by Marnie Lamb
I started to follow, but I was so preoccupied with unwrapping my drumstick that I tripped over a tree root and landed on my hands and knees. The chocolate-nut part of the cone popped off and rolled several feet away. For a second I considered picking it up, but suddenly a squirrel scurried out from behind a bench and began nuzzling at the ice cream.
I slapped my hands on the hard ground. Tears began to form in my throat. Nothing was going right. Lynn was mad at me for hanging around with Kallie. My mom wouldn’t let me buy the right clothes, and even if she did, they wouldn’t fit me. I had so little chance of becoming cool, Chanel Winters probably wouldn’t bother to spit on me. And Kallie, well, she was off in her own little world. Even the squirrels were against me.
Kallie rushed over when she saw me fall, but when she noticed the squirrel, she started snickering.
“It’s not funny!” I wailed.
“I’m sorry.” She tried to stifle her laughter, and suddenly the sight of Kallie in her 3-D glasses, one hand over her mouth and the other holding a purple ghost Popsicle, made me laugh, too. Soon I was laughing so hard tears were running down my cheeks, and then I started crying.
Kallie stopped laughing. “Why are you crying? Come on, let’s sit down.” She led me to the bench. By the time we sat down, I’d finished crying, and I felt like I’d swum the length of Lake Ontario and been pulled onto the shore by a pair of kind hands.
Kallie took off her glasses. “What was that all about?” she asked gently.
I took a breath, but the air, thick as cotton batting, only let me get in about half the oxygen I needed. “Nothing. Everything.”
“Oh.” She licked her Popsicle, waiting for me to continue, while I tried to decide what to tell her. I couldn’t tell her I thought her nerdiness might ruin my chances of getting in with the cool crowd next year, especially not when she was being so nice. And how could I talk about any of my other problems without mentioning that one? All my problems connected, like a giant spider web. But I had to escape from the web before it suffocated me. Finally I said, “It’s about yesterday. You know, the clothes … The Dress.”
I glanced sideways at her to see her reaction, but she was quiet. “Oh, so now you’re going to pretend it didn’t happen?” I demanded.
She looked surprised. “What are you talking about?”
“You know. You thought I was too fat for that dress, but you didn’t have the guts to say it. And you could see I was upset but all you wanted to do was go for ice cream.” I crossed my arms and looked away.
“I never thought you were too fat for that dress, and I’m sorry if I made you feel that way. And I only suggested we get ice cream because I could see you were upset and I thought it would make you feel better.”
“Oh, yeah?” I said, trying to sound tough. “Well, why didn’t you ask me if I wanted to try The Dress on? And why did you act all quiet when I told you the price?”
“Because I was surprised at how expensive it was. I never buy clothes that cost more than forty dollars. And I guess I just forgot to ask you to try it on.”
I remained silent.
“I can’t believe you thought that about me,” she said. “Just a few days ago, I was trying to convince you that you aren’t fat, remember?”
“I know! That’s what made it so weird.”
“Well, I hope you believe me about The Dress,” she said. I nodded. “And you don’t still think you’re fat, do you?”
I exhaled through my nose, and my breath burned my nostrils in the mid-afternoon heat. “Yes, I do.” She gave me a look. “You don’t know what it’s like, Kallie. You’re so lucky you’re thin. You don’t have to worry about Chanel or anyone else laughing at you.”
“Hil, being skinny can be a curse. Trust me. Anyway, you don’t have to care so much about what Chanel thinks.”
“Kallie, didn’t you hear what I told you at the mall? Chanel is going to be the most popular girl in grade seven. She’ll have a big influence over everyone else. If I want to be popular, she has to like me, and I want to be popular.”
“Why?”
I rolled my eyes. “Why would I want people to like me? Gee, I don’t know. Maybe because I don’t want to be some loser who sits by herself at lunch?”
Kallie pressed her lips together. I waved my hand impatiently. “Oh you don’t understand! You don’t care about being popular. If someone laughed at you, you’d just talk back to them. But for people like me, it’s hard when someone teases you. Like there was this girl in my grade six class, Heather Banks. She used to give me dirty looks all year. Then one day I wore this pink sweater to school. It was a Christmas present from my grandma, and it was furry and kind of tight. I walked past her — Heather Banks, not my grandma — in the hall, and you know what she said? ‘I can’t believe they’re letting pigs in the school.’ You don’t know what it’s like to be picked on, so don’t pretend you do.”
Have you ever said something you know might make someone a bit upset, only to have the person blow up? That’s what happened to me then. I knew I was being a bit melodramatic. Heather Banks hadn’t really been that mean to me, though the part about the pig comment was true. But I was not prepared for what happened next.
“Shut up!” Kallie shrieked. I gasped. Her voice sliced through the heavy summer air like a machete through flesh. “Just shut up about yourself for once! You think I don’t know what it’s like to be picked on? Maybe I know a lot more about it than you do!” About twenty feet away, a couple walking a big dog turned to look at us. Kallie waited until they’d passed before she continued.
I’ll never forget Kallie’s story.
“You say you got picked on once. How about getting picked on every day? Being called things like stupid loser or ugly bitch every day for months? How about having no friends? Nobody even wanting to sit with you because they’re afraid they might get picked on, too.” She leaned in closer, ignoring the purple juice streaming down her hand, and hissed, “How about being so upset by people’s insults, you throw up in the bathroom during lunch? Your eyes hurt from trying to hold in the tears every time it happens. And you go home at night and wonder whether you’d be better off dead.”
I didn’t even try to stop my voice from trembling. “That happened to you?”
“Yes,” she said. The word was like an arrow fired at a target.
“When?”
“In grade five. When I lived in Oakville.” She took a deep breath, threw the Popsicle into a garbage can, and wiped her hands on a crumpled napkin.
She spoke again, more calmly. “It started when I became friends with this girl named Sheila. We were both new at school and we didn’t know anyone, so we started hanging around at recess. And then I started inviting her over on the weekend.” Her words came out in a torrent and then stopped, as if someone had turned off a tap.
“What happened then?”
“One day, our teacher assigned us this project. We had to build something. Sheila and I decided to build an orrery.” When she saw my puzzled expression, she explained, “It’s a model of the planets and the sun. Anyway, Sheila wanted to add moons to all the planets because she thought we’d get a better mark if our project was more complicated. I tried to explain to her that some planets don’t have moons and it would be too difficult to add moons because my mom was going to help us build a little motor so the planets could rotate and if all the moons had to rotate, too … well, you can see the problem.”
I nodded.
“But Sheila kept saying she wanted moons, and we ended up getting in this huge fight and … I said something pretty mean.”
“What?”
She took another breath. “I told her I was going to build the orrery my way and I’d do a better job without her. She got upset and left. She had low marks, see, that’s why it was such an insult. I talked to my mom, and she said I’d been too hard on Sheila and I should apologize. But when I called her, she hung up on me. So I finished the orrery on my own. I got an A+, but since we wer
e partners, Sheila got one, too. I thought that was fair, but now I’m not so sure.”
“I don’t think it was fair,” I said quietly.
“I thought Sheila would forgive me after she got the A+ because that was what she wanted. A high mark. But when I tried to talk to her, she ignored me. Then one day I found a box under my coat hook. It had all the stuff I’d ever lent her. At recess she told me she hoped I’d found my junk because she never wanted to touch it again. ‘It’s contaminated,’ she said. I tried to apologize, but she said she never wanted to talk to me again.”
“But why was she so mad at you?”
She shrugged. “Maybe she was jealous because I got an A+ without her help. Or maybe she just wanted to hurt me. I don’t think she was very happy. She never invited me to her house, so I think she had some problems at home. Anyway, by this time, she’d made other friends, so one day at recess, when I was just playing by myself, Sheila and this other girl made a remark. I don’t even remember what it was, there were so many of them. Something about how only losers dress the way I do.”
Suddenly I remembered Marcia, her white dress and limp hair, her downcast face, scurrying away in the graduation photo. “She’s such a loser.” Had Lynn said that, or had I? A line of clammy coolness slithered like a worm down the back of my neck.
“And that’s how it started. More people joined in, and soon, almost the whole class was teasing me. The guys weren’t so bad, but the girls…” She leaned forward, fanning herself with her hand. The sun had shifted so the tree no longer gave us any shade, making the bench feel like a sauna whose temperature has just jumped ten degrees.
She looked at me. “And you’re right, Hilary. At first I did answer back when they called me names, but that only made them angry and then they started doing other stuff like stealing my hat and tossing it around during recess and … they said some really awful things.” Her voice caught.
I couldn’t stop myself from asking, “Like what?”
“Like —” She bit the insides of her cheeks.
Tentatively I reached out and laid my hand on her arm. “It’s O.K. You don’t have to tell me any more.”
“No,” she sniffed. “I want to. They said my dad was a fairy because he’s an artist.”
“You mean, like your dad is gay?”
“Yeah. And they said it like, if it was true, it would be a really bad thing.”
We sunk into silence. The wail of a siren sounded in the distance. Kallie seemed to have finished her story, but I had too many questions about plot and character to remain quiet.
“But weren’t some people in the class nice to you?”
“There were a couple of people… Sometimes when the others were laughing at me, I’d see them looking at me like they felt sorry for me. But they never talked to me because they were afraid of being picked on too, and I don’t blame them.”
“Well I do!” I said hotly. “They could’ve helped you. Yeah, they might’ve got picked on a bit, but at least then you wouldn’t have been the only one.”
Kallie lifted one shoulder. “That’s easy to say, but most people don’t want to go against the leader, especially if it means the leader might be mean to them.”
I frowned. “So what happened?”
“After a while I couldn’t take it anymore, so I told my mom everything. She was great, and we went to talk to the teacher together. I really liked my teacher, and I thought she would help. But she just told me I was making a big deal out of a few silly comments, that everyone got picked on sooner or later and I should try to defend myself. And the principal said the same thing, only he wasn’t as nice about it.”
“Wow, that really stinks.”
“Yeah. So I told my parents I wanted to go live with my grandma and go to school on the island.”
“What island?”
“The Toronto Island. That’s where my grandma lives. I thought I could get away from those people, but my parents wouldn’t let me. They said it would be too complicated to change schools in the middle of the year and I should wait till next year. I was so mad at them.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Yeah. I blamed my mom a lot. We kept moving around because of her job, and I kept having to change schools. It took me a long time to stop being mad at her, but finally I did. And she promised this would be the last move.”
This surprised me as much as anything Kallie had said. I’d always assumed she and her parents never fought.
“I went to a new school the next year,” she said. “It was O.K. I didn’t have any friends and some people looked at me funny, but it was nothing compared to the year before. It was like … I’d been roasted over a raging fire, and now there were only a few sparks.”
She pushed her hair off her face. I leaned forward, pulling at my T-shirt, which was glued to my back with sweat. Both of us looked longingly in the direction of a fountain, where a little girl was splashing around happily, oblivious to everything but the water.
“I’ve thought about this a lot,” Kallie said. “I kept wondering if maybe I did something wrong. If I’d acted a certain way, if I’d been a certain way, maybe they wouldn’t have laughed at me. But after thinking and writing about it, and talking with my mom and grandma, I realized that what I did didn’t make any difference. Those people just decided they were going to be mean to me.”
She turned to me. “See, that’s what I mean about not worrying about what Chanel Winters thinks. Be yourself. Because if someone wants to make fun of you, trust me, they’ll find a way to do it, even if you’re wearing the right clothes and saying the right things. I’ve seen it happen.”
I didn’t want to talk about myself, so I said, “But … O.K. It’s one thing for people not to defend you, but why did they pick on you? I mean, with Sheila — not that I’m agreeing with anything she did — but I can kind of understand. You guys were friends and then you got in a fight. But why did those other people tease you?”
Kallie ran her fingers across the bench, making a soft scratching noise. “Why are there wars? Why is there racism? Sometimes people are just mean. My mom says it’s because they’re threatened by others who are different. Like with my cousins. My parents are different from their parents, so it was easy for them to make fun of me for being a vegetarian and wearing the kind of clothes I wear. I guess it’s just the price you pay for being different.”
I looked at the fountain, where the little girl’s mother was lifting her from the water. Strangers sitting on benches waved and made funny faces at her. I heaved a huge sigh. “So much for the advantages of being a geek.”
She smiled wanly. “Well, I said I suspect there are advantages. That doesn’t mean I’ve found them.”
I stared at the parched grass until I heard a voice say, “Kallie!”
We both jumped. Kallie’s dad was standing in front of us. “Where have you guys been? I went to the planetarium, but you weren’t there. I’ve been looking for you for half an hour.”
I looked at Kallie. She chewed her lip and mumbled, “Sorry. We just got talking.”
He looked at both of us as if he could see right through to where our blood was running in our veins. But he just said, “Well, we’d better get going.”
As we headed for the car, I noticed that the crowd in the park had changed. Different couples were walking different dogs, different elderly people were sitting on different benches. Or maybe they just looked different. Somehow I felt that I’d grown older in the past hour. I can’t explain this feeling, but you’ll understand if it’s ever happened to you.
No one spoke or hummed on the way home. When we arrived at Kallie’s, her dad didn’t linger with us outside. I think he knew we wanted to talk to each other alone.
We were quiet for a minute, and then I said, “Kallie, I’m really sorry.”
“About what? You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Well, for whining about The Dress and Heather Banks. It was really childish.”
She smil
ed a wavy smile, as if she was being reflected in a disturbed pond. “That’s all right. And I didn’t mean to come down on you so hard. I guess we just all have our problems.”
I nodded. “Um … do you want to go to the Bata Shoe Museum this weekend?”
“Thanks, but we’re going to visit my grandma on the island.” We looked at one another for what seemed a long time. Finally she said, “Would you like to come visit my grandmother, Hilary?”
Her voice was serious, not light-hearted like it usually was when she invited me somewhere. This was a different kind of invitation.
“Yes, I’d like to,” I said solemnly.
“Great. I’ll call you and let you know when.” Then she was gone.
As I slumped across my yard, I felt like someone I love had beaten me with their bare fists and left an ugly row of purple bruises under my ribs.
-10-
The Fool’s Journey
I have to admit, I’m kind of stuck. I mean, what can I write that could possibly compare with what Kallie told me in the park? Even all these years later, whenever I think about that day, I feel like someone is pressing those old bruises like piano keys, playing a painful tune.
So … well, I guess I could start by telling you what I was feeling as I lay in bed that night.
Guilt. That was number one. For whining about my pathetic problems. And for the way I’d been thinking about Kallie. I thought her nerdiness would ruin my chances of being popular? How could I have been so cruel?
And shock. I would never have guessed — and I have a pretty vivid imagination — that anything like that had happened to Kallie. She seemed so happy and strong, like nothing anyone did could hurt her. Then again, maybe she’d just been pretending. Like when she ran away that time at the swings. She sounded cheerful when she said goodbye, but I didn’t see her face. Maybe she really was hurt by my rejection.
