The first time you met somebody who shared your same name, it was the summer following seventh grade, at soccer camp in Montecito. For the Jennifers and Heathers and Tiffanys of the world, this kind of thing happens early on, before anyone knows that it is strange. But as it was — though there had been plenty of Anns, Annes, and Annies in your past — there were few, if any, Annas wandering about your section of Southern California. To meet another one was eventful, if for no other reason than because it suggested that there might exist a place somewhere in which you would not always be just slightly different, always just a little bit off.
You were at soccer camp with Cindy Corsakov, the girl from Clearpoint who had befriended you on an AYSO soccer team the year before. You had never met somebody like Cindy Corsakov: effortlessly social, bubbly, and so generous with her compliments that you guessed she must be under the mistaken impression that they were something that grew freely on trees, rather than being a resource so rare and precious that they required a specially trained pig to sniff them out. Cindy’s world was intoxicating, if suspicious: everything was fun, everything was exciting, and each new person represented a new opportunity, instead of the need for devising a new defense mechanism.
And when she flattered you, there was such a mastery in her light hand that sometimes you caught yourself believing that the things she said about you were sincere. You began to think of her compliments not as flattery, but rather the natural response that came from dealing with someone so wonderful as you must clearly be. This was how she became one of your best friends, and it was how she remained one of your best friends for precisely two years. After that, there was to be a dramatic falling out, the specifics of which you would misplace among other lost artifacts of tweenage years, packed away where they could never again be found, along with your faith in the nice things she said, of which you would claim to have been suspicious all along.
You were at soccer camp with Cindy, but this was not the first time you had been there. This time was to be so different from the first year — last year — which was the year that you were told you would be rooming with Megan Fairfield, only to discover on arrival day that Megan had already made plans to room with Courtney Valentine, because they were best friends, after all. And really, you only knew Megan a little bit, it was your parents who were friends, and besides, everybody felt bad about the mixup, and that’s why one of the adults came up with the idea to bring in a third bed into that tiny room that housed just one pious seminary student during the academic year. They had all agreed that this would be the best plan — three girls in a dorm room — that it was the only way to be certain that nobody would be left out. The adults, of course, had been careful to wipe away from their language any indication of who might hypothetically do the leaving and who my hypothetically be left, and you went along with the plan, superficially, agreeing to it as if it were not the worst idea you had ever heard in your life. You allowed them the luxury of feeling better about things, holding out just long enough so that your parents could get back into their yellow Volvo sedan and drive away. And then you gathered your things from Courtney’s and Megan’s room and went next door, and silently went about unpacking your things and making up your bed, again, and the business of applying yourself to soccer: the love of it, and the getting-better-at-it of it.
But this year was different.
You were still only there for one week, but this was a different world. There were kids who became girlfriend and boyfriend for the week, making out in the tiny dorm rooms in between soccer practices and cafeteria lunches. As it happened, the room you shared with Cindy was uniquely situated so as to facilitate late night discussions out the window with the boys two floors below. This was how you first heard the eponymous Violent Femmes album, shocking as it was, and why when you went home you would go into Licorice Pizza and ask for the cassette version of it with a muted voice, requesting that the counter clerk give you the one with the picture of the little girl looking through a window on its cover. This year, instead of studiously ignoring the social element of soccer camp, you were in the center of it, and it was a relief, for once, to not have to worry about what people thought.
The Other Anna was a year younger than you and she was from Encino. You were not totally sure where Encino was, but you did know that the wealthy girl in The Karate Kid had been from there. Based on this, you figured that Encino — wherever it was — must be a pretty exclusive place, if the object of Ralph Macchio’s affections had hailed from it, and so The Other Anna must be a child of privilege. Naturally, there had been other demarcations of class, though you would not have recognized them as such at the time: her hair was long but boasted perfectly feathered sides the likes of which you had never been able to accomplish with your own hair, and her clothing covered the requisite brand trifecta of tweens of the early-to-mid-eighties (Guess, JAG, Esprit). But most significantly of all, while the rest of the soccer campers used regular Chapstick during long days on the soccer field, the Other Anna had Bain de Soleil lip balm, which came in a delicate case with a longer, more elegant cap.
The Bain de Soleil lip balm was of particular note to you because it was the very brand you had begged your own mother to buy for you for soccer camp before leaving home. She had refused, and the decision had been logical: Bain de Soleil lip balm was twice as expensive as PreSun15, which clearly worked just as well. That your family could have afforded the Bain de Soleil lip balm was besides the point: it was a needless expenditure of extra money based on superficial preference for packaging. Had you been older, or better trained in pitching the intangible differences and market value of things like beauty in presentation and subtle social language expressed by commodity choices, perhaps you might have negotiated better for yourself. Perhaps then you might have been able to convince her of how essential it was to have the Bain de Soleil brand, but instead you were stuck with the PreSun. But to be fair, though there was no way that the fact the Other Anna had the Bain de Soleil lip balm could escape your notice, it only bothered you slightly. Because this year, you were with Cindy, and you were having a great time at soccer camp, and the subtleties of lip balm envy are nothing when you have already survived a week long camp with no roommate and come back for more.
