He lunged at me, but I didn’t move as he might have expected me to, and he had to stop himself to avoid crashing into me. I stood there hoping he would hit me, or spit on me, or do something else that was plainly unforgivable, that would force my mom to leave him, knowing, sadly, that he wouldn’t. He was very good at riding the line between total piece of shit and passable human.
He theatrically flipped me off and returned to fighting with my mom, using my erratic behavior as fuel for his anger. Their fight devolved into the name-calling and stomping around that were becoming completely normal and comfortable for me to watch, and it was clear that this was just one of many fights, with many more to come.
“I’m not sure why she’s acting like that,” I heard my mom say to Seth hours later. “She’s probably about to start her period.”
5
a year without spoons
In October of my freshman year of high school, I switched schools. I was happy about the move, because I wasn’t doing very well socially. I had a group of friends that I hung out with during lunch period and on some weekends, but each person in that group thought of me as their least important friend. I was ready to move on.
My mom had gotten a job long-term substitute teaching for a science class at Lower Lake High through the end of the year, and, aside from wanting to ditch my group of non-friends, I liked the idea of being driven to and from school every day.
Switching schools was kind of my thing. My family moved frequently during my childhood, but only ever to the next town or two towns over, so a lot of times I would be transferred back to a school I had already attended at some point. All my old friends and classmates would be there still, only three years older. I would be sort of the new girl, and sort of the girl who had disappeared for a while. I was terrible at making new friends, but even worse at picking up old friendships after long periods. I avoided the old friends I had fallen out of contact with as if we despised each other for some forgotten reason.
Seeing all my old classmates at Lower Lake High was like seeing into the future. Or the past, depending on your perspective. I could see remnants of their cute kid faces behind these older, less adorable, more awkwardly pubescent ones.
There was the boy from my kindergarten class who used to give himself hickeys on his arm when he was nervous or excited, now wearing hair gel and cologne and talking to girls without even sucking on his arm flesh.
There was my best friend from third grade, hanging out with the boy I picked on/had a crush on in fifth grade.
There was the girl who had punched me in the stomach when I told her I wanted her to play Pumbaa in our dance interpretation of The Lion King in fourth grade because she thought I was making a comment about her weight, hanging out with who I thought was the boy who used to nap during recess in first grade but who was actually a similar-looking kid from my third-grade class.
There was the boy who had made me cry several times in first grade by calling me “blue-eyed blondie,” which I all of a sudden recognized may have been a compliment but which didn’t matter anyway because now he was on the basketball team and that fact alone made him utterly intimidating.
I knew that these people recognized me, and I knew they knew that I recognized them, but, following that brief moment of recognition and almost simultaneous redirection of our eyes, we effectively communicated to each other that there was no interest in rekindling old friendships. As long as I diverted my eyes slightly before they did, I felt okay about this, as they would know that it was my decision not to talk.
There were also plenty of people I didn’t recognize, kids who must have gone to the one elementary school in the area I had never attended, or kids who had moved here from elsewhere, but none of them immediately interested me either.
•
I had science class with my mom the period before lunch, and would stay and hang out with her until the bell rang. Sometimes she would sneak me off campus and we would go to McDonald’s or run an errand. Otherwise we would eat cafeteria lunch in her classroom and she would tell me what her students had done or said in her classes that day.
My mom was young and cute, and a lot of her stories were about the junior and senior jocks flirting with her, asking if she was married and inviting her to hang out with them on the weekend.
Sometimes, she said, these same boys asked about me.
“Me?” I would say, confounded.
“Yeah. They’re amazed I have a daughter as old as you.”
“Oh.”
“Why don’t you be friends with Naema?” my mom said a few months into the school year. “She’s pretty cool. Her family moved here from Arizona. She has a brother who is River’s age.”
Naema was a girl I talked to in Art and P.E. and we sometimes ate lunch together. She was new that year, so I had an advantage over her in knowing insignificant details about some of our classmates’ childhoods, which seemed to impress her or at least hold her attention.
I had thought I was becoming friends with Naema, but my mom’s implication that I wasn’t yet friends with her, along with her assumption that I didn’t know where she had moved from, as well as her apparent belief that I couldn’t decide who to be friends with on my own, insulted me and undermined the very reason, in my opinion, to have friends in the first place, which is to have a life separate from the one your parents know about.
I didn’t want to be friends with someone who was friendly with my mom. I didn’t want to watch what I said around either of them, to worry about them speaking casually with each other.
I couldn’t imagine telling Naema not to talk to my mom, because I didn’t want to appear controlling, and also because I didn’t want my mom’s feelings to be hurt if she found out. And I didn’t want to tell my mom to stop talking to Naema because I thought she wouldn’t stop anyway, and it would become a shared joke between my mom and Naema that they weren’t supposed to talk to me. I simply stopped speaking to Naema.
Naema barely seemed to notice.
