Chicken Soup for the Preteen Soul 21st Anniversary Edition by Amy Newmark

Author:Amy Newmark
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicken Soup for the Soul
Published: 2021-08-17T00:00:00+00:00

From Freak to Friend

My solitary mornings on the corner of Hampshire Court and Eastbrook Lane had become almost unbearable. The other kids at my bus stop would chat in huddled bunches, carve their names into an unfortunate oak tree, and, occasionally, smoke cigarettes. Only once had a blond girl with pink lip gloss and unblemished skin invited me to join them and I had declined, instead continuing to read whatever thick book was my current library find. I’d given up on finding someone to sit with on the bus.

The summer prior, my family moved to Webster Groves, a small suburb of St. Louis. Before, we had lived in another suburb a few miles away, and I had attended a St. Louis Public Schools magnet program: the “international” school. I shared my classrooms with kids from all over the world — from Nigeria to Guatemala to Bosnia to Russia. I loved school; as a fifth grader I was well-known and admired for my spelling bee wins and oratory contest accomplishments, earning me the nickname “Matilda” after the precocious Roald Dahl character.

Now, I was just another white kid in a white suburb where being the teacher’s pet marked you as dork of the century. I had expected culture shock, but I hadn’t prepared for the loneliness.

Most of the first semester of sixth grade passed in a blur of awkwardness and solitude. I harbored a few massive crushes. I managed a daily exchange of pleasantries with the girl who shared my music stand in band class. The local YMCA hosted preteen nights monthly, and I bravely stood in line alone and wandered around the dance floor, trying to “make friends,” a vague task from my parents that I never seemed to accomplish.

So, instead of socializing, I observed the socializing going on around me, anthropologically. I could label every friend group and detail the drama within and between them and identify whose crushes returned their interest. I kept copious notes about people in my journal, secret missives that I wrote backwards so no one could decipher my observations. After a mean boy who sat across from me in homeroom grabbed my notebook and teased me loudly to the rest of the class — “What a freak! What the hell are you writing?! You’ve got some weird freak language!” — I was certain my isolation would be permanent. I wished every night that my parents would send me away to boarding school.

Then, one day, Alyssa McFarlane sat next to me on the afternoon bus.

According to my notes, Alyssa was friends with Ali and Toni, cool girls who wore their hair in neat ponytails, kissed boys, and had impressive gel pen collections. But Alyssa was different — she wore her hair in pigtails high on top of her head adorned with cat ears and an accompanying tail. One day in gym class she removed the tail from her jeans and pinned it on her gym uniform; we did the rope climb that day, and her tail gracefully arched beneath her as she scaled the height with ease.

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