It had been hot that week, and you had taken to putting the PreSun around your eyes to keep them from getting sunburned while you were on the soccer field. It was a stop gap solution to stopping the sunburn damage, and you had made it in the moment, and thought nothing of it, at least until the Other Anna came up to you and asked to see the lip balm that you had been putting around your eyes. You agreed, though you were unsure as to why she cared, and the Other Anna looked at the lip balm, examined its lackluster brown and orange packaging, and then looked at you with something like unkindness and disdain. She demanded to know why you had been putting it around your eyes and you explained that you had been sunburned, that you just wanted something there to protect that skin from the glare. The Other Anna continued to look at you with annoyance, until she ceremoniously dropped the tube PreSun into grass in front of you, like something not worthy of her time or touch, and walked away.
Surprised, you picked up the PreSun and put it back in the pocket of your soccer shorts. You did not know what to make of The Other Anna, much less of the subtleties of tweenage caste systems and the semiotics of lip balm in Southern California. And besides, before you could blink, the ball had been thrown in again, and the Other Anna was off towards the other goal, and you headed back to defend yours, before the rest of the week blurred past you with the kind of speed that only the last breaths of childhood can carry.
When I was 13 years old, I went to boarding school. My parents, fed up with the failure of their liberal social experiment that involved sending their freakish, too-young, and too-weird oldest daughter to public school for eight years, had given up and opted for a posh boarding school that promised all the best in higher ed.
Public school had been a complete misery for me, starting with a friendless stretch in elementary school that involved daily taunting from the mean girls and continuing into middle school that seemed like a daily existential nightmare that would never let me out alive.
I literally was threatened every single day — every single day — with promises that the threatener was going to “kick my ass.” People called me on the phone at home to make this threat. People left me notes in my locker, whispered it to me in class, accosted me as I emerged from my oblivious father’s car. Girls tricked me with deliberate offers of friendship, only to run away giggling with their friends at what a gullible ass I was. How dare I even believe that they would want to befriend the likes of me?
I lived in complete, daily terror. Why they wanted to kick my ass was unclear. I was small (then). I was a year younger than everyone else, having started first grade at age five because I’d been reading since age three. I was unquestionably strange, reading things no one else would or could read, thinking about things that no one in that school was anywhere near thinking about. I was socially clueless and never could figure out how other children associated with each other. I guess I do know why they wanted to kick my ass. With all that going for me, I may as well have been walking around with a big red target on it.
It wasn’t that my parents didn’t know about the bullying. I was in one of those situations where defending myself invariably got ME in trouble, and my parents got the phone calls. My father went so far as to teach me to box. I guess he thought it would be best to leave me in this godawful, godforsaken public school in Waco, Texas, a middle school so hardened that the principal was compelled to come on the PA system the first day of school to remind students not to smoke in the hallways—and I was being left there to box my way out of it.
Straight from this terrifying milieu to a boarding school full of upper-class snobs? You might think that the latter was an improvement. It’s true that I didn’t have people kicking my ass every day. These better-educated, smarter, richer people simply had slightly more clever ways of messing with me. And it was worse in the end because I actually had to live with them. My daily existential hell of middle school had become a No Exit of an entrapped freshman year, surrounded by people who seemed hell-bent on making me miserable night and day. And even 27 years later, as I look back, the only real reason I can divine, the only trigger for this systematic, targeted behavior, is that they were just cruel people. As we learned from The Simpsons, sometimes, people (and elephants) are just assholes.
I emerged from this crucible of fear and emotional torture at age 14, no longer at boarding school, back at a public school in Waco, Texas. Once again. But it was a “better” public school (i.e., full of kids from the wealthy side of town).
And somehow, from pretty much the day I started, I walked across the threshold with a new attitude best summed up as, “Bring it on. I really don’t give a s*** what you think.” I don’t know where it came from. I don’t know how it coalesced for me at age 14. I don’t know why the onset was so sudden. I wished I’d been able to adopt it much earlier. And it was this attitude that left me alone at the dance during that first homecoming my tenth-grade year at my new school.
I knew almost no one. Homecoming followed soon after school started, and in a fit of…something…independence? self-assertion? hope? … I went, alone. I dressed myself in a nice two-piece outfit. I stood alone in the stands and watched the football game, I went to the dance and sat, alone, through the entire night as my peers, some of whom had been attending school together since kindergarten, danced the night away, locked in speechless, adolescent embrace. I never spoke a word to anyone the entire night.
I held up. I told myself I was happy, it was fine, I was just looking at things, an observer, OK to be on my own. And it was true. It’s how I’d always been happiest, sitting silently with my own thoughts, watching people who were so different from me they almost seemed like aliens, observing their behaviors, feeling more aware of everything around me than any of them.
So, I was happy.
Until I got into my parents’ car after the dance, and my mother — occasionally known for not being the button on the cap of discretion — asked me irritably, “Why did you even come to this dance? You’re all alone, and everyone else has a date.”
With those pointed words, she nailed any moxy I’d mustered up about the whole thing to a cold wall of reality. I crumpled. Inwardly.
