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| Can you feel my 13-year-old sex appeal? |
I concluded my elementary school career by
attending group therapy at my mother's rehab facility. To say I was ill
equipped to handle middle school would be an understatement.
I recall telling my three closest friends
that my mother was going away to a hospital for a while and she had a disease
called "Alcoholism." I thought having a sick mother with a nameable
disease would somehow normalize my life. What I didn't realize was that
there were acceptable diseases — like cancer — and then there were the things one wasn’t
supposed to mention.
A few days later, one of these three
friends informed me that her mother said she wasn't allowed to play with me
anymore. It is without malice that I now mention that her mother was quite
possibly more pickled than my own, but I digress.
It's not like it was a surprise to the
neighborhood that something was awry at my house. For several years the
catholic school punks down the street had been heckling me on the way home with
taunts of, "Your mother's a drunk!" When I was younger I hadn’t known
what a "drunk" was, but I did know enough to be ashamed and to find a
new route home
In the sixth grade I had already acquired a
bully of my very own. For some reason, the quiet, awkward, tomboy that I was had
inspired rage in this particular bully’s pre-adolescent mind. He went after me
with the full-throated screams of a zealot on the playground and with whispered
threats during class. We'll call him Antoine de Cadillac because his name was
French and I'm from Detroit.
Antoine alternated between finding me
repugnant and wanting to grab my ass amongst the book racks. It was too early
for me to understand the kind of sullen loathing a pre-adolescent boy could
have for a girl. This type of creature also mistakes being
"unpopular" for being "easy." I would encounter more of his
type later on in high school.
However, my lack of dating opportunity never quelled
my fervent desire to be choosy and to have the same blue-eyed dreamboat of a
boyfriend that the popular girls had. In fact, I thought popularity was
something that fell upon you like winning the lottery or getting hit by an
asteroid. Although I believed it was out of my control and not likely to
happen, I still felt it was within the realm of possibility.
So it was that on one golden June afternoon
while all my peers were full of summer hopes and I was preoccupied with
dreading group therapy at Mom's rehab, that the slope-foreheaded Antoine de Cadillac
grabbed me by the collars of my off-brand Izod shirt and pinned me against a
brick wall at school.
"You are a loser, Mandy. You will
always be a loser. I know people in middle school and I know that you’re gonna
be the biggest loser there," he said, his spittle hitting my face like
tender drops of summer rain.
I managed to save face by shoving him off.
"No! You're going to be the loser,
Antoine! I know people in high school! So there," I said. But I
was shaken by the Frenchman's prognostication. It had the ring of a hex about
it. I worried that he could either see me more clearly than I saw myself or
that he had somehow French cursed me into a life sentence of unpopularity.
To read Part 2, please click here.
*This is an excerpt from my memoir, from the chapter, "Middle School: Dante's Forgotten Circle of Hell."
