Girls, Girls, Girls

When I first moved to Steamboat Springs, I was six years old. I started school in the fall and spent most of my first year with a group of children my own age. A few weeks before the end of the school year, my parents and the school system decided to move me ahead, into the grade above. I finished the year with a new set of students, most a year or so older than I was. Later my teachers would think perhaps they should skip me again but my parents said no, once had been enough, and perhaps too much. In our very small town, skipping a grade seemed the best academic option for a student like me, but emotionally and socially it was a questionable decision.

For a time, it didn’t seem to matter. For those first few years in elementary school, I was a popular little girl with many friends. They would call me religiously, to discuss all manner of important things, like what our Cabbage Patch Dolls were up to or what treasures we’d found at the Esprit Outlet on the way to Denver. We traded stickers and had sleepovers, and as I blew off the less popular girls at recess, I am sure I thought it would be just that way forever.

I will never know exactly what happened. All I know is what I remember and how it changed me.

A girl moved to our small mountain town in 5th grade, some time after school had started. Her arrival would have been noteworthy enough had she moved at the start of the year — there were so few of us in the grade that we were hyperaware of each new student. Her family had been in Florida for a time.

At first, the new girl and I were friends. She was friends with the other girls I knew, and was especially close with the best friend I’d had since moving to town. Slowly at first, and then all at once, the girls who had long been my friends turned away from me. I became an outsider, crying in the halls at school, hearing my ex-friends whisper about me but no longer to me.

If you have never lived in a very small town, and specifically a tourist destination, there are some things about my childhood that will be unknowable to you. In particular, you will never know what it is to see people move to paradise, only to find it’s the end of the road in the opposite way they expected.

Toward the end of our 5th grade year, the new girl’s parents were arrested for smuggling drugs. She cried in school that day instead of me.

Bricks of marijuana were built into the walls of their house, a house I’d been to on more than one occasion. The layered artifice extended to the family: The name we knew wasn’t her real name. Her family had moved seven times, and this was her seventh name. She went back to her first name, and was taken away from her parents, away from Steamboat. My old best friend kept in touch with her, but I refused to hear any news of her, even a decade or more later.

I wish I could have felt sorrow for her and the life she’d been given, but at the time I was not yet ten years old. I had no way of knowing this girl who came and ruined my life did so out of jealousy, a deep and profound jealousy, of what she perceived I had: A nice house that never changed, married parents who worked normal jobs and were present in my life, a brother, a dog, a cat, a bike, long pretty hair, lots of friends. The other girls she took from me had bits and pieces of all this, but I was the one who had it all.

I had no sympathy for her that year, and it took many years to find it. When I was nine, all I knew was that she’d ruined what I had loved so much: a sense of belonging.

When we are children, we are led to believe that much of what plagues us will disappear as we move into adulthood. Mean girls, gossip, acne, a lack of control over our lives. Growing up looks in our minds like the swank affairs of the 1950s, martini glasses everywhere and everything put together just so and a distinct sense that adulthood is another world, far removed and vastly improved. The things that bothered you as a child will fade, and you will find new people, better people, for the new you.

It seems an affront to decency when we discover pimples decades after adolescence. So too the gossip of junior high and high school does not end but swirls ever onward, from our own mouths and the mouths of those we thought we knew. The list of things we cannot control even as adults is long, and woven throughout is the dawning knowledge that we cannot control what other people think and say about us.

Many decades after the new girl moved to town, I have learned much less than I imagined. That girl is everywhere, often where I least expect it and sometimes in myself. I am still surprised to find her, and to find that when jealousy begets gossip and gossip begets social upheaval, I am at first bewildered and thrown off kilter. It is disappointing: Why do I still want to belong? Where is that strength of age and wisdom, that shoulder shrug with a raised eyebrow, that un-mussable armor of a perfectly nipped waist and coiffed hair?

I think of the new girl, her parents, everyone in that little town, and how they tried to protect themselves and to fit in the best they could. I always thought it was just me fighting to belong, but it was all of us. Children and adults alike, taking from others so they could find a home.