Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul on Tough Stuff (30 page)

The next day at school, my friends and I were talking about Katrina and the good times we had with her. All of a sudden everybody got really quiet. People always say that whenever that happens it means an angel is flying over. I hope it was Katrina. And if it was, she's going to be real busy. We move around a lot, too.

Kari Fiegen

11
GROWING
UP

T
here is always one moment in childhood
when the door opens and lets the future in.

Deepak Chopra

Somewhere in the Middle

A journey lies ahead
for all teenagers today.
A journey to adulthood,
our youth to kiss away.

But as we go we find ourselves
at a truly awkward stage.
We're partial, unripe, sketchy and crude
at this tender age.

We're old enough to make a choice
yet still young in many ways.
Too young to pack our bags and go,
too old to want to stay.

Young enough for fun and games,
too old for carefree lives.
Young enough for hopes and dreams,
yet for reality we strive.

Old enough for heartfelt pain,
too young to find the cure.
Too old for childish ways of past,
too young to be mature.

Old enough to fall in love
and give our hearts away.
But, still too young to understand
just why we feel this way.

We're trusted, loyal, proud and true
yet scolded, sneered and scorned.
Between the role of adult and child,
we are somewhere torn.

Like an uncompleted work of art,
we're awkward, unsure, half-baked.
But be patient please
for we're on our way
to becoming something great.

Liza Ortego

Losing Becky

I didn't see it coming, the day I lost my best friend. Becky and I were eating our bag lunches at some benches out by the school tennis courts. We were alone; our other friends weren't with us, which was unusual in those days—we almost always ate lunches in a group, the eight of us—so this should've tipped me off. It's true that Becky had been acting strangely for the past few weeks, alternately ignoring me and snapping at me. When I'd asked her what was wrong, she'd said, “Nothing!”

“Then why are you acting so weird?”

“If I'm so weird, maybe you shouldn't hang around with me.”

So I was glad today to be hanging out with her, just the two of us, like old times. We'd been best friends for almost two years. We'd met soon after we started the seventh grade and quickly fell into being best friends in that mysterious way friends sometimes do. We'd shared countless phone calls and school lunches and sleepovers. We'd spent many weekends together, laughing gut-strengthening laughs, playing records and the radio; I played piano while Becky sang in her light, high voice. We shared lots of inside jokes and goofiness, like our hilarious games at the tennis courts. Neither of us were any good at tennis, so as we hit the ball wildly off the mark, we'd yell to each other, “It's still going!” laughing helplessly and scrambling to retrieve the ball, no matter how many times it had bounced.

But today at the tennis courts, neither of us was laughing or even smiling. And suddenly, I realized that this lunch alone together had been planned. Becky wanted to talk to me.

“You wanted to know what was wrong,” Becky said. Her tone was overly kind and condescending. “For awhile now, we've felt you haven't been having a good time with us.” Why was she saying “we”? I had a sinking feeling. She was right about my not having a good time lately hanging out with our friends. Really, they were Becky's friends, and I hung around with them for her sake. They were nice enough girls, but I didn't have much in common with them. They liked Top-40 music, which increasingly bored me. They thought the music I liked was too weird. During lunch, they'd chat on and on about thirteen-year-old boys, gymnastics, TV shows and how stupid the popular girls were. More and more, I'd tune out their chatter, daydreaming about the bands I liked, feeling profoundly bored by Becky's friends—but not by Becky. I endured my boredom because of her. Besides, there was a certain security in having these girls to sit with at lunch, having them if you wanted them.

Becky went on with her speech: “I want to be . . . popular.” Her voice was quavering and ruthless. “You don't seem to want to, but we feel it's important.” I couldn't believe I was hearing this. They'd gone on and on about what lame idiots the popular girls were. But what Becky had to say next sent my world spinning. “We think maybe you ought to have lunch with some other girls from now on.”

“But who?” I asked, panicking. I couldn't think of a single person. It suddenly sank in that I no longer had a best friend.

“What about those older girls? You seem to get along with them,” she suggested with a trace of what sounded like jealousy. It was true that I did get along with some of the older girls—like Lisa, who we'd met in an after-school creative-writing workshop, who wrote strange, impassioned poems, and who'd loaned me a tape with some equally strange, impassioned songs on it, songs I listened to over and over again. The older girls were more interesting than Becky's friends. But at that moment, all I wanted was for Becky to say we were still best friends. I felt like no one could possibly want me around.

The next day at noon, I put my books in my locker, grabbed my lunch, slammed the locker shut, then headed automatically for Becky's locker as I had every day for what seemed like forever. Just as I saw her—small, thin girl with shoulder-length black hair—I remembered. She saw me, and we both stood frozen for a moment. Then I made myself turn and walk in the opposite direction. It was like a divorce.

At first, I wandered around school close to tears all the time—in class, in PE, everywhere. But I did start getting to know some of the older girls better. I began to eat lunch with them, to sit with them during free period. We talked about the music and the movies we liked, and I found myself having fun. No longer did I have to tune out—I wasn't bored anymore. I still missed having a best friend. But by the time I got to the ninth grade, I had many friends and several close ones—and a number of them had also been dropped by their previous cliques for being “too weird.” They liked the same music I did, and some of them even went to see live bands. Soon I was going out, too, and my whole world seemed to open up.

Becky and I were never friends again, although I still talked to her from time to time at school. Sometimes I tried to tell her about the fun I was having, but she didn't seem to understand. She and her friends hadn't become any more popular than when I was part of their crowd. I didn't know whether that continued to matter to her.

