This one is going to hurt bad. Really bad. There's a very painful part of my childhood I don't visit often in my writing or storytelling. It reads a bit like a subplot from the movie Mean Girls...
Middle school was a rough transition in the Long Island town of my childhood. Several elementary schools fed into two middle schools, North and South. All the kids I grew up with and around funneled into North, so I can't say much about South. But North was largely the landing ground for the kids from three schools, three different zip codes. Make no mistake, everyone knew the order of income and wealth from *Rock Hill and Rolling Green to Kingstown.
Suddenly each of the pockets of kids comfortable in their own neighborhoods, were thrown together to duke it out for their places in the hierarchy of middle school social life. Sixth grade was an important year. Where you landed could determine your station in secondary society for the next six years, because North Middle fed right into North High.
I struggled in middle school. I was with the same kids from kindergarten to fifth grade, and I was smart and athletic in a town that valued both academic achievement and sports. It was cool to be smart, and I had plenty of friends. It didn't matter so much that I was a little chubby, because I was active and young. Boys liked girls who ran fast and played soccer. Affirmative on both accounts.
But the girls in middle school, oh the girls. When the three feeder schools mixed, it was clear the rich girls were at the top of the food chain. The rest of us fought our way into the social circle. There was one dynamic that muddied the water though. In this predominantly Jewish town, there were several synagogues. The one your family joined, was not necessarily the one closest to your home. Membership to the temple was based on whether your family was Orthodox, Conservative, or Reformed. Kids who went to one elementary school might be "Hebrew School friends" with kids who went to a different elementary school because their families belonged to the same synagogue. This created alliances outside your everyday network of friends, giving you a wider friend base when you entered middle school. This was my situation.
I attended Rock Hill, the lowest school in the wealth hierarchy. My best friend from early childhood went to Rolling Hills, the school in the middle of the hierarchy. Our families both belonged to the Conservative Jewish temple. We went to nursery school and Hebrew school there with two girls named Rachael and Stacey, from the wealthiest school. In middle school, I started to hang out with Rachael and Stacey, and some of their friends from Kingstown. Some of my elementary friends knew some of their friends from another temple and soon enough the groups were blended. That's a lot of girls trying to impress each other.
Enough of the backstory. To be honest, I think I'm sharing it because this story is so embarrassing and hurtful, I feel the need to explain how cut-throat the social environment was. As an adult, I feel ashamed I even worried about these girls liking me. But when you grow up in a town like that, you just don't know any better... I'm glad I moved away in time for high school. I just got lucky.
In my constant struggle to be accepted and to feel good enough and popular enough, I spent many a day in middle school feeling physically ill. Nausea, nerves, it was awful. I remember days of feigning sore throats and headaches just so I didn't have to go to school. I woke up everyday wondering if it would be my turn to become the castaway. It sounds pathetic, but I identified with Claire from the Breakfast Club. In the scene when they're all bearing their soles to each other and she explains how high pressure it is to be in the popular crowd and the others didn't understand. I understood. The group I hung out with in 6th and 7th grade judged everything you did. It's strange, I wonder now who had the power, or if anyone really did. Maybe we all felt the same way. Stupid teenagers.
Everyone has an exit scene in this type of crowd. There comes a time when the spinner lands on you, and you become the social outcast. That day came for me in such a horrific and hurtful way, none other than a mortifying rumor. Even worse, it was unexplainably true. Sort of.
I got my period for the first time, when I was 13. Still trying to figure things out, and so unaware of my own body, I never really knew when it was coming. Spotting, cramping, it was all so hard to predict. One day I was at my friend Rachael's house. The friend who went to Kingstown. The one I went to Hebrew School with. She had a huge house, nothing like I had seen before. Black and white marble floors, a double kitchen because her family was kosher and had two sets of everything to keep dairy and meats separate. She had a pool too. Up north, only the wealthiest people had their own pools. She was all the way across this expansive house in the kitchen with her family when I went all the way down the hall to the bathroom between Rachael's and her sister's bedrooms.
I closed the door and locked it. I pulled down my pants and sat on the toilet. And my heart raced. I looked at my pants and saw that I had gotten my period and bled right through my underwear. I was a mess. And I was not prepared. I wasn't sure what to do. Had it been Stacey's house it would be a no-brainer. Stacey was a really good friend. The kind who farts in front of you. But this was Rachael's house, and I was insecure and trying to impress her, or at least not unimpressed her. I panicked. There was a door from the bathroom to Rachael's sister's room. I tiptoed gingerly, making sure there was no one in there and no one heard me. I opened a couple of drawers until I found an underwear drawer, and I grabbed a clean pair and ran back to the bathroom. I was desperate and scared, the way only a girl who doesn't know who her friends are can be. I balled up my bloodied underwear, wrapped them in a bunch of toilet paper and threw them in the trash can, throwing some crumpled up tissues on top to hide my shame. I rolled up some more, strategically trying to fold into the underwear in place of a maxi pad. I checked the back of my pants to make sure nothing bled through, washed up and went back to join everyone else. I waited until it was time to go home, the hours felt like days.
I don't remember anything else about that day. I don't remember if I stayed for dinner of her mom's delicious chicken and Persian rice (Rachael's dad was Persian) as I sometimes did. I don't remember if I got picked up or dropped off. I just remember feeling relieved that days went by and I never heard anything of it. A few weeks went by, and my luck changed. Drastically.
Apparently, the underwear I took had a custom tag (like the ones you iron in for summer camp) with Rachael's sister's name in it. And apparently, one of my other friends saw them somewhere when she was over my house. And apparently, none of those girls were really my friends after all. Before long, there was a rumor around school (not really school, but my social crowd, which felt like the whole school) that I took Rachael's sister's underwear, and now they all thought I was weird or a perv or whatever. What I was was ostracized and absolutely mortified. Rachael never confronted me about it privately. She never seemed to want an explanation, or even care that there might by a reasonable one. She just treated me like a pariah and got her friends to do the same.
Thinking back, it says a lot about my family and the kind of person I am that I didn't become suicidal. I know I felt like I never wanted to go back to school again. I know that girls who I thought I had become friends with would never talk to me again. I know I was more embarrassed about this than anything I had ever experienced before. I know I felt like I wanted to disappear. I knew there was nothing to be gained from trying to explain anything. I just denied it. I denied it though tears. I denied it by cursing those mean bitches for lying about me. I denied it.
I lost those "friends" and a bit of my dignity as well. But it was the last time I tried to maintain a friendship that was a bullshit facade. Stacey reached out to me. We became very close, and she helped me get through the difficulty of my parents' separation the following year. If you look back on parts of your life and the way different sets of circumstances lead to specific events in your life, it's hard to believe things don't happen for a reason. Stacey was the first true girlfriend I had. She didn't give a shit what the other girls said, and she helped me get to a place where I didn't care either. It was a pivotal point in my development as a young woman. And I survived to tell about it.
*Names of schools and people are changed.
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