Chapter 3

At Starlight, I felt like I belonged.

School was different.

By first grade, I already knew Anna and Beth.

I knew how quickly they could decide who was allowed in and who wasn’t.

I knew the other kids usually followed their lead.

And I knew what happened when they decided you didn’t belong.

They’d had kindergarten to teach me.

First grade was when I started fighting back.

Not very successfully.

But I was six.

Give me a minute.

Eventually, I started wishing I looked like them.

I wished I was blonde like Beth.

I wished I had freckles like Anna.

The other kids fell in line with whatever Anna and Beth decreed. They decided who could

play, who couldn’t, who was acceptable and who wasn’t.

And everybody listened.

I was a little girl trying to make sense of that kind of power.

I thought they must be really beautiful.

Why else would everybody want their approval?

Looking back, I can see how much power distorted the way I saw them.

There was nothing extraordinary about the way they looked. What made them seem

extraordinary to me was the way everybody else treated them.

I wanted that too.

I wanted friends too.

There were kids I played with.

Sometimes we played at my house.

Sometimes I went to theirs.

Our parents were friends, so we were put together while they talked and enjoyed

themselves.

Were those friendships?

I don’t know.

Were we friends, or were we acquaintances put together for short periods of time to amuse

ourselves while our parents visited?

Because Monday morning was different.

At school, being my friend came with a price.

It was a little like The Breakfast Club.

Please don’t be offended if I don’t talk to you at school on Monday.

And the lines weren’t always as simple as Red Devils and Blue Angels.

Monica was part of the Red Devils.

But our families were friends.

On weekends, Monica came over to swim and watch Cowboys games with us.

Her dad was the one who would grab Mom every time the Cowboys scored a touchdown

and spin her around like she was a ragdoll.

Eventually, something medical happened and his doctor told him he couldn’t watch the

games anymore.

That didn’t entirely stop him.

For a while, he secretly listened to the games on the radio during church.

At least it was a secret until the day he shouted and jumped out of his seat in the pew.

Secret was out then.

But Monday was still Monday.

Monica and I went back to school.

And at school, she was still part of the Red Devils.

I dreaded going to school.

I was scared.

But I was also scared Mom would find out nobody liked me.

She had already told me enough times that I brought shame to her.

I didn’t want this to be one more thing.

One more reason for her to be ashamed of me.

So I didn’t tell her.

I don’t think Mom or Dad knew how the kids treated me at school.

Looking back, I don’t know how they would have.

The children they saw weren’t necessarily the children I knew.

And that became especially strange once everybody discovered what came with being

invited to my house.

We had a pool.

And my birthday parties were the parties to go to.

My parents rented some of the best kid places.

This was the eighties, and every kid could get ten or twenty dollars in tokens.

For a kid in the eighties, that was a ridiculous amount of tokens.

Kids from other grades found ways to get invited.

Everybody wanted in.

Which was confusing.

At school, Anna and Beth could pick on me.

Other kids could laugh.

Or watch.

Or let it happen.

But when there was a pool party—

everybody wanted to come.

Apparently, you didn’t even have to be nice to me to want to come to my birthday party.

I remember looking around while I blew out the candles on my birthday cake.

There were kids crowded all around me.

Some of those same kids didn’t talk to me at school.

Some of them treated me poorly.

But there they were.

Crowded around me for my birthday.

And I noticed it even then.

You would think I was the most popular girl in school by the party and photos.

I wasn’t.

Looking at it now, I have to wonder if my parents were basically trying to buy me friends.

And maybe that’s part of where I learned something I still struggle with.

Maybe that’s why some part of me still believes I have to buy my friends.

I don’t know.

But it’s hard not to wonder.

And Reeves came to our school.

Until Reeves came, I was the smallest kid in our class.

Then there was Reeves.

He was even smaller than me.

And he was a boy.

Anna and Beth noticed.

They made fun of his height.

