This Landshark Is Your Landshark

Ole Miss’ new mascot is like the best mascots everywhere: hilarious, absurd and magically unifying. I should know. I was once a beaver.

- Aimee Nezhukumatathil

I WAS QUITE THE ACTRESS AS I STALLED AT MY HIGH SCHOOL locker, pretending to look for my lunch or search for a notebook. I knew exactly how much time I had to waste before I could grab my sack lunch and—without anyone seeing me—run to the nearest bathroom and eat its contents while hiding in a stall. My younger sister never knew. Neither did my parents. Day after day I kept up the act that everything was fine.

As the new girl in my junior year at Beavercreek High—in a large suburb of Dayton, Ohio—I simply couldn’t bear to sit alone in the boisterous school cafeteria, where people who knew one another since kindergarten laughed and traded jokes and snacks. If I wasn’t hiding in a bathroom during the lunch hour, I was eating in our school elevator, conveniently hidden near the library, the place I loved to scurry into, so at least I could get lost in books afterward. This went on for almost an entire academic year.

Besides my studies, the only thing at Beavercreek I knew I loved was football. Coming from a rural region in western New York where the Buffalo Bills dominated the news cycle and homeroom talk, and where I was a “manager” for my junior varsity football team, I was attracted to Beavercreek High’s football games: giddy for the grind and crunch of a play, for the smell of popcorn in waxy paper sacks and hot cocoa in white Styrofoam cups; how strangers in wooden bleachers, regard-less of race and class, could become high fiving friends in less than an hour.

I wanted to be part of that. So I found a new way to hide. I knew if I could hide in this particular way—with a new face, a new body—I would finally feel at home in this giant suburban school.