I accepted that I might never have friends again. Having spent most of my life being the new girl, I had never really “made friends” so much as attached myself to the first person who showed mild interest in me. Whether they liked me or not, they were stuck with me. I decided that I wasn’t going to do that anymore. I wasn’t going to approach anyone. I wasn’t going to pursue friendship of any kind. If someone wanted to be friends with me, they were going to have to work really hard to prove it to me.
Once I decided to stop making any attempt to appear nonpathetic, I felt liberated. I stopped hanging out with my mom during lunch and fully embraced my lonerdom. I raced to my favorite bench when the lunch bell rang so I could spread my things over it and make it awkward for anyone else to try to sit near me.
I started wearing bright blue eye shadow up to my eyebrows and raver pants and tight, brightly colored tank tops and T-shirts. I wore neon miniskirts with torn, filthy, giant hoodies and metallic combat boots. I wore skimpy tank tops over my little brother’s old sports T-shirts with plaid bell-bottoms and suspenders and a velveteen blazer. Nobody else dressed this way, and I wasn’t sure if I was being judged or not, but I decided I didn’t care. If all it took to be disliked was weird fashion, an off-putting personality, and a commitment
to disregarding what anyone thought about me, then I didn’t want to be liked.
“Everyone tells me they think you’re cool and mysterious,” my mom said. I believed her, because people had started approaching me to compliment me on my colorful accessories and interesting hairstyles. My preemptive rejection of my classmates had given me a new kind of confidence, almost a cockiness. I was trying to gain control over the reasons people didn’t like me by manufacturing more reasons for them to not like me, but the reasons I was manufacturing had turned into reasons for them to like me.
One thing was becoming very clear: I did not understand people.
>
Some of my classmates began sitting with me on my bench. Sometimes talking to me and sometimes not. Sometimes I would engage them and sometimes I wouldn’t. Sometimes I would ignore a person who was talking directly to me. Sometimes I would talk to a person as naturally as I could manage and then, later, after the bell rang, would whisper, “Why won’t you just leave me alone?” loud enough for that person to hear as they walked away from me.
Essentially, I was a bitch. A bitch who didn’t care that she was a bitch, but who believed she was cool or mysterious enough to compensate for her bitchiness, but who nevertheless had no friends.
I was a lonely little bitch.
It was hard to admit I was lonely. Part of my new identity was accepting being alone without feeling lonely, though I guessed accepting loneliness could be incorporated into my new antisocial personality.
I began making “classtime friends,” who were people I would talk to and hang out with during class but avoid during break times.
A “classtime friend” named Jake, who had the beginnings of a mustache and who I had a crush on, asked me out between fourth and fifth period.
I said very slowly and clearly, “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” and walked away from him. I had never had a boyfriend, and knew I could not manage all the first experiences that come with having one without a girl friend to talk things through with.
He asked me out again at the same time the next day and I said, “Look, fine. But we’re not ever going to hang out, you can’t tell anyone we’re going out, and I’m not giving you my phone number.”
He agreed, but then stopped talking to me completely, and I spent the next few months being in love with him from afar. It was very romantic.
I stopped using spoons one day. I was becoming weird, I knew. And it didn’t seem like the good kind of weird, like the eccentric arty weird that could be appreciated by other people. It seemed like the bad, dark kind that could unravel a person if it got out of hand. Was this a cry for help? A desperate, attention-seeking maneuver? Because if so, no one really noticed. It was just my own silverware rule that affected pretty much no one, myself included. It was one minor, meaningless limitation of my own making, in a world full of uncontrollable limitations.
No spoons.
“I’m not using spoons anymore,” I announced to my mom. I had gone several days without using spoons before I said something, just to make sure I could do it.
“What about cereal?” my mom said.
I raised an eyebrow. Aha. I would have to stop eating cereal. Cereal was a food I ate once in a while, and now it was out of the question.
A desperate, attention-seeking maneuver that affects no one, huh? I thought sarcastically toward my own inner monologue. We’ll see how long you last without a food you occasionally enjoy.
Your life is a disaster, my inner monologue shot back, laughing. I ate cereal with a fork with pretty much no problem.
The drive to and from school with my mom took close to an hour. I made mixtapes to listen to on the drive and became irritated when my mom tried to talk to me. I wanted to hear the same songs, over and over, completely undisturbed, until we got to school.
I began having a hard time making conversation with my mom. Nothing felt different, but I couldn’t remember how to talk to her. I couldn’t believe it had ever been easy, because now it felt so difficult and complicated. I didn’t have anything to say. All of my thoughts were extremely confidential.
If she noticed this change, she didn’t say anything, and I didn’t notice her noticing it.
My mom’s curriculum included tending a vegetable garden adjacent to her classroom. She brought my Polaroid camera to school and took photos of her students with the plants they were growing. I was mortified, as I felt sure that everyone thought that the whole “Polaroid photos in the garden” thing was part of a perverted ploy for my mom to get pictures of boys so I could hang them on my bedroom wall, which I did.