They took things away from him in the classroom and on the playground.

Reeves was different, though.

He was this bright little light.

He could sing.

He could act.

Even as a kid, there was something about him that made people notice him.

He performed around Dallas, and he played Tiny Tim in a Christmas production.

By first grade, I believe this was his second year doing it.

Our family—or maybe our class—went to see him perform. That detail is still fuzzy for me.

But I remember Reeves performing.

He had stage presence.

Over the years, he always landed the starring role in school productions.

At school, none of that protected him.

Being smaller than everybody else just gave Anna and Beth something to use.

One day during class, Reeves had to go to the bathroom.

I remember him raising his hand.

Frantically.

The teacher didn’t notice.

Or didn’t understand.

I don’t know.

Then Reeves had an accident.

After that, everything got worse.

Now Anna and Beth had something else.

Reeves became a huge target that year.

Reeves and I did play together.

We played at each other’s houses.

I had a few relationships like that.

Our parents would talk and enjoy themselves, and we would play.

But school was different.

Being friends at home didn’t necessarily mean being friends at school.

At school, being my friend came with a price.

It was a little like The Breakfast Club.

Please don’t be offended if I don’t talk to you at school on Monday.

I understood that.

I didn’t necessarily like it.

But I understood it.

In fact, I had already tried telling the teachers on the playground that Reeves was being

bullied.

Before the Blue Angels.

Before I decided I was apparently going to handle this shit myself.

The teachers were too engrossed in recounting their beloved soap operas.

I noticed things adults seemed perfectly capable of ignoring.

I noticed when someone was being left out.

I noticed when somebody was alone.

I noticed when somebody was hurting.

And once I noticed—

I couldn’t pretend I hadn’t.

Maybe part of that was because I knew exactly what it felt like when nobody stood beside

you.

Actually, I don’t have to say maybe about that one anymore.

While working on this book, I realized that was ultimately what drove me.

I knew what it felt like.

And I wasn’t going to watch it happen to anyone else if I could do something about it.

The Tetherball

One day on the playground, Anna and Beth had the tetherball.

They were holding it over Reeves’s head.

He jumped for it.

They held it higher.

He jumped again.

He couldn’t reach it.

Neither could I.

But I could reach the pole.

I grabbed it with one hand and used it to boost myself as I jumped.

My other hand caught the tether rope.

I pulled it out of their hands.

“Leave him alone.”

They looked at me.

“Stop being bullies.”

That put us in a standoff.

Anna and Beth had already given themselves a name.

The Red Devils.

Fine.

Standing there on the playground, I decided there should be another group.

The Blue Angels.

The Blue Angels would protect kids from being bullied at school.

Apparently, I had appointed myself Playground Monitor.

Protector of the innocent.

This was quite a territory for a six-year-old to patrol.

Our playground had a soccer field and a baseball diamond.

There was a set of monkey bars.

And there were two tetherball poles, although usually only one of them actually had a ball.

The balls kept getting stolen.

There weren’t any meetings.

There weren’t any rules.

There wasn’t a secret headquarters.

There weren’t even any other Blue Angels.

There was just me.

Nobody joined.

Anna and Beth laughed at me for trying to form the Blue Angels.

It became one more thing they could tease me about.

Cruelly.

But I did it anyway.

The problem was that the kid getting bullied at school was already me.

Starting the Blue Angels didn’t make Anna and Beth stop.

It put me right back in the middle of everything.

Only now I’d given them another reason to come after me.

I’d wanted to take the target off somebody else’s back.

Instead, I made the one on mine bigger.

But for that moment, Reeves was safe.

And I think that’s what mattered to me.

I knew what it felt like to stand there hoping somebody would notice.

Hoping somebody would say something.

Hoping somebody would decide that what was happening to you mattered enough to

become their problem.

Nobody had done that for me.

So I was going to do it for everyone else.

I was six.

It didn’t work very well.

But I tried.