what “orgasm” meant. I wanted my sister to be as far away from my shy, “What do birds drink?” traits as I could manage, and Nicandra seemed like the surest bet.

But when I pitched the name to my parents, they didn’t bite. They didn’t seem to hate it, either, though, which pissed me off even more.

Just me, at seven, at a dinner table or standing in between them and the TV (I don’t remember where we were, sue me), saying, “What’s wrong with it? It’s beautiful! It’s a perfect name!”

And being met with their silence, a look between them that I couldn’t interpret and then, “It is beautiful. We just think there’s another name for our baby out there that we’d all like.”

I ended up landing on Catherine, which everyone agreed on, and I was able to squeeze some enjoyment out of the decision after realizing that with the right middle name we’d have the same initials (fucked up our monogram game rill hard).

Anyway, I forgot about Nicandra both conceptually and as a human shortly thereafter because we moved, but thanks to the miracle of facebook I was reminded of her existence recently and this memory made me LOL.

A pale, curly-haired, freckly chick named Nicandra Friar would be just as neurotic as you, 7 year old Christine. A+ for intent though.