Everything Is Perfect When You're a Liar (3 page)

The day after the audition fiasco, I sat at my desk, biding my time after completing my work early (my thing), lining up wafer cookies on my desk. Then, suddenly, a wave of courage came over me. I took a deep breath, broke one of the cookies in half, and carried it past the tadpoles right up to her desk, holding my breath the whole way. I didn't want to give her a whole cookie because I was a greedy little six-year-old and sacrificing half a wafer for my French commander was difficult enough, even if it was a bribe to get her to say
oui
to my grassroots production of
Star Wars
.

By the time I got to the front of the room, my face was purple. Mme. Misbet looked at me like I was insane. I exhaled with a gasp.

“What do you want?” she snapped. “It's almost lunch. You're supposed to be reading.”

I held up my sacrificial wafer-cookie half. “I wanted to give you this cookie. And ask if it would be okay to have auditions at lunch today, for this play I wrote? Well, I guess I should say
adapted
. It's
Star Wars
.”

Madame stared at the wafer half in my hand. “Why would I want that?” she sneered. “It's half-eaten already.”

“Oh, no!!” I said. “I would NEVER do that! I broke it in half!” I was horrified. But how could I prove it? “Wait—I can show you. The other half matches! Just a minute—you'll see.” I ran back to my desk, grabbed the other wafer half, and flew past the tadpoles back to Madame. “SEE??” I shouted, pressing the halves together. “Just like Little Orphan Annie's locket!!” With that, I put her wafer half back on her desk.

“So,” I continued. “Can I hold auditions for my play at lunch today? I was going to do it at home and have a penny carnival, but the kids in my neighborhood are ANIMALS!!”

Madame reached out her hand, extended a long, contemptuous index finger, pressed her Lee Press-On nail onto the loathsome wafer, and slid it to the front edge of her desk. Then she looked at me and said, “Whatever.” (Note: Mme. Misbet, if you are reading this, please know that at the time I thought you were just acting like a French Canadian, but now, as an adult with some time to reflect, I know you were also one crazy bitch.)

“EVERYONE!!”

It was midway through the lunch break, before recess, and I was standing in front of my classmates, who were all busy talking and stuffing their faces with ham sandwiches, peanut butter sandwiches, and Lunchables packed by parents who just didn't give a shit. I climbed up on a chair in front of the chalkboard and—in a move that would sacrifice everything I believed was good and true—dragged my nails across the chalkboard to get my classmates' attention.

“AHHH!!!” A wave of horror echoed through two dozen children as they all froze in place and looked at me. I'd won, but I'd also just cut two years off my life.

“Thanks. I'm holding auditions today for my production of
Star Wars
. I'm pretty sure Principal Everