Skin Game: A Memoir by Caroline Kettlewell

Author:Caroline Kettlewell [Kettlewell, Caroline]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780312263935
Amazon: 0312263937
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Published: 2000-06-06T16:00:00+00:00

19

Having so long coveted it, now I couldn’t imagine what I’d ever thought was so special about thirteen. Sure, we were the top of the heap at school, but that meant we were the top of nothing. Middle school: doesn’t the name say it all? Now I could see that high school was where life truly began, and eighth grade was just another year of waiting to get older.

That being said, eighth grade, in spite of its girl gangs and chronic chaos and self-imposed starvation, was a good year. In the shelter of my little coterie of Very Nice Friends, I could see that a pleasantly normal world existed in which girls lived in their own homes and brought brown-bag lunches to school and had piano lessons before supper. I couldn’t imagine that I would ever live that kind of life, nor did I exactly want to; I continued to believe that my family’s persistent divergence from the norm was what made us interesting, as though not belonging were our essential defining feature. But I found proximity to that other life comforting. I could visit it, in the homes of my friends who did not sleep on homemade particleboard beds.

In the middle of eighth grade, I and several of my Very Nice Friends were tapped for a new enrichment program for gifted students, a class called Quest that met daily in a tiny glass cubicle off the library. Only some fifteen or so students in the entire middle school were offered a place in this class, and I’m happy to admit that my ego was exceedingly gratified by this singling out. I considered it one in the eye for my former grade school and the slow-learning debacle.

I can’t remember much of what we did to enrich ourselves in Quest, except bask in the warm light of devoted, individualized attention from our teacher and her assistant. We did spend a lot of time writing, which allowed me ample opportunity to produce a copious body of morbid free verse. A lot of dark colors and bare branches and cold rain and colder hearts.

“Can’t you write something more cheerful?” asked the assistant, a blond young thing who was probably doing her student-teaching rotation and was still brimful with optimism and idealism about shaping young minds.

In a Swiftian spirit, I slapped down a couple of verses about smooth yellow sunshine pouring like lemon butter across idyllic spring meadows. “Yummy!” I wrote on the final line with a flourish.

“Oh yes, that’s so much nicer,” she said delightedly.

I was very amused at myself.

At the end of the spring, Quest compiled a selection of our short stories into a mimeographed booklet to treasure always. After twenty-two years I do still have mine, slightly stained and worn, one painful piece of evidence from my eighth-grade self.

Set upon

by life’s

joys,

sorrows,

and perfections,

that find

their way

to paper

I wrote rather incomprehensibly at the front, and To Caroline, Don’t let anything get you down. I’m behind you 100%! CK, I wrote more optimistically at the back.

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