Girlfriend

By the time I was in fifth grade home life was the equivalency of going to a liquor store: go in and get what you need, loiter for as long as the clerk can tolerate you before he shouts in a foreign language and get out.

Stealing a Twinkie or a Pepsi was optional.

My older sister had been my best friend for so long but she was in high school and had a life that included me for a few moments as she spent even less time at home than I did. She snuck out at night and day and sometimes wouldn’t come home for a few days. Mom and dad would yell at her but she would scream back that she learned from the best and they should have been flattered.

My hair was still long, I still wore dresses to school.
The school counsoler was always asking me questions.
Child Protective Services had been to our house a few times.
I had been asked if I was ever sexually abused...Seriously a fifth grader who wore dresses to school was being put through the wringer.

Our house had visits from the police too, usually over something I said to someone. Everyone was able to say what they wanted to: including Tony, who would say it with a distinct whistle in his voice.

I also met someone who I called my best friend for four years: April Rothermel.

April was new to town. But she wasn’t the Nancy Drew, Mary Sue, how do you do kind of girl. On the first day of school she slammed Tony’ s head into he wall after he commented on her weight. April weighed close to 145 pounds in fifth grade but one could swear it was all muscle.

She was suspended on the first day of school and before they escorted her off campus I gave her a folded note asking her to call me when she could.

She called that very night and I told her everything about the school and congratulated her on taking Tony down another notch; she had asked why he spoke with a whistling sound and you could hear the smile in voice as I proclaimed: “This bitch, here. Right here.”
The next day was Friday and I went to school with an ever-lasting grin on my face because I knew that on Monday things would be. So. Much. Better. And maybe beyond that as I could imagine how being a teenager would be with my best friend at my side, with us watching each other’s backs.

We got to do that on Monday after school when I walked home with her.

“Fat girl and the gay boy!” Sung in some sing-songsy kind of way. I didn’t know what gay meant but I knew that these guys and one girl were making fun of my friend and we handed their asses over to them. I confronted the sole girl who threw several punches and grabbed onto my hair. I followed suit and tore at the roots of her hair. Her ear-shattering scream was so loud it could be heard all the way to the International Space Station.

April was aware of her weight and it bothered her form the end of the world and back but I could see that her brave front, her violent streak and sardonic attitude tried to hide the little girl who wanted to cry in a corner as people talked about her. She once asked me how I never let things bother me: the condescending looks, snide comments and outright disgust from total strangers.
“Cuz they’re strangers.”
“What if they were people you know?”
“Some of them are, like my family.”

Which was true. By seventh grade my parents put their feet down and took every single dress I had away. I could keep the hair and I could keep the blouses, unicorn shirts and a rainbow pendant but I was not allowed to go to school with anything that resembled a skirt.
I was also told that I would have to take PE. Fortunately, or not, our junior high school was too large and too old to accommodate working showers for PE. So, for the most part I had to wear mandated red shorts with a grey t-shirt.

I hung with April during PE and our math class but our home rooms were different and I stuck in a class where everything started off on the wrong foot after the first five minutes of class when Anthony McGalliard and five of the other boys in the class thought it would be open season on me and ripped my pendant from my neck, shattering it into three pieces.

The teacher was not very receptive to my outburst of emotion toward the pulverized lead-crystal and metal necklace. It was like she didn’t care or thought, “meh, you can get another one.”

And with that, Anthony required ANOTHER crown in his mouth.