Miles to Go (2 page)

Lyric and Melody

F
or a while I had two fish. I was obsessed with them. Their names were Lyric and Melody. Sometimes, when I should have been writing, I’d sit and watch them swimming in circles in their bowl. Outside, in the pastures, our horses ran free; but I would stare at those two fish swimming in their glass world forever. They were so beautiful. I could just put my two hands around that bowl and know that there was something wonderful in there. Life in a jar.

Life in a jar is a miracle, but it’s also a trap. Lyric and Melody were stuck, destined to thread the same line through the water over and over again. Their worlds never expanded. They could never have Nemo adventures, never find out who they were. I’d gaze into their small world, looking for a song.
Think outside the bowl
. That’s what I told myself.
Think outside the bowl
.
I didn’t want to be stuck like the fish, stuck seeing only the world that was right in front of me, stuck swimming in circles.
But when I was eleven, in sixth grade, it was hard to imagine any world beyond the one where I was stuck.

I wasn’t
always
stuck. And I did get unstuck. Every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and so does this one. But I’m only sixteen—let’s face it, this is all “the beginning”—so to start with the day I was born and tell you every major milestone (I lost a tooth! I turned ten! I got a new bike!) until my sweet sixteen isn’t how I want to do this.

Instead, I want to start with sixth grade. It was the last year that I’d be known as just Miley Cyrus. It was a dividing point—what I now think of as my life before and my life after.

Not All Butterflies and Flowers

T
o say sixth grade was not a good year would be the understatement of the decade. When I found out that pilot season—when all the auditions for TV shows happen in Los Angeles—overlapped with the beginning of school that September, I spent a good hour on the floor of my room bawling. That meant I’d have to start school in Nashville a couple of weeks late. At the time, the idea of missing any school seemed awful.
(If only I had known!)

We’d just come back from a year in Canada, near Toronto, where my dad was starring in the TV series
Doc
. He and my mom had been commuting back and forth for a few years, but the summer before I went into fifth grade we all missed him so much that my mom moved us up there.

She homeschooled me that year, so now I was coming back to my old school after a year’s absence.
(Scary!)
Not only that, I knew perfectly well that the first few weeks of school are when everything gets sorted out— you meet your teachers, you find your friends, you figure out if the new school clothes you bought are acceptable—or completely
un
acceptable.
The cool people find each other. The smart people find each other. Me and all the other in-between artsy people realize we’d better join forces and make the best of it.
If you miss all that fun, you risk being an outcast. A loser.
(I didn't want to be the weird wannabe actress.)
If you’ve been through middle school, then you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t yet, well then . . . hang in there. It gets better, I promise. Either way, you can imagine, missing school was far from ideal. But if I wanted to be a performer—and I did—then there really wasn’t a choice.

I wasn’t exactly expecting to just show up back at school and be one of the cool girls. The farm in Tennessee where we lived when we weren’t in Toronto was kind of isolated, so there weren’t any neighborhood kids for me to practice being friends with. I grew up playing with my brothers and sisters, but I was just as comfortable hanging out with my parents and their friends.

It didn’t help that I always had too much energy. There was no way I could sit still and focus for hours on end. People didn’t know exactly how to handle me. It’s not that I was trying to be disrespectful, but I. Could. Not. Be quiet. On my first day of school one year, my teacher told me I’d get detention if I said one more word. I turned to my friend and whispered, “One more word.” Boom! Detention. For whispering. On the first day of school. I’m lucky the teacher didn’t hear exactly what I said, or who knows what would have happened to me.

At school I always wanted to be my own person and wasn’t shy about it. I had a lot to say. I stood out in drama and music. I made good grades. I had huge dreams. Not exactly the formula for “cool.” Most kids worry about not fitting in; I worried about not standing out. I wanted to feel unique, quirky, different. But standing out by missing the crucial beginning of school wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.

Anyway, when I got back to Nashville for sixth grade—two weeks after school had started—my old friends seemed happy to see me, and life felt back to normal. I started to think I’d dodged a bullet and that I had worried for nothing. But slowly I realized that wasn’t the case. One of my closer friends, let’s call her Rachel
(obviously, not her real name)
, and I started drifting toward a group of girls in our class. They weren’t the “cool” girls or the “mean” girls. I didn’t really know what their deal was then, and I can’t stereotype them now. But for some reason, they were the group I wanted to fit in with.

