One
When I was a little girl, my mom used to tell me wonderful stories. She never told me stories about dainty princesses waiting around for their Prince Charmings to come save the day and take them to a better life. She hated those stories, because in her mind, it would make me a weak woman who wanted a man to rescue her as well. No, instead she told me stories about the woman I was going to become. Someday, when I was quite grown up, I was going to be a famous singer; Emily Hargrove, entertaining the masses and making an insane amount of money with my melodious voice. Or maybe someday, when I was quite grown up, I was going to be a world-class surgeon, saving the lives of little children and bringing hope to families where once there was none. Perhaps I'd come up with the cure for every cancer in existence; wouldn't that be wonderful? Then again, perhaps someday, when I was quite grown up, I would be a farmer, an astronaut, a policeman, a concert pianist, a prima ballerina.
Every time the story would change with whatever interest passed my childhood fancy at the time. Did I want to be a figure skater? Of course, we'll drive you down to the ice rink for lessons first thing next week. I wanted to learn how to play the violin in one of those breathtaking orchestras Mom and Dad took me to see a week before Christmas? We rented a child-size violin and sought out a music tutor. Every time they were so supportive and wanted me to go on to great things. And every single time it would only take a couple of lessons, a few weeks before I was bored senseless and on to the next great escapade in my young life. I owned so many discarded relics of my future careers they eventually had to be stored in a cardboard box and put in the basement, just to give me room to maneuver inside my own room.
Figure skating was my longest venture. I was able to stick with my lessons for four months, the instructor swearing I had the talent and determination it took to become a world-caliber skater. Then one day the inevitable happened. I was trying to show off to the bigger kids by doing my very first jump, something the teacher had expressly forbidden until I learned to advance to that level. "You have to learn to crawl before you learn to fly." He would always say. But I was determined to show up those girls who made fun of the little ones, who picked on the smaller kids and often bossed them right off the ice. So I skated out onto the ice, spread my arms the way I saw them do, turned my back and got into position to jump and...fell like a slippery stone, skidding across the ice and cutting my left leg all to pieces. There was a long line of crimson trailing on the white ice from the place where I first cut myself. Just the sight of it was enough to send me into hysterics. The coach was the first to reach me, shouting for someone else to call 9-1-1 and holding a towel against my leg to stop me from seeing the blood. But it didn't stop me from screaming my head off, absolutely sure I had severed my leg clean off.
After that incident and forty-eight stitches in my leg, Mom and Dad never told those stories to me again. When Mom tucked me into bed at night, she'd grab a book off the shelf, read me a lovely bedtime story about some princess waiting around for a prince to save the day, and kiss me goodnight. I guess she eventually decided the "frail-female complex" was a lot better than carving myself up like a Christmas ham on a slick patch of ice. She never yelled at me for cutting my leg, and she lavished lots of attention and a never-ending supply of hugs and kisses during my two-week convalescence. But she never told me stories about all the wonderful, amazing things I could do if only I would take a lesson, watch a demonstration video or read a book on the subject.
The next time I expressed interest in anything, coming home breathless and excited after my best friend Heather announced her intention to try out for Pee-Wee football cheerleader, asking if I could please, please, PLEASE do the same, Mom just patted my head, smiled at me and said, "We'll see, dear." But I never got to try out for Pee-Wee cheerleading. And my best friend became friends with all the new girls in her squad and we drifted apart. And I spent many boring summer afternoons "safe" in my room, with some of the old relics from "Emily the Amazing" still sitting untouched on my bookshelf.
Every now and then I would express interest in other things, like learning to dive or even going back to ballet, and every time Mom or Dad would give me the same answer, "We'll see, sweetheart." And it never happened. After my accident, all of the items I had accumulated in my long stint as Jack-of-all-trades eventually disappeared. My ballerina tutus were all given to my little cousin, the violin was donated to a church's charity shop down the street. All the instructional videos and books were packed up and they simply vanished. And my ice skates were thrown in the trash the day I got home from the hospital. I didn't even get to keep the pretty, pretty outfit I was going to wear at our first exhibition.
It's not like Mom and Dad completely gave up on me that day eight years ago; on the contrary. It became their decision that the safest and most responsible thing they could do for me was to find something that would keep me busy...within the confines of the house. They started supplying me with books, books and more books. I got a dictionary, and was given the monumental task of learning a word a day, definition and all, starting with the "a's". Every week I was given a supplemental list of spelling words that were two grades above my level. Any library book I wanted to read, I got, so long as I read at least one chapter book a week. During the summer before I entered third grade I learned all of my multiplication tables, which meant when my classmates were busy sweating trying to solve the eternal question "seven times eight equals..." I already knew the answer. By the end of third grade I was dividing fractions, which was a foreign concept to my contemporaries. My mother became a slave to my education, making sure I spent every waking moment learning as much as I could to fill my otherwise hum-drum life. There were no after-school activities, no riding my bike around the neighborhood like other children. After all, kids got snatched of the sidewalk every single day by deviants, and I wasn't about to become a statistic. I'm sure the memory of me bleeding profusely at the ice rink racing through their heads went a long way to convincing them that I was in no way meant to stay upright on two wheels.
My only creative outlet came from the books I read, and even that was limited. When you have to give a book report on the internal meaning of Moby Dick before you even reach middle school, it doesn't leave you much room to pretend you're on the ship with Captain Ahab, facing down the monstrous beast. I missed my old life. I missed getting to try new things, even if it turned out I didn't like them very much. But that one stupid incident with my ice skate had convinced my mother that, at any moment, one of those fun activities could backfire heinously and kill or seriously wound me. My accident has spooked them, and now I was paying the price for one stupid mistake I made at the age of seven.
It wasn't all bad, though. They took me to a lot of cultural events to broaden my horizons. I got to go to a lot of ballets and musicals, even if I couldn't participate in formal dance or singing anymore. We would actually travel out of state if there was a significant art exhibit in the next state over. I saw my first Van Gogh that way, and I discovered that I really loved art. And I found the one activity my parents would actually allow, painting. Apparently paint brushes aren't very lethal, and they had enough faith in me to know I would avoid eating the watercolors. As a result, I started painting. I would paint the pictures I saw in those books I was never allowed to fantasize about. I painted Alice stepping lithely through a beautiful rose garden, that pesky Cheshire cat watching from an overhead branch. I painted Laura Ingalls with her peppermint stick and her tin cup she got for Christmas. And when I got into fifth grade my painting of Fanny Price and her cousin Edmund standing at the altar got first prize in the regional art fair, though I had to lie about who they really were, because how many kids do you hear about reading novels about cousins getting married in pre-Victorian England?
The good news was I was still able to make quite a few friends, former friends-turned-cheerleaders NOT included. Gabby was my new best friend. She was adopted from China, which I always thought was cool beyond belief. Her parents made her study all the time just like my parents made me study, only she was a little more advanced because she started the year before school, where I started somewhere in the middle of second grade. Her parents and my parents became good friends, I guess mostly to justify the way they pushed education on us so hard and fast. She had a little brother named William, who didn't have to learn anything because he was a boy, and to be honest, he was kind of a brat. I doubt he would have sit still for five minutes to crack a book, much less learn anything. Gabby always thought it was because she wasn't biologically her parents' kid, where William was a surprise kid born two years after they adopted her.
She always got sad when she talked about how they seemed to treat them differently; I didn't know what to say to her because I didn't have any siblings. So I would just hug her and tell her I was happy to have her as a friend, and then we'd get back to studying or working on whatever computer program was teaching us our new language. She wanted to learn Mandarin, because it was the language she would have known had she been raised with her real family in China. We wound up learning Spanish, because our parents were determined that being bi-lingual in Spanish would give us a definite leg up in the business world. Besides, they wanted her as far removed from her "unfortunate" existence in that orphanage as possible. Our next language after Spanish? German. Fun.
I also had Toby. He was a boy in most of my classes who had a stutter, but he was really sweet. Some of the other boys picked on him, which forced me and Gabby into action because he was our best friend, and NOBODY picks on our best friend. For two little girls we were pretty scrappy. We left one or two bullies spitting out mud when they went just a little too far. One time when one of the boys slapped Toby in the back of the head, we began the biggest fight in Oakleaf Elementary history. Gabby went for the boy's knees and I went for his stomach. When we had him on his back, Toby took over. He punched and kicked that boy for a good two minutes solid before a teacher came and pulled him off. As Toby was being pulled off that boy, he kicked and screamed like a mad man, "N-n-never again! Never a-a-gain! Never again!"
