A Pack of True Sisters
When I was young, I was reckless. I was like a meteor hurtling across the sky, heedless of scrapes and bruises, running towards adventure. I was blessed with strength and skill, and reveled in sports and pick-up games. I climbed trees, gnawed on acorns, and biked everywhere. I explored the world with curiosity and pluck.
Heading off to our first day of school.
The girls in my neighborhood were like me; we moved as one, like a school of fish. We’d skate on the pond behind our homes at dusk, Simon & Garfunkel’s “My Little Town” playing in my head as we spun across the ice. We delighted in games of tag at night, hiding under bushes and up in trees while others looked for us, flashlights scanning the darkness. We were recruited into tackle football by the older boys, tumbling to the ground as we caught the football, grimacing when they piled on top of us.
We endured their bullying, too, when they demanded we name the members of KISS from best to worst; our answers never satisfied, and they’d hurl us into snowbanks headfirst, merciless as only teenage boys can be. Undaunted, we were smart, daring girls, caroling and drinking cocoa, hosting sleepovers and watching horror movies, taking tennis lessons and trying out for baseball teams, playing musical instruments, listening to Bread.
Sometimes I felt distant from them. I would stand in the backyard on summer nights, gazing through the chainlink fence that separated our yard from the elementary school, and believe I was a changeling. In the winter, when moonlight sparkled upon our snow-covered landscape, I’d walk down the road and look into the woods, thinking I belonged in there, like some wild thing, yearning for escape. Yet I was part of this group, sometimes a leader, sometimes following, but always central.
Celebrating my eighth birthday with a favorite outdoorsy pal.
One day everything changed without warning, so suddenly that I am still struck, forty years on, by the power of a few words to transform my life. As I walked to school with my friends, a neighborhood boy shoved the books I carried out from under my arm. “I’m not crazy!” he shouted, accusing me of spreading this rumor about him because his parents were divorcing. My books tumbled to the ground and I stopped, shocked. I had no idea why someone would tell him this. I soon found out who had fabricated the lie. I’d considered her one of my closest friends and now I saw her differently. As someone I couldn’t trust. I didn’t trust the other girls in the neighborhood, either, for being complicit in spreading the lie or in not defending me. I remember collecting up my books and walking alone to school.
My world shrank. I no longer participated in neighborhood gatherings. I stayed inside and looked out the windows of our home, watching my former friends walk to each other’s houses. I succumbed to a hollowing loneliness even as my mother comforted me, telling me I was brave. I think now that this was the first time my heart was broken, when I realized what people can do to each other for reasons of jealousy, spite, or even boredom.
On Lake Winnipesaukee. I'm on the right, with the huge smile!
I finally pulled myself together and befriended other girls from school, girls who became my new best friends. I walked and biked to their homes, which lay beyond our neighborhood, in that part of my mind’s map now labeled “Where Good People Live,” where my heart felt safe. In time, I met other boys and girls who became the circle of friends I consider among my closest to this day.
I think about how we are shaped, how things happen and sometimes can’t be reconciled, how the paths of our lives shift course, leading us to this moment. Perhaps if my betrayer had explained herself and her reasons for telling this boy what she did, I might have forgiven her. My tender heart and fierce pride would not allow me to consider forgiving her then, but I do forgive her now. We were so young; she may not have realized the pain she caused me. I’d rather recall the gloriousness of those childhood days, still so bright and vivid these many years later, when our gang of neighborhood girls loved each other like a pack of true sisters and had so much fun.