They're Never Kidding. No, Really.

Maybe if the security guard hadn’t teased me each morning about my Titanium-looking water bottle—maybe if I were taller, muscular, broad-shouldered—I would have responded differently. I should have learned my lesson weeks ago, on my first day of the internship. He had looked at the French scrawled across my foot and asked if I was going to the Immigration Office. I laughed and said, “Oh, yeah. I’m new,” with my Midwestern accent. He told me that it was past the elevators, to my right. I told him I was only joking and thought he had been, too; he didn’t smile and said he hadn’t been joking.

As he leaned for me after my purse slid along its rollercoaster of x-ray machines and asked if I had a knife, I looked to see if he was, perhaps this time, joking. His brow was not furrowed. His jaw was not clenched. He was not concerned.

“Oh, of course,” I replied while gathering my umbrella, book and bag.

“We have a no tolerance policy,” he insisted. “Do you always carry it?”

“Do I look like I would go anywhere without it?” I flipped my eyes from his stoic face to the wand-carrying man that had waved me through the security monitor. He stared back, not knowing how else to respond. I whispered to each of them, “Is this a joke? Are you really telling me to check my bag?”

My heart raced, lapping the embarrassment of holding up the line of eager immigrants staring toward the Immigration Office and the idea that someone looked at me and thought, “Well, why wouldn’t she carry a switchblade?” I began tossing things about: my favorite pen—They better give that back—my umbrella—Maybe the metal?—a journal, several tampons, Trident.

“Look, I really don’t have a knife. I honestly thought you were kidding,” I said. My shoulders drew closer to my neck, not defensive, but rather wanting to disappear.

“You’ll have to take it back to your car. They should have caught this days ago. Sorry for the inconvenience, Ma’am.”

“No, I really don’t carry it. I’ve never owned a knife.” Here, I got worried that I was hooked up to an invisible lie detector. Ok, I wanted to correct, not since fifth grade. I made my boyfriend’s brother buy it. I was really in love with him. It was blue. My dad threw it away. I don’t have one. Ok, my dad didn’t really throw it away, but he threatened to.

The man that is never joking took the bag from me and slid it along the rollercoaster again. “Must have been the clasp, I guess. You were really kidding?”

I threw my life back into the main compartment, hoping they caught a glimpse of the O.B. wrapper, hoping they saw Super Absorbent and were embarrassed for themselves as they scanned the next terrorist.