Until I remembered that sitting there in those stands, alone, watching and observing and taking mental notes, was just about the most fun I’d had in a school environment in years. Until I remembered that I hadn’t myself made any of the decisions in my life that had dragged me through the mud and terror of daily bullying and torture. Until I recalled that attending this dance alone had been my very first salvo in asserting myself as Me, as an individual, not a fearful, terrorized creature creeping into school every day, hoping to go unnoticed. Until I started saying to myself, like a mantra, “Bring it on. I don’t give a s*** what you think.”
I am 43 years old. By all accounts, my time in junior high school (now called middle school) was a long, long time ago. Why is it that I can still remember quite clearly the awfulness of my peers during those years?
Let’s start at the beginning. I changed schools in sixth grade. I had been attending a Jewish day school where my parents were unhappy about my level of secular education. They decided to send me to a true “prep” school — one replete with lacrosse, loads of preppy handbook wannabees and kids just itching to find someone who was different from them.
I was definitely in what could be termed an “awkward” phase — although looking back at pictures from that time, we all were. I was on the smaller side, had awful short hair, glasses and braces. Not much to work with. There were a few of us who were new that year and we all sort of hung out together.
The other girls, many of whom had been together since first grade, were extremely cliquey and exclusive. This was also the year that co-ed roller skating parties were all the rage, as was “going out” with a boy. Going out didn’t mean dating. It was more of a way of telling the world that you liked one another and would hang out at recess together. Needless to say, no one asked me to “go out” that year.
Beginning in sixth grade, boys would walk up to me, put an arm around me and tell me they liked me (not). I guess nowadays this would be termed some sort of sexual harassment, but hey, in the 70s those days were far far away. I was also the butt of some sort of joke where a song by The Kinks (remember them?) called “Girl, you really got me going” was changed to “Liann” instead of “Yeah.” Oh, the horror. I remember in a seventh grade science class one of the very cool boys (I think he has since done a stint in rehab and has never held a job) playing the game “hangman” on a piece of paper while we waited for the teacher to arrive. His puzzle was “Liann is ugly.”
And then there were the girls. There was one, who for some reason made it her mission in life to talk about me in front of my face, and due to her semi-popularity would make sure that her friends did not include me. (To this day, I have not forgotten this person and would stil not be particulary unhappy to see her looking old and miserable.) Girls would whisper about me and make faces at me while I was standing nearby. Not sure what there was to say. No one really knew me or had any idea what I did or thought about anything.
Truthfully, I’m not sure how I got through it. I know my mom would try role-playing with me and had me talk to a counselor at the school. Somehow by ninth grade things improved. I got my braces off, got contact lenses (changed my life), and grew my hair long. I was also lucky enough to spend some summers during those years at a camp far away where people actually liked me. I am sure this was a tremendous help.
When I talk to kids now (like a 13-year-old who babysits for me) I have great empathy for what she is going through. I have certainly moved on and built a life, but I remember with great clarity how I felt and how awful I thought it was to be in such a position.
My CISWY co-editor Jen frequently remarks that she is “Not nice.” I don’t believe her. But I do believe that I’ve been Not Nice for a long, long time, as this mortifying post illustrates.
I found every last part of seventh grade bewildering. The hundreds of new students, the maze-like new campus, the rows and rows of lockers, having to choose classes and then needing to switch between those classes six times each day, the concept of “popularity” and its blatant yet slippery links to student government elections, and the hundreds of new students.
My classmates and I had been plucked from our isolated, comforting, elementary school nerdling pod, and dropped into a massive social cage match. I found myself on the sidelines, confused and lost, in a holding pen with the geekiest geeks from five other elementaries.
I might have been at a social disadvantage, but I was also not a nice kid. And I quickly compensated for my social disorientation by picking on the weaker and geekier. Morgan Van Grundy and his bolo ties? Fair game. A friendly, gangly new kid with the then-rare name Cameron? In my sights. I quickly had them both squirming. Both asking me why I couldn’t be nicer to them. Asking what they had ever done to me.
I remained unrepentant. Besides, I lacked the self-awareness to explain that I preyed on them so I wouldn’t feel like fair game to the kids outside our fast-track classrooms.
After a few weeks as a free agent, I found an equally callous partner. Lara was a transplant from New York and had the accent to prove it. She was creative and vivacious and interesting, and told me secrets about life outside Southern California, about things like boroughs and fashion models. I started to spend afternoons at her house. I would moon over her designer jeans. She would tell me what it was like to have a single mom. We would talk in hushed tones about S-E-X even though no one else was home.
Lara was no more bone-evil than I was, but she shared my fondness for easy targets. So, when we weren’t gossiping, watching TV, dressing up, or laying waste to her family’s stash of Jello pudding pops, we were tormenting her neighbors and our classmates Deanna and Adele.
Deanna lived next door to Lara, and Adele lived a few houses down the street. They were good friends, and were cut from the same quiet, good-natured, studious cloth. I got the sense that Lara had been friends with them both in elementary school, but that they’d since had had a falling out. I never even bothered to ask what happened. I had no reason to target Deanna and Adele, not one — except that Lara wanted to pick on them, and I liked to pick on people. Because I was not a nice kid. Because it was easy. Because I felt powerless, and so craved power, no matter how tainted or piddling.
