You know who gets the best gossip? Quiet people, that’s who. It is not because, as you might think, the people are quiet and will therefore keep secrets well. It is because they are so quiet that people are driven to talk more and fill in the quiet void.
When I worked at my high school job, I always felt a little over my head being surrounded by boys and people who seemed way more together / popular / prettier than me. I was accepted by them but scared I would do something to screw it up so I was quiet. Sometimes very quiet. (Talk about false advertising!) But I remember at many lunches hearing stories that there is NO WAY people should have been telling me. About how one girl was cheating on her boyfriend with his best friend –- both of whom also worked with us. How one girl got in a car accident when she was driving her boyfriend’s car before she had her license and switched seats with him before the police came so she wouldn’t get in trouble. I knew about crushes, hook ups, pregnancy scares. Honestly, the sum total of the information I had been made privy to was enough to knock the teenage social circles around which I orbited completely out of whack.
Since those high school days, I think it’s safe to say I stopped being so quiet. And now I find myself around people who are eerily quiet and, despite what I should I learned when I was sixteen, I talk to fill the void. And so if you watch those quiet folks I hang out with, they know all of my deepest secrets and thoughts.
