Growing up in a no-nonsense town, going to a no-nonsense school, it didn’t much prepare me for the real world. But meeting Jackie, the town’s wildest pumpkin, surely did. You see, I’ve gone to a Catholic Cantaloupe school my whole life, I’m talking K through 12 here, and my mother always told me that good Christian Canta-girls don’t fill themselves with cottage cheese, don’t let the handsome chefs down the street roll them into melon-balls, Lord knows they don’t hollow out their innards and carve faces on their epidermal surfaces. Jackie didn’t care about the rules. Whether it was Halloween or Christmas, she always had a bright, toothy smile on her face and the look of sheer seduction in her eyes. That vacant noggin of hers drove all of the fellas crazy.

At Saint Augustine’s school of Catholic Cantaloupes, Sister Mary Loupe always told us to stay away from the watermelons. A watermelon is nothing but trouble, and wants nothing more than to plant his dirty little seeds into one of us innocent muskmelons. Or so they told us. But, Jackie didn’t give a what about Sister Mary Loupe or any of the others. Hell, she was dating the largest watermelon this side of the berry patch and seemed perfectly content about it. The two of them were even spotted holding vines in public, in the throws of one serious make-out sesh. None of the ’loupes at St. Aug’s could make-out. Not just because of our devastating fear of rotting in a melon hell, per se, but because we literally couldn’t make sexy facial expressions and didn’t even have mouths.

I’ll be the first to tell you that I wasn’t much exposed to too many fruits in my upbringing, but I guess everything changed for me one Thursday of my senior year. I was hanging out with my BFFs from forever, and we were all watching the Friends/Will & Grace line-up. Same old, same old, and I felt the scene was totally Lamesville. My best friends forever kept exchanging the same racist honeydew jokes that I’d grown up with my whole life:

Q: “Why did two inbred honeydews get married in Mexico?”

A: “Because they “Cantaloupe” here!”

Q: “Where do impoverished honeydews send their kids in the summer?”

A: “John Melon-CAMP for the filthy poor.”

“Look guys!” I finally snapped. “If you think you’re better than anybody else than it’s high time you took a dose of ‘get real’ pills and washed them down with some ‘save the drama for your mama’ tonic. I’m out of here. Save your prejudice for a different audience, this scene is being edited from my life and, get this, I’m the director making the cuts!”

I bounced out of there with both my ego and my melon-y surface slightly bruised. Although I knew I did the right thing by sticking up for what I believed in, I didn’t feel right about dissin’ my friends like that and I didn’t feel good about them throwing rotten tomatoes at me either. I really had nowhere to turn. I was just about to sell myself at the local supermarket when I ran into Jackie sitting on a doorstep, she held a candle inside her head .

“Don’t do it, darling,” Jackie whispered into the darkness of the night, “Don’t whore yourself via the corporate giant, and don’t make the same mistake I did. Don’t fall in love with a farmer. He’ll sell you before you have time to say ‘I love you.’ You don’t have the tough skin—both literally and figuratively—that I do. I may be out with the seasons, but you’re out with yesterday’s trash.”

And Jackie was right. She may have saved my life that day. I went the straight arrow way and landed myself a good-paying weekend gig working as a model melon at the Radisson Hotel Sunday brunch display. I get all the medical benefits, plus the benefits of my new, diverse multi-fruital friendships.