We all got in trouble for that one. Here we were, the two girls who had been battling back and forth for three years for spelling bee champion and the boy with the speech impediment, ganging up on a boy who was a head taller than the tallest of us...and winning. Since the boy started the whole thing all we really got was after school suspension. But that didn't stop us from getting punished at home. Gabby's mom and dad came into the principal's office already screaming at her, before they even knew where she was sitting, and when they found her, head bowed and trembling like a leaf, they just got louder. My mom came in behind them, terrified that I had been injured, only to find me beaming from ear to ear, with one braid completely pulled loose and the other barely braided in the clip. I was proud of us that day. And as Mom drove me home all I got was a lecture for putting myself in a dangerous position like that, making the teachers think I was some sort of discipline issue. When Dad got home he basically repeated what Mom said, but added he was proud of me for sticking up for a friend, so no harm, no foul. Unfortunately, the pride Gabby might have felt at taking on that creep got taken away from her mean parents. She got grounded for a month that day, and I'm pretty sure she got worse than that, after I heard my mom complain to my dad that night that she didn't approve of people hitting a child the way the Andersons hit their daughter. I didn't get to ask her until school let back in on Monday, and by then she didn't want to talk much.
For Toby's part he managed to get grounded from video games for a week. And when he came back on Monday there was a very noticeable difference in his stutter. It was almost non-existent. I think that one fight was enough to give him a little confidence in himself. His stutter didn't come from a disorder or an illness; it was just a lack of self-esteem. One thing was for sure; the other boys didn't pick on him so much anymore; even though a couple did whisper that he was a sissy for letting two girls do his dirty work for him.
That afternoon we stood outside the school after our punishment was over, the three musketeers that we were, talking about our triumph on Friday. Well, Toby and I were talking about it. Gabby was very quiet. When Toby's mom pulled up to take him home he did something that surprised me. He reached over, kissed me on the cheek, and said, "Thank you for being my f-friend." I stood there, hand on my newly-kissed cheek, wondering if I should wipe off the germs or never wash my face again. Gabby gave me a very mean look when he did it. Maybe he should have kissed her too; after all, we were all in that fight together.
For a while after that Gabby stopped talking to me. I don't know what I did to her. I didn't make fun of her, I was still her best friend ever. But she just didn't want to talk to me. She started sitting with Julia and Mack at lunchtime, leaving Toby and me to wonder what we did wrong. Every day of the week we were punished she sat on the bench on the opposite side of us while we waited for our moms to pick us up. Toby and I talked a little, glancing over nervously at our best friend who suddenly didn't want to be our best friend anymore. I even suggested Toby go over to her and give her a kiss on the cheek like he did for me, but he didn't want to. "I like Gabby, but I only wanted to kiss you." He said. Well, that was weird. We were all friends. Why didn't he want to kiss Gabby? I didn't ask him, we just sat on our bench on our side wondering if we'd ever get our friend back.