“What boys do you like?” my mom would ask.
I thought of all the boys I had crushes on, and chose the one who I least cared about.
“Corey,” I would say, “is kind of cute, I guess.”
Corey was the first but not the last boy I had a crush on who I later found out was in the special education program.
Daniel was a cute, popular senior. He was really dumb, and mean, in a way that only cute, popular, really dumb boys could get away with. He would have completely blended into the faceless mass of “cool” older boys, except for the fact that he regularly teased me.
“Nice bangs, Mrs. Johnson’s daughter,” he would say, laughing. Before I had time to respond, he would begin to saunter away from me, as if he had somewhere to go but had a really long time to get there.
I hated him. I hated the way he talked, as if everything he said was some big joke that no one else was in on. I hated that people liked him. I hated that he thought he could talk to me. And I hated that he was so cute, because it complicated the situation, made it slightly exciting that he had chosen me to pick on and/or be weird to (or whatever was happening).
When he was close by I would prepare myself to react to whatever he might say to me with the appropriate blend of annoyance, indifference, and social ineptitude, which was the recipe for my newfound personal brand.
Many times, though, he wouldn’t approach or speak to me, and I would direct the annoyance, indifference, and social ineptitude inward, reproach myself for expecting Daniel to talk to me or wanting anything to do with him, and for hating him and wanting his attention simultaneously.
Though I felt pretty lonely most of the day at school, I loved being alone in my bedroom. There was nothing better than shutting my door, turning the music up really loud, and spending hours doing vaguely creative small projects. I made conceptual mixtapes, including one with only the grunts and superfluous oohs and oh yeahs from my favorite albums. I wrote out the lyrics of my favorite songs on scraps of paper and memorized them. I glued soda bottle caps to my backpack. I stapled old mousepads and photos and ribbon and all kinds of garbage to my walls to make a hideous 3-D collage. I ripped advertisements for alcohol or perfume out of Rolling Stone and Cosmo and re-created the ads in acrylic paint on canvas. I printed images of musicians I found on the internet onto T-shirt transfer paper and ironed the images onto my clothing.
I knew I had something to say, but I didn’t trust myself to find the right way to say it yet. I took other people’s words and images and tried to find a way for them to fit me.
I never thought of what I was doing as art, or even self-expression. I never went out of my way to show anyone what I made or did. Though a lot of the output of my efforts was truly bad, it was, looking back, the purest form of creativity I’ve ever known, free of pretension or ego and completely absorbed by itself and its own influences.
I didn’t need anybody to tell me what was good or bad or worthy of my time. The more time I spent alone in my room, the more this fact slowly began informing my self-image. I was the sole judge of what was cool or interesting or worth thinking about.
I didn’t need anybody.
“I was a loner when I was your age, too,” my mom said.
She was full of shit. I knew she’d had friends because she had maintained friendships with the girls she was friends with at my age. I had met them. I had heard them talking about the wild adventures they had when they were my age. Plus she got pregnant with me when she was seventeen, which required, I assumed, at least passable social skills.
“No, I really was,” she said. “I would go to parties and sit in the corner and read a book and all of my friends would be like, What are you doing reading that book? Come dance!”
The last party I had been to was a birthday party almost two years earlier, where I accidentally admitted I liked the band Aqua when everyone was talking about a rapper who had a song with a simil
ar-sounding title, and everyone had looked around at one another like, This moron thinks we’re talking about “Barbie Girl.”
“I don’t think it counts as being a loner if you got invited to parties and your friends were upset that you weren’t hanging out with them enough.”
“You’ll get invited to parties. You’re just at an awkward age.”
I wanted to believe her. I’d had friends just a couple of years before, after all. I’d gotten invited to sleepovers, been asked to promise my allegiance to insecure friends, regularly knocked on the bedroom windows of people from school at 1 a.m. and been greeted with enthusiasm. I had done these things easily, unfazed by how I was being perceived. Now I was fourteen and everything had changed.
Fourteen, I thought, shaking my head in agreement with myself. You tricky bitch.
But quickly I remembered all the fourteen-year-olds I knew at school—the ones who had sex with one another and skipped class to get drunk with their older boyfriends. Or the ones who brought their guitars to school to show their friends what they had practiced the night before. Or the ones who were able to hold conversations with their adult science teacher while posing for Polaroids in the garden. Or even the ones who got together during lunch hour to quiz each other about vocabulary words.
It wasn’t the age that was awkward. I was awkward. My mom was trying to make me believe I was normal, that my age was to blame for my complete social ineptness, but I wasn’t normal. There was no guarantee I would ever have friends again.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “This is my fault. I should have been more social when you were growing up.”
I tried to imagine a reality in which, because my mom was social while I was growing up, I did not turn into the strange loner freak that I was. It would be nice to have some outside force to blame, but in some ways it was even more comforting, in the way things become comforting through habit, to blame only myself.
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