turned fifteen in October. My mother says I have the mental maturity of a forty-year-old and the emotional maturity of an eight-year-old, and that’s pretty spot-on, I have to admit.
For the longest time I’ve felt older than everyone else around me. The social climate at school only makes this contrast more obvious. It seems like all my classmates ever talk about is who’s going out with who or what outfit so-and-so got at the mall. I could name names, if you wanted me to, from our very own class.
Cecily-Anne St. Aubrey and Autumn Fullerton have fathers who are partnered in a law firm. They are both terrible people and also happen to be cokeheads, but all the teachers here at Wallace adore them to pieces. Kelsey Smith and Chelsea Cutler are both jocks who live for softball and field hockey. They’re actually as stupid as they come, but their slavish study habits will guarantee their entrance into good colleges later on down the line. Loo Garippa is the biggest poser I have ever met in my life. She wants everyone to think she’s all edgy and punk, but she’s really this closet happy person who has a new boyfriend every week. Aggie Hamada has never had a tough day in her life, although it’s rumored that one time in eighth grade she got an A-minus in science class and got grounded for two months because it wasn’t an A. Jamie Friedman has a new stepmother and is always talking about how much she hates her, but then in the same breath she’ll brag about the new designer outfit her stepmother bought her or how her stepmother is taking her on a skiing trip to Switzerland.
They’re all pretty contemptible. All of them yammering on blithely about stupid stuff while the world around them wells up with death and heartache and existential crises, which they don’t see or they don’t care to see. They don’t understand how easy it would be for their lives to be over in a minute.
This is a fact: From the time I was a little girl, I always knew life was more about sadness than anything else.
How did I know this? You mentioned music in class the other day. Something about Mick Jagger. When I was little, I used to cry at sad songs coming out of my parents’ CD player. I couldn’t make sense of most of the lyrics back then, but I could tell sadness from the way singers sang. The minor chords always give it away. I even knew when songs were secretly sad—songs that seemed upbeat enough on the surface but hid a sorrow that maybe even the songwriter didn’t want you to know about. I knew other things, too. I knew that most grown-ups really don’t know much more than children, though they pretend otherwise, and that it’s impolite to let on that you know this when you’re a child. From the day I was born, I saw far too much for my own good. I suppose you could say I had the curse of seeing the world in a clear-eyed way while having the manners to keep what I saw to myself.
In some ways I was childlike back then, and in other ways I wasn’t. I played with Annabel Francoeur, a girl my age who lived a few houses up the street from me, because I knew that every child was supposed to have at least one friend. We would play our games—girl-games she would dictate, ranging from soap operatic Barbie doll plotlines (Ken sleeps with Barbie’s sister Skipper) to games of “house” where I was always The Boy—but instead of feeling as though I were playing a game, I felt as though I were playing the role of a child playing a game and doing a shitty job of it. I’ve gotten better at playing roles since then, I guess.
Sure, I had fun sometimes as a kid; I can remember certain moments, certain silly and meaningless moments, like lying in Annabel’s backyard after sundown, the two of us side by side on our backs in the grass, and me thinking: For the rest of my life I will remember what it feels like to lie in this grass. I will remember this dark sky. And once I told myself I would remember, I never forgot. Not even now, long
For the longest time I’ve felt older than everyone else around me. The social climate at school only makes this contrast more obvious. It seems like all my classmates ever talk about is who’s going out with who or what outfit so-and-so got at the mall. I could name names, if you wanted me to, from our very own class.
Cecily-Anne St. Aubrey and Autumn Fullerton have fathers who are partnered in a law firm. They are both terrible people and also happen to be cokeheads, but all the teachers here at Wallace adore them to pieces. Kelsey Smith and Chelsea Cutler are both jocks who live for softball and field hockey. They’re actually as stupid as they come, but their slavish study habits will guarantee their entrance into good colleges later on down the line. Loo Garippa is the biggest poser I have ever met in my life. She wants everyone to think she’s all edgy and punk, but she’s really this closet happy person who has a new boyfriend every week. Aggie Hamada has never had a tough day in her life, although it’s rumored that one time in eighth grade she got an A-minus in science class and got grounded for two months because it wasn’t an A. Jamie Friedman has a new stepmother and is always talking about how much she hates her, but then in the same breath she’ll brag about the new designer outfit her stepmother bought her or how her stepmother is taking her on a skiing trip to Switzerland.
They’re all pretty contemptible. All of them yammering on blithely about stupid stuff while the world around them wells up with death and heartache and existential crises, which they don’t see or they don’t care to see. They don’t understand how easy it would be for their lives to be over in a minute.
This is a fact: From the time I was a little girl, I always knew life was more about sadness than anything else.
How did I know this? You mentioned music in class the other day. Something about Mick Jagger. When I was little, I used to cry at sad songs coming out of my parents’ CD player. I couldn’t make sense of most of the lyrics back then, but I could tell sadness from the way singers sang. The minor chords always give it away. I even knew when songs were secretly sad—songs that seemed upbeat enough on the surface but hid a sorrow that maybe even the songwriter didn’t want you to know about. I knew other things, too. I knew that most grown-ups really don’t know much more than children, though they pretend otherwise, and that it’s impolite to let on that you know this when you’re a child. From the day I was born, I saw far too much for my own good. I suppose you could say I had the curse of seeing the world in a clear-eyed way while having the manners to keep what I saw to myself.
In some ways I was childlike back then, and in other ways I wasn’t. I played with Annabel Francoeur, a girl my age who lived a few houses up the street from me, because I knew that every child was supposed to have at least one friend. We would play our games—girl-games she would dictate, ranging from soap operatic Barbie doll plotlines (Ken sleeps with Barbie’s sister Skipper) to games of “house” where I was always The Boy—but instead of feeling as though I were playing a game, I felt as though I were playing the role of a child playing a game and doing a shitty job of it. I’ve gotten better at playing roles since then, I guess.
Sure, I had fun sometimes as a kid; I can remember certain moments, certain silly and meaningless moments, like lying in Annabel’s backyard after sundown, the two of us side by side on our backs in the grass, and me thinking: For the rest of my life I will remember what it feels like to lie in this grass. I will remember this dark sky. And once I told myself I would remember, I never forgot. Not even now, long
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