She apologized to me one day in the school lunchroom for the way she had treated me. “I can't believe I did that to you!” she said. But I told her I had long since realized that she had done me a favor. I had found my true friends, friends who could really understand me, friends I could be completely myself with, while the pain of Becky's rejection has become a distant memory.

Gwynne Garfinkle

Something I Couldn't See

I used to joke that the first person I ever met, after my parents, was Ellie Oswald. Ellie was the daughter of our next-door neighbors, and our mothers introduced us before we were a month old; for most of my life, I couldn't remember a time when Ellie and I hadn't been friends.

We went to the same school, and we spent nearly all our free time with each other. We put together jigsaw puzzles, dressed up, played house (one of the reasons I liked Ellie was that she would always agree to be the man), and ran around the golf course that our street dead-ended onto.

We told each other everything, and we knew each other so well that we could communicate without speaking. In fifth grade, her seat was two rows ahead of mine, and sometimes when Mrs. O'Hara wasn't looking, Ellie would glance back and ask questions or tell me things with her eyes:
Doesn't Brad Bentley look cute today? Why is
social studies so boring? Do you want to play four-square at
recess?
So certain and familiar was my friendship with Ellie that, in an odd way, I never thought of it; it was just my life.

It was around fifth grade that Ellie and I went from being girls who had existed on the periphery of our elementary school's social scene to being the ones everybody wanted to be friends with. I still can't entirely account for this. One day, we were just hanging around with each other, watching TV and drinking root beer in her parents' room; the next day, we were being flooded with invitations to birthday parties and were the ones other girls wanted to be partners with in gym or sit next to on the bus. Our classmates asked about our opinions, laughed at our jokes and confided their problems in us.

But being popular wasn't easy—honestly. At lunch, girls would cram around the table where we'd chosen to sit, and when we finished our lunch and stood, they'd all stand, too. If two girls got in a fight at a slumber party, I'd be called on to settle the dispute. And I always felt the press of my classmates' wishes for attention from me. I wanted to be nice to everyone, but sometimes it felt exhausting.

It was around eighth grade that my classmates began rebelling—girls and boys fooling around with each other, shoplifting, smoking cigarettes. Such activity made me distinctly uncomfortable. Ellie and I had both always done well in school, and I valued my teachers' approval. And I definitely didn't want to get into trouble with my parents. Plus, it all just seemed unnecessary. Cigarettes smelled bad and made you cough, and why would I hide somewhere, covertly puffing away, when there were so many other things I was interested in?

But I could feel how my lack of interest in misbehaving began to separate me from my friends—including Ellie. If a bunch of us were spending the night at Gina's house and some boys were going to sneak in after Gina's parents went to bed, I'd purposely go to sleep early. Then, the next morning, the other girls would have a new, shared point of reference that I was outside of. I couldn't understand my classmates' rush to act older; we had the rest of our lives to be old, but so little time left to be young. When I tried to talk about this with Ellie, she would simply say, “Things are changing, Caroline.” I wanted to say that they didn't have to change—that we didn't need to be at the center of things, that it would be okay if it was just us again—but I could never force the words out.

One Saturday in October, I was at the grocery store with my mother when I ran into a classmate named Melissa. She pulled me aside and whispered, “Is Ellie okay?”

“What?” I said.

“From last night.”

I swallowed. My heart was pounding. “What happened last night?”

“You don't know?”

Melissa wasn't someone I particularly liked, and it embarrassed me to have to ask her for information about my own best friend. “No,” I said. “I don't know.”

“Well, I guess Gina's parents are out of town, and she had a party and everyone was drinking, and Ellie fell down the steps and cut her forehead. I heard she had to get stitches.” Melissa squinted at me. “I can't believe you don't know this.”

It was difficult to absorb all the information at once—a party? Ellie falling? Stitches? How had I not known about this? Had I not been invited to other parties? Since when had Ellie been a drinker?

When I called Ellie, she sounded subdued and defensive. “It wasn't a party,” she said. “It was just a few people. And I didn't have to get stitches. I didn't even go to the hospital.”

“Do your parents know?”

“No, and don't tell your mom or she'll tell mine.”

“But something really bad could have happened,” I said.

“But it didn't,” she replied. “So chill out.”

That was the moment, those were the words—
so chill
out
—that made me know for certain that things between us had changed dramatically and permanently. And sure enough, Ellie soon made some excuse to get off the phone. I had lost her.

As popularity had once suddenly been bestowed upon me for no apparent reason, it was just as suddenly snatched away. Girls who had hung on my every word barely acknowledged me in the halls; several times, when I passed by a cluster of them, conversation would stop. The truth was, I might even have been relieved by this shift except for the fact that this time I didn't have Ellie to keep me company. For most of ninth grade, I was alone. I still saw Ellie in class, but whenever the teacher or another student said something that reminded me of her and I glanced over, her gaze was averted, her eyes somehow deadened. I heard that she started smoking pot. She also stopped making honor roll and began going out with an older guy named Dave who'd been kicked out of our school.

Throughout most of high school, I was incredibly lonely. It wasn't until college that I made friends with people whom I felt the true sense of connection I'd once felt with Ellie. So maybe it's surprising that when I look back, I don't regret any of it. I spent much of high school studying, and it paid off when I got into my first-choice college. I focused on what interested me, like the books we read for English class, and I joined the track team, and today I still love to read and to run. Ironically, my decision not to do things that made me uncomfortable, like drink and smoke and lie to my parents, caused me a lot of discomfort. But it was a manageable discomfort; there was something true in it. I can honestly say that the consequences of being yourself are never worse than the consequences of not being yourself.