This is what Lara and I would do:
We would walk behind Adele and Deanna and snicker.
We would follow them onto the volleyball court during P.E. and demand to know what “that thing” on Adele’s face was (it was a beauty mark).
We would “oink” at Deanna and her perky upturned nose when the teachers weren’t listening.
We would call them at home, several times a day, and then hang up when they answered.
One day, a voice that wasn’t Deanna’s answered the phone at her house. It was a teenage girl’s voice, but a thick voice, a slow voice. I hung up and told Lara what I’d heard.
“Oh, that’s Deanna’s sister. She’s retarded. She wears maxi pads in the swimming pool!”
And, inexcusably, I laughed and called right back. The sister picked up the phone. I wondered again at her voice’s tone and texture, and then I asked for Deanna. Deanna picked up the phone, said “Hi?” and of course I hung up, because Deanna’s sister and our need to harass Deanna were two entirely separate issues.
But I thought about Deanna’s sister a lot, even as Lara and I kept up the harassment. What did the sister do all day? Did she go to school? Did she ever go out of her house?
Our own classes were small enough that after a few months we knew baseline biography information on just about everyone, so while I knew that Deanna had older parents, she never once mentioned her sister. Nor did anyone else. Not through five more years of classes together. I still wonder if Deanna’s sister was a source of pain, strength, peace, or all three. If Deanna’s silence was to protect her sister, herself, or both of them. If her silence was even a conscious effort.
Lara and I eventually gave up on Deanna and Adele because, to their credit, they ignored us. They didn’t have their parents or teachers intervene, they didn’t confront us, and they never retaliated in any way. They didn’t even acknowledge that we’d said or done anything to them. We stopped bothering them, because without reactions to fuel our actions, we lost our motivation.
We never succeeded in taking away even an ounce of their power.
Not that I didn’t find other victims to needle. After all, I wasn’t very nice.
—–
For those who now need something with which to wash their eyes, here is Susan Etlinger’s latest hero, slamming the foulness of the word “retard”:
In general I have not been the mom who couldn’t stand it when her kids moved to another stage in life. (Not that there is anything wrong with that mom.)
At times I have thought that there must be something wrong with me because I am able to walk away from milestones such as the first day of kindergarten, without crying. But honestly, I have tried to simply celebrate whatever stage my children are in. I loved my babies as babies, but I don’t wish they were still babies. I embraced having three toddlers under five at home, napping on the couch, and never showering. I appreciated that we didn’t have to be anywhere at a certain time, and that I basically had complete control over my children’s choice of friends—and their choices about everything else.
Then my oldest child started kindergarten. I was excited that we were done with being home and had entered a new era: elementary school. It seemed as though every year after that, I had another child starting kindergarten. And even though my youngest is only two, I feel as though he will start kindergarten any minute now.
But this year there has been a little kink in my plan to always embrace the next stage of my children’s lives, because one of them finally reached a stage that I just wasn’t excited about. My oldest son, Cole, has started middle school. Every day, he walks into the same building that I walked into during my first year of junior high. He’s playing the trumpet. I played the trumpet. It’s his first year to have a locker. I still cry when I think about trying to remember my locker combination.
We took Cole to and from school for the first few days of middle school, but now he’s riding the bus. Which is better, because I don’t have to break out in hives when I drive to the school and remember my middle school days.
Last spring we went to the school for orientation. I was walking the halls with Cole and I said, “Yep, Cole, right there. There’s the spot where Mama had her very first nervous breakdown. That’s right. That desk right there in what used to be Mrs. Moore’s class.”
Cole looked at me with an expression that clearly did not mean, “I feel you mom. I’m just so sorry.”
Like Mrs. Moore, he did not understand the plight of an eleven-year-old girl who was being made fun of daily by the boy who sat right across from her, because if Mrs. Moore had understood, she would have used her almighty powers to move that boy to the other side of the room.
When I say I was being made fun of, I do not mean the kind where people say to you, “Oh he is just flirting with you.” I know about the kind of teasing that is really just flirting. That’s what this boy did to other girls. But me, I was mocked, made the butt of all jokes and made to look like the complete idiot that of course I already believed I was because I could not everever get my locker open on the first try. Or manage to get to class with everything I needed. Or come up with a science project that would please the likes of Mrs. Moore.
Usually I managed to get all the way inside my house before I would cry. I would take deep breaths as I slowly walked the road from the bus stop to my house, and up the stairs to my blessed bed with the Holly Hobbie bedspread. “You can make it,” I would tell myself.
But one day, I couldn’t make it. I didn’t even make it out of third period. I cried so hard that I actually hyperventilated. Which finally made people notice that I was being hounded by a mean boy for the entirety of every science class. And here’s the thing about middle school. You don’t ever want anyone to take notice. Your parents, yes, and your close friends, maybe, if you have any. But not the rest of the world. To them, I was just trying to be invisible. So, yes, the mean boy got in trouble. It was a long time ago, so he even got spanked. Which I never lived down. Mrs. Moore finally moved him, disdainfully. And I spent the rest of the year trying harder and harder to disappear into the nonexistent spaces between the lockers.