Eventually Gabby started talking to me again, but she didn't really talk to Toby much anymore. Our friendship, the three musketeers, had suddenly broken up, and I was in the middle of whatever our friendship was now. It wasn't a great place to be. If Toby came up to talk to me, she'd walk away. And eventually if she wanted to talk to me, Toby would walk away, not wanting to be anywhere near her. The picture I painted of us dressed like Athos, Porthos and Aramis got tossed in the trash. It was too painful to keep in my room, to have to look at every single day. Mom fished it out of the waste basket, smoothed it out and put it in a box with all her other "treasures" she kept back from my childhood. Oh well, as long as I didn't have to see it. We all went to middle school together, and for some really crazy reason Gabby started studying really hard for anything in which we had to compete against each other. She won spelling bee champion in sixth grade, and her science project got first prize. She got so serious in sixth grade, always having her nose in a textbook or working in the library in any spare time she had. We still studied together, but she got impatient with me whenever I got something wrong and held us up. She'd yell at me, always saying something like, "If I don't learn this by Friday my dad is going to have a stroke!" After a few blow-ups from Gabby my mom decided it might be a better idea if we studied separately, and when she invited the Andersons over to tell them that, there was a screaming match like I'd never heard in all my life. My mom and dad were saying things like "Well, if you didn't try to BEAT the material in her head she'd learn it a lot better and she wouldn't be having emotional breakdowns all the time!" to which the Andersons countered, "Well, your kid is dragging our kid down! She's barely learning anything having to tutor your slow daughter all the time!" which got Daddy VERY upset. When he yelled, "Well, at least you got ONE kid that's capable of learning. Last time I checked that son of yours could barely tie his own shoes...and he's nine!" After that Mr. Anderson threatened to hit my dad, which saw my dad loosening his tie and taking off his jacket, and both my mom and Gabby's mom pulling them away from each other and Mrs. Anderson pulling Mr. Anderson toward the door with all her might. After that, I didn't get to speak to Gabby anymore. And Mom and Dad bought me more books and more computer programs to learn languages and music appreciation. And Toby was my only best friend.
As sixth grade turned into seventh grade and seventh grade turned into eighth grade, I made lots of new friends. Mom involved herself with lots of activities at the school, as long as they were educational and not those frivolous athletic activities where one could get seriously hurt. That still didn't stop me from becoming friends with Heather McConnell again. And being friends with Heather opened up a whole new world for me. I left my easy-to-manage braids behind and began to worry about what my hair looked like. I started noticing how I looked, and I was pretty cute if I do say so myself. I had red hair that flowed down my back, and I didn't have the regular freckled face that most girls with my hair color wound up getting. My green eyes looked really nice with the eye shadows Heather would show me at school, though I had to wipe my eyes off the moment I walked out the door so my mom wouldn't catch me wearing makeup. I got to sit with Heather and a couple of the cheerleaders at lunch; but to be honest I really missed sitting with Toby and Gabby at lunch. But Toby had second lunch those days, and Gabby of course had nothing to do with me anymore. But that was her loss.
By the time eighth grade ended I was a pretty content girl. I had already been asked to be Zachary Lovett's girlfriend, but that only lasted two weeks because, when you've got parents who won't allow you to date until you're sixteen, it's pretty hard to maintain a relationship. But for two weeks we were so silly together, passing notes and giving each other meaningful looks from across our lockers. But two weeks later and he was on to another girl, some seventh grader with boobs a little bigger than most ninth graders. Whatever, I thought to myself. Heather swore I was so better off. He was a jerk anyway. It didn't take long to get over Zachary Lovett, especially when I found out he had told his friends he got under my shirt after school once; jerk. Heather and I successfully petitioned to have the middle school prom restored. They stopped it because some girls couldn't afford dresses and it was unfair to them. But after we instigated a prom dress drive with our journalism teacher Mrs. Wicks, the principal finally gave in and agreed to let us have a "formal dance" in the school gymnasium. The girls and I spent the entire weekend picking out our dresses, and when Toby asked me to be his date to the dance I said yes. Mainly because he was only boy my mom and dad would allow me to go out with on an unofficial date before I was old enough to drive a car. We had so much fun, dancing the night away. And at the end of the date, before Mom picked me up, Toby and I shared our second kiss in our entire lives. Only this time it was on the lips, and to be honest it was a little awkward, because I could feel his braces hit my teeth. Weird.
The one thing that made me a little sad was not seeing Gabby at the prom. Even though we had long ago fought and our parents had long ago banned us from speaking, I still worried about her. I knew she was getting hit for any screw-ups that happened, and now she walked around school with her head hanging low and her eyes pointed squarely to the floor. Most people made fun of her, called her a brain. But I really wanted to talk to her again, to give her a hug like I used to and tell her everything was going to be all right. If I knew I could risk it and not get her in trouble, I would have made up with her ages ago, letting her know I was still her friend and to please talk to me, even if it was in private. But she always had her head bowed low, and even if I tried to get near her I was sure she'd run away before I had the chance to tell her how I felt. How I wish to God I had done that now.