The first sign of trouble was the teeniest, tiniest thing you could possibly imagine. We were standing near our lockers after math. I made a joke, and the leader—she’ll be MG, for Mean Girl—rolled her eyes. That was it: a tiny gesture—it went by in a second. But this was sixth grade.
Everything
means
something
in sixth grade. What did I do in response? Nothing of course. I mean, if you’ve been through sixth grade, you know how it goes. If I had said something straightforward like “What’s up with the nasty eye-roll?” MG would have just said something patronizing like “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” and I’d be humiliated. A feeling I loathe more than anything. So I acted like I hadn’t seen it. I put it out of my head.

But the signs kept coming. A few days later, I put my tray down at lunch and thought I heard a snarl.
A snarl?
The next week, I came in wearing a new jean jacket
(yes, that was the thing in sixth grade)
. I said, “I love my outfit today.” One of them sneered, “You do?” and gave me a look that shriveled me up into a puny dried pea on the floor. From yesterday’s dinner.

Now I knew I wasn’t just being paranoid. I was an outcast. Why were my “friends” turning on me? I had no idea. But there you have it.
Welcome to sixth-grade social hell.

On the Other Hand . . .

Y
ou know how it feels on a hot summer day to dive into the crisp relief of a cold swimming pool? Well, that’s how it felt when I came home from school after a particularly hard day to be told that Disney had called. Margot, a talent agent who’d taken an interest in me, let us know that Disney had asked her to send tapes of all the girls she represented between the ages of eleven and sixteen. They wanted a tape of me reading for the part of Lilly, the best friend of a girl named Chloe Stewart in a new TV show called
Hannah Montana
.

From the very first time my parents and I read the script, we knew that Chloe Stewart was my dream part. Chloe’s alter ego, Hannah Montana, was a rock star. The actress who played both parts would be singing Hannah Montana’s songs. Singing
and
acting. Both were dreams of mine, and if I landed this role, I wouldn’t have to put either one aside. After my dad read the part, he just kept saying, “That’s made for Miley. Miley’s made for that.”

But, heck, I’d be happy to play Lilly. Or lucky to be Chloe Stewart’s talking houseplant, for that matter. So we made a tape, sent it in, and almost immediately got a call from Disney asking me to make another audition tape—and this time they wanted me to read the part of Hannah. I was so psyched. Seriously, my shrieks probably scared the poor horses out in the fields. In my head, I was already dropping everything to move to L.A. Sure, Hannah was supposed to be fifteen, and I was twelve. Twelve-ish. Okay, I was eleven. That was a problem. But still—they knew how old I was and they’d asked for the tape anyway, so it must not matter.

Except it did. We sent the second tape in, and the very next day we got an e-mail saying that I was too young and too small for Hannah.
(Hello? Didn't they know that from the Lilly tape?)
I was bummed. No—what’s ten
times
bummed? That was me. My dad said, “Disney just made a big mistake. My intuition tells me that you are Hannah Montana.”

All I could think was,
So much for Dad’s intuition
. Now let’s return to our regularly scheduled torture: sixth grade.

Operation MMM

I
s there a guide for how to torture eleven-year-old girls? If not, those girls I’d started hanging with—you remember, my “friends”—could write one.
(What am I saying? That's a terrible idea.)
In the winter of that year, every day brought a creative new tactic in Operation Make Miley Miserable. They sent me mean notes. They stole my books and made me late to class. They made fun of my clothes and my hair. They told Rachel—the friend who had become tight with them at the same time as I did—that if she sat with me at lunch they’d have it in for her too. So I sat at a table by myself day after day, looking at the goth kids, wondering what I’d look like with black hair and chains. I’ve since decided: not so good.

The list goes on: Rachel stopped speaking to me. When I wanted to try out for the school cheerleading team, my so-called friends told the principal that I’d cheated and learned the tryout dances in advance. Total lie, but the principal believed them, and I wasn’t allowed to try out for the squad.
(At least I still had my competitive cheerleading squad outside of school.)
Oh, and I’ll never forget how one of them was nice to me for a few days. She said she wanted the “fight” to be over. She got me to tell her exactly what I thought about “our friends”— that I didn’t understand why they didn’t like me, that I felt like they were being mean—then she went back to them and told them I was a snob. She’d been faking it.
(Me = total sucker.)
Looking back I think maybe she was the one who should have been an actress.

If this sounds like run-of-the-mill Judy Blume
Tales of a Sixth-Grade Nothing
, well, it was. I wasn’t oblivious to issues like world hunger or pandemics. I knew my problems were relatively puny. But they were mine. And they felt heavier than the world on my shoulders. So, if you want to know if I liked school back then, the answer was definitely no.