When Cole and I got home from his orientation, he told his dad that I was completely crazy and could his dad please take him to all of the rest of his middle school events instead of Mom? When we filled my husband in as to why, he said with complete nonchalance, “That’s funny. When I was in seventh grade, I got spanked for making fun of a girl until she cried.” I lost just a little bit of respect for him right then and there. Respect he will not regain until he finds that poor girl and apologizes. Which he cannot do, because he doesn’t remember her name. They never do.
The good news is that I don’t think that Cole is going to repeat my middle school experience. And I know this not just because he is a boy. I know it because on the first day of school I picked him up and when he got in the car he was chewing on something. So I said, “Hey, what’s in your mouth?” To which he replied, “My locker combination.”
And because he is the kind of boy who would actually eat the only piece of paper he has with that sacred information on it, I had to give him a lecture right then and there about never making fun of girls.
I’m a loner and have been since nursery school. Even the idea of having a friend is completely foreign to me. My class is the amalgamation of the “smart” kids of the entire school district and we are all attending an full-time, every day “enrichment” program. It is 1.5 hours away by bus, meaning I leave home at 7:05am, well before sunrise for much of the school year. I am 2 years younger than all of my classmates. My entire wardobe consists of jewel-toned jogging suits and I am crowned with a bright red afro (thanks to an unfortunate haircut). I obsessively listen to the other kids but when I try to act social with them, even they can tell I’m mimicing. They think I’m a freak. In a classroom full of kids that were supposed to be like me… I’m still a freak.
I discover that I really enjoy working with my hands when we start taking wood shop. I’ve begged to be allowed to take weekly wood shop class with the boys, because my other choices are home economics and art, and I already know how to bake, use a sewing machine and have no artistic skill whatsoever. Reluctantly, the teacher grants me permission to join the class when my homeroom teacher intervenes on my behalf. I am delighted.
Wood shop is apparently a proving ground for the budding adolescent male, where the jocks suddenly are on equal academic footing with the nerds. The teacher belongs to the jock group, I can tell by the way he stands and who he jokes with, but beyond that classification the social nuances are lost on me. For once I’m so different I’m left completely alone… a girl isn’t worth the time of the jocks or the nerds.
We do different projects to learn to use the different tools, moving from hand tools to power tools and then onto the machines, giant sanders, saws, lathes. My success is mediocre, but I don’t care! It’s new and I love the smells and sounds and solitude of the projects. After a few weeks, the teacher tells us to prepare on graph paper a design to cut out on the jigsaw. Something with some curves and some straight edges, and he’ll approve the designs before we’re allowed to copy it onto a piece of wood. I spend the next week tracing and retracing the same design… a musical 1/8th note, where the note is a heart shape. I plan to carefully sand it and colour several different samples of the design for myself, trying to decide on what colour will look nicest hanging on my bedroom wall. I painstakingly draw more than a dozen of them, trying to get the
perfect balance of heart-to-stem, the heart shape proportional and not to fat, not to thin, the stem not so thick as to throw off the balance of the picture, the tail on the eighth note gracefully curved and angled.
Finally, the morning of the class arrives and I eagerly wait my turn, to have my design approved so I can pick out a piece of pine from the scrap bin and start work. I watch while the teacher nods and smiles at the jock’s designs, and sighs but approves the nerd’s designs. I present my own coloured master plan, on graph paper as specified, and wait.
The teacher frowns. His eyes narrow. I don’t know how to read it yet. Angrily, he gestures towards the drawing. “What is this supposed to be?”
“A love note!” I say proudly. I feel it is both clever and cute and am eager to learn how to use the jigsaw.
His face clenches, he crumples it up and tosses it in the waste-paper basket, tells me to sit at my desk. I’m too confused to cry while he steps into the next room, the art room, and speaks to the teacher briefly. I am shortly steered by the shoulder into art class, where I spend the remaining 6 weeks of the semester making a coil pot out of clay, my cheeks burning with shame because I still don’t know what I’ve done wrong.
I hated Karen Morley in year 8. She had naturally blonde hair so light it was nearly white. Her no-makeup skin revealed the colourless spots beneath to the world. When she laughed her small teeth were yellow against the red of her too-large gums; and she laughed a lot. Her clothes were boring and old fashioned, as if her gran had chosen them. She had no friends. Despite all of that, the boys seemed to love her. They flocked around her like seagulls around fish! And she had a boyfriend called Colin.
But she was so boring! She never said anything. She just laughed. She laughed at their jokes, she laughed when they teased her, she even laughed they asked her questions instead of giving an answer. But still they flocked.
Tania and I often stood frowning, arms folded, watching in disbelief. Now Tania and I – we were interesting, clever and funny. We could joke back, tease them with attitude and hold our own in any debate. We knew about football, politics, psychology and Marc Bolan. We also spent a lot of time on our clothes, hair and makeup. So why were they hanging around with her? She couldn’t even crack a joke and she had yellow teeth for goodness sake!
I can’t recall much about what we did to Karen Morley that year. I do remember Colin kicking Tania really hard in the playground for calling Karen names. I don’t remember the names that we called her but I expect being boring and yellow teeth were mentioned. We were outraged at his reaction. We had just wanted the boys to see what we saw. They were supposed to turn against her, not us.
