I went to high school with a kid who would only drink out of a baby bottle. He brought a large baby bottle to school every day. At first, we thought that he was using it to sneak alcohol or something, but he wasn’t. He would bring it filled with chocolate milk and then fill it up with Coca-Cola and Sprite during lunch. He’d buy a can of each and mix them together. Like I said, it was a large bottle.
I didn’t know the kid that well and I didn’t have any classes with him so I never really talked to him that much. I knew his name. His name was Kevin. Sometimes I’d see him at parties on the weekends. He still had his baby bottle. He would fill it with beer and rum.
He dated my sister’s friend, Emily, for a little while. I had known Emily for a long time. She had been a friend of my sister’s since they were five or six. They were really good friends. She spent a lot of time at our house for sleepovers and stuff. Sometimes she would pee the bed, but I never made fun of her for it. I think most older brothers would have loved the opportunity to make fun of their sister’s friend for peeing the bed and I think she really appreciated that I never mentioned it even though I definitely knew about it because after the sixth or seventh time, my parents started paying me to clean everything up instead of having to do it themselves.
I asked Emily why Kevin only ever drank out of a baby bottle and she said that she didn’t know. They had only been dating for a very short time at that point and she didn’t want to bring it up and offend him or anything. I asked her to tell me if she ever found out. They broke up right after that and I kind of forgot about it because Kevin stopped going to school. I don’t know if he transferred or dropped out, but I never saw him at lunch or any parties after that.
I hadn’t thought about him in a long time, but Emily happened to mention him while she was over at our house recently and I immediately remembered the baby bottle thing.
“Did you ever find out why he drank out of that bottle?” I asked.
“Oh yeah, he told me why,” Emily said. “He used it because he heard that babies that drink out of bottles for too long or drink sweet drinks out of them get really bad teeth problems. He wanted all of his teeth to go bad so that they would fall out and he would be able to fit a softball in his mouth. He said that he wanted to have the world record for being the first person to be able to put a whole softball in his mouth and he wouldn’t be able to do that with all of those teeth in the way.”
Something that really bothers me about people’s hatred towards Ron is that unless you grew up really poor you have no idea what it’s like and how much it affects you. Especially if you grow up poor surrounded by rich friends. The jealousy seriously eats you alive and the way Ron acted was perfectly understandable.
Over twenty years later, I’ll still never forget the day one of my classmates told me to just ask my parents for more money, as though I was literally too thick to work out the obvious solution. Because in her world, it was that simple. Or the day my teacher gave me an ‘are you even trying for a believable lie’? look when I had to tell him my parents couldn’t afford to send me on a low-cost excursion. Or how for an entire school year, I had to wear a school uniform skirt so small it left angry marks on my waist every day, because my mother begged me to make it last just one more year. The day everyone thought it was hilarious to ruin my pencil case, and even more hilarious that I was so upset and claimed that my parents would be furious with me - LOL, that silly girl! They’ll just buy her a new one, it’s not that difficult! (Spoiler, they couldn’t and it was). And yeah, I had my fair share of second-hand underwear too, like another character who grew up in poverty. The utter shock I felt when I realized other families not only had air conditioning, but also used it regularly… the jealousy I felt when everyone else had nice formal wear and I had whatever my parents could manage to get… the list goes on and on. And that’s on top of a bunch of other struggles and disadvantages I had.
But to hear Ron critics talk, he was the worst person alive if he ever even dared to want nice things for himself instead of just nobly being happy other people had them. ‘Why is everything I own rubbish?’ is not a permissible attitude, not even for a moment.
I see a lot of people making fun/disapproving of how Ron is always stuffing his face with food and it INFURIATES ME.
When you grow up fucking poor you learn to take advantage of free food when you have it.
Asshats.
Also does anyone realize the sheer fortitude Ron had to have to invite Harry over to his house!?
I could not invite my better off friends over to my house because things were literally falling apart inside of it and my family didn’t have the means to fix it and it ate me up inside to not be able to have my best friend over to my house when I spent the better half of my teenage life sleeping over at her house because my parents and I didn’t want her to see how rundown the inside of our home was.
Ron was so nervous about what Harry would say about his house and was embrassed by the state of it but he saw Harry needed somewhere to stay and he opened up his home to him. People who have always been well off wouldn’t understand the magnitude of that action.
Ron is a damn treasure and anyone who hates him because of his jealousy can’t understand the deeper meaning behind it.