Three years later Karen Morley and I sat together in the Form room only a couple of months away from leaving school. All animosities had long ceased. We chatted and laughed about teenage girly stuff. Then suddenly she told me that Tania and I had made her life Hell in year 8. She said we had sent her a card on her birthday and when she’d opened it “We all hate you” was written inside. I was devastated. I saw all the pain of that year in her face.
Karen Morley was a nice, pretty, not particularly clever person. She had never done anything to hurt me, but I had really hurt her. I remember that I said I was sorry and did not know what else to say. I wish now that I’d told her what pretty hair she had, how attractive her laugh was, and how destructive and powerful jealousy can be.
Jorge strummed his blonde wood guitar in the hotel patio. He swaggered right up to the table where I sat crunching a taquito de pollo drizzled with cream, flanked by my parents. I leaned toward him, his tight silver-spangled pants and mustard-colored mariachi suit bright in the Mexican sun. He looked me straight in the face, and launched into a song that seemed to be breaking his heart. Yo soy un hombre sincero…
I was twelve, and enchanted. It was Holy Week in Puerta Vallarta. California was still groggy from winter, but Mexico was wide awake, fragrant and rioting in color. Scarlet and magenta bougainvillea comingled, dripping over gleaming black balconies of twisted iron. Thick white-washed walls hid interior courtyards, filled with cooing birds and cooling palms.
I watched bright parachutes soar over the Pacific. I ate clams for the first time and crunchy curls of fried cheese dipped in smoky salsa. I devoured Gone With The Wind, perched poolside in a black bikini, legs slick with baby oil.
Back home, the foxiest boy in the 6th grade was Tim Morelli. If I did the right thing, acted the right way, maybe he would invite me to his fort, clasp his St. Christopher medal around my throat, ask me to go steady. A couple of weeks before our trip, Tim invited me to meet him after school at the bluffs, a hideout under the eucalyptus trees. I pushed my bike up the craggy, crusty hill and waited in the shade under tangy leaves, my heart thumping.When he arrived, Tim jammed his grimy hand into my underpants and wormed it around. I squeezed my eyes shut, lips pressed together. The going steady would come next. A ring, maybe. I waited. Footsteps crunched through the leaves and he pulled out his hand. His two friends, Wally and Dave elbowed each other, and Tim grinned.
I pedaled my lime green Schwinn home as fast as I could, thighs on fire, tears streaming into my ears. No medal, no gentle kiss. After that, Wally and Dave regularly ambushed me in the janitor’s closet. They wrestled me to the ground, then groped and grabbed at me. “Gusto,” they shrieked, mimicking a popular beer ad, and twisted the tender tips of my breasts.“Go for the gusto!” Each time, my nipples were purple for days.
But in Mexico, there were wide grins, low bows, a door swept open. And what does the señorita desire this evening? While Jorge strummed, I sipped my virgin strawberry daiquiri and imagined his mouth clamped over mine, what it might feel like to have that black mustache prickle my lips.
I was safe, high on my vacationer pedestal, a moat of chlorinated water, Hawaiian Tropic Cocoa Butter and my mother’s close eye keeping me from harm.
At home, though, the border between child and woman was dangerous. On weekends at my dad’s house, my older step-brother regularly terrorized me in the middle of the night, fondling my breasts with his dry hands, jacking off in the dark while I scrunched into a ball. Another guy started out as a babysitter, and we jumped Parcheesi pieces around a board, but after dark, the game changed; a slobbery kiss, a teenage hand cold on my belly, reaching, pushing.
“Don’t tell,” they all said, and I was ashamed, so I kept quiet. I figured I deserved it; that’s what happens to girls with breasts already as big as their mother’s, who dream of kissing mustached mouths, who are desperate to wear Tim Morelli’s cheap ring.
The lipglossy clear-eyed girls in magazines, the Susan Deys and Marsha Bradys swung their hair and grinned. They didn’t look scared. They wore gleaming white swim suits, slim bodies just right; no scraggly wiry hairs sprouting, no purple stretch marks, no Oxy 10 in their medicine cabinets, no worn copies of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret under their pillows. They were cool, possessed, sure, un-slouching, un-needing. Unlike me.
A couple of months before our trip to Mexico, I discovered a saddle-colored stain in my underwear. I was the first girl in the class to get my period, but I had seen the film strips, I knew that it was just men-stroo-ay-shun. I snuck into my mom’s bathroom and pushed in a tampon. It felt foreign inside me, uncomfortable; I didn’t feel like horseback riding or swimming, like the smiling Kathy Rigby had promised in the TV ads.
That afternoon, I hid in my room, record player blaring, furious at my body’s betrayal. I knew what was lurking across the border; more bruised nipples and slimy tongues, more grabbing and jerking.
My mom came in, asked how my day was, and the tears dripped off my jawline.
“Oh, honey, whatever it is, we can fix it,” she kept saying, stroking my hair.
“You can’t,” I cried, hanging my head. “Nobody can.”
After a few minutes, she spied my balled-up underpants in the corner and understood. She straightened me up, looked into my face, gently. “You’re becoming a woman.”
On our last day in Mexico, Jorge again came to our table. He sang a lovely lilting song, closing his eyes, chin tilted skyward during the best parts. “In your mouth, you will carry the flavor of me…”Then he took off his hat, and asked my parents’ permission to leave a small gift. “So that you have warm memories of my country,” he said in perfect English. It was a cheap, too-big necklace, a slab of marbled stone hanging from a cord. I was awed. It was the same mustard color of his mariachi uniform.
A tiny ballerina danced every time I cracked my jewelry box open to look at Jorge’s gift. I fingered the cool stone cradled in red velvet. But I never wore the necklace, didn’t want to feel the weight of it around my neck, the press of stone between my breasts. I just liked knowing it was there, waiting for me.
The summer before the seventh grade, I received an unexpected phone call.
“Kari! It is Trisha! You remember me, right?”
The voice was friendly but the name was not familiar. I probably uttered a noncommittal, “Um… hi!”
“You mean you don’t remember me?” she asked, her voice a bit sharper. She didn’t wait for an answer, “We were, like, best friends in the third grade.” Her voice sweetened, “You remember… right?”
I refused to say “yes.” My best friend in the second grade had taught me not to lie. And in the third grade she told me music was of the Devil and as third-graders we had to be “mature.” Of course, we also had the Crazy Club in the third grade, and that wasn’t particularly “mature,” nor was being crazy particularly God-approved. I didn’t remember a “Trisha” in that mix.
I couldn’t say “yes,” but I also didn’t want to admit not remembering her if she could be a potential friend.
That best friend from the second grade moved on to a Christian junior high while I went through several public junior high rites-of-passage such as having a seagull take a shit on my head during lunch, being accused of stuffing my bra, and having my locker broken into: the shelves my dad had built for me were doused with graffiti and the cheerful pink striped wrapping paper I used as wallpaper now had, “Kari is a Pig-Nose” written between the lines.
(The Pig-Nose thing was pretty unoriginal, but that didn’t stop me from crying when a group of teenagers with their noses taped up high entered the frozen yogurt place where I worked a few years later. They specifically asked for me to serve their yogurt.)
In the sixth grade I ate lunch with a Chinese woman who wore her old school uniform, a shy Polish immigrant, a girl whose mullet stuck up in the front revealing heavy forehead acne, and a fickle, spacey seventh-grader who repeated the seventh grade. Eventually, Mullet Girl decided she was too cool for me, so I stuck with the folks who didn’t speak English.
If “Trisha” was real, maybe I would have a shot at a friend who was cooler than those others.
“Um, well, we must have been in different classes,” I finally said to the voice on the phone.
“Nope!” Again, the voice was super-cheery and expectant. “Look… I am moving back into the area, and I wanted to see if you would show me around.”
“Um, sure!” Finally I could answer in the affirmative. I could be bouncy, helpful, and friendly.
“Why don’t you meet me on the steps on the first day of school!”
“Sure, absolutely!”
“You better remember me by then,” she cautioned, and then laughed, “Bye!” Was that a giggle and snort I heard in the background?
I was skeptical and worried. If “Trisha” was pretty, she’d be snapped up by the “popular kids.” And if she wasn’t… well, then she’d be yet another person that I ate with because nobody else would.
The first day of seventh grade, I waited on the steps close to the location where eight months later I would overhear the football team telling their coach that if I made cheerleader they would all quit the team. I had made finals; they were panicking. I didn’t make cheerleader.
I waited for Trisha.
And waited.
Perhaps there were giggles. Perhaps there were people hiding alongside a building, peeking out. But I didn’t notice them.
After the second bell, I ran to class. Of course I was late, but I hadn’t wanted to miss a potential friend. I didn’t want her to think I had stood her up.
That evening, she called, “Um, sorry. I couldn’t make it this morning.”
I promised to wait for her again the next morning.
Of course, nobody came.
The call that evening was, “Where were you? I waited for you!”
I knew she hadn’t arrived, had she?
I half-apologized, half-accused, “Well, sorry if you are real, but if you aren’t, stop bugging me.” I hung up without waiting for her response.
Fed up with public school life, I ended up at a private high school. But “Trisha” hadn’t forgotten me the way I had apparently forgotten her. That familiar voice phoned me shortly after my sixteenth birthday to inform me of a new dating service in the area. She didn’t identify herself as “Trisha,” but I am pretty sure it was the same person.
“No thanks, I have a boyfriend,” I shrugged.
The shock in her voice was noticeable, “Well keep us in mind for when he dumps you!” I heard plenty of snickers in the background.
Two years later, the phone rang. “We are from the premier dance academy in the country. We saw your most recent performance and are interested in having you apply to our school. To where should we send the admissions materials?”
This was a joke, right? Still, I couldn’t be sure, and I wanted to be polite, even if I had no intention of attending their school. I gave the voice my postal address.
A few minutes later, the phone rang again, “Oh, so sorry…” and then I heard a huge guffaw. The voice composed herself and shushed the peanut gallery, “It turns out that you are not the dancer we are interested in. There are many better than you. Best of luck with your college applications.”
“Actually, I’ve already been admitted to Brown University. But thanks for your well-wishes,” I responded. I knew their call was a joke, but my statement wasn’t a lie.
They called during the holiday break after my first semester of college to taunt me again with the fictional dating service. Fortunately, I was able to respond that their services were not necessary.
The next holiday break, the only calls were from my boyfriend.
I met a real “Trisha” years later. She is a gorgeous, thin, multi-talented woman. But she is also someone with a heart.
Mullet Girl is now quite beautiful and holds degrees in law and genetics. We are long-distance friends via holiday cards with occasional phone calls where I know the voice comes from a real person.
Christian Girl returned to the fold of our Crazy Club and we are now Crazy Mothers together.
In 7th grade, I got a crush on my French teacher. A huge, yearning, painful crush. On my female French teacher. It hit me like a truck, and it was terrifying. Particularly so because I read a lot and knew exactly what it was called if these sorts of feelings for people of the same gender continued; I had it on good authority that they could be Just a Phase, and I hoped fervently that they were.
See, all those advice books for adolescents — the ones with questions supposedly from Real Teens about things like menstruation and pubic hair — always included a question from some poor soul along the lines of “I think I have a crush on my best friend, s/he’s a girl/boy and so am I, does this mean I’m gay?” To which the answer was always something like, “Now, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with being gay. But don’t worry [emphases mine] about your crush on your friend; it’s perfectly normal for heterosexual teens to have feelings like this…” and blah blah blah. It was supposed to be reassuring but was actually confusing: if there was nothing wrong with being gay, what was there to worry about, with the crushes on friends? Why the need for reassurance? Anyone would smell a rat.
In 8th grade, I tried to put the whole emotional mess behind me and concerned myself with the standard teenage-girl nerd things: reading the Foundation trilogy, writing in my Notebook, and trying not to get beat up by mean kids.
The mean kids were really, really mean. Especially Noelle Johnson, who was constantly threatening to beat me up because I was so bad at volleyball. Noelle was one of those girls who were mysteriously allowed to spend every gym class sitting on the bleachers, gossiping and making obnoxious comments. (And you have to wonder: why did she care about me? I wasn’t even on her team!)
One day Noelle ventured down from the bleachers again. I figured she was going to give me yet another hard time about how my inability to spike the ball was going to lead to my imminent demise at her hands. Instead, she stared at me, hard, and demanded accusingly, “Are you a lesbian?”
My jaw dropped. My first impulse — honestly, I was this nerdy — was to say something like, “How am I supposed to know if I’m a lesbian? I’m only thirteen! No one can know if they’re a lesbian when they’re thirteen! All the books say so! I’m waiting to see. Ask me again in a few years.” But even I knew that that would’ve been a Big Mistake. Though, in retrospect, maybe not worse than what I did say, which was (after a few seconds during which all the above thoughts flashed through my mind) a bare and unconvincing “No!”
As it was, she stared at me for a couple more seconds, while all her friends went “ooooooh!” with that rising inflection indicating a fight’s about to start. But nothing happened. She made a few more remarks about how dumb I was and went back to the bleachers.
I went back to the volleyball game, shaken. How had she known to ask? How??
Now I think that she probably just randomly picked the most damning accusation she could come up with. But at the time it was so scary and creepy, like she could see inside my thoughts. If she could do that when I wasn’t even sure how I felt, what would happen if I decided that I really was gay? It was too terrible to contemplate, so I put it all firmly out of my mind.
Or rather, I did the best I could. A year or two later, in unrequited love with my best friend and trying to decide what “counted” as being in love, I remember writing something like this in my notebook:
“Am I gay? I know I’m in love with Z. But does that mean I’m a lesbian? I’m really too young to decide something like that! When I’m maybe 20, if I still feel like this about girls, then I’ll decide I really am. But I can’t know now.”
And that’s more or less what I did: I waited until college, when nobody I knew was threatening to beat anyone up, and it didn’t matter how good anyone was at volleyball, and I didn’t feel like my whole world would come tumbling down with one simple “yes.”
In the decades since then, most people in my life — my friends and family and even the people I work with — have been just fine with who I am and who I love. Even my daughter says that no one at school gives her a hard time about having two moms. I know it’s not like that for everyone, and I feel really lucky.
At times I wish I’d had the courage to come out sooner, at least to myself. Sometimes, now, I wish that when Noelle Johnson asked me that question, I’d said “Yes!,” swept her into my arms, and given her a big smooch in front of the whole gym class. It would have made for a much better story, even though I probably would’ve gotten suspended and beaten up.
And at other times I think I was right and smart to wait until it felt safe for me. Life isn’t just a story when you’re living it, after all. It’s easy for me now, safe in my grownup life, to wonder whether it’s worse to get hurt, or worse to live scared that you might get hurt. Some kids who come out as teenagers did and do get hurt, in real and lasting ways, and I escaped most of that.
But you know what’s weird? No one ever did actually beat me up, even though they spent much of 8th grade threatening to. I didn’t even exactly know what “beaten up” meant, even though I spent most of 8th grade being afraid of it.
I do wish I’d been able, somehow, to not be so scared of something that hadn’t even happened to me. And to let myself decide for myself what I felt, and what it meant, and what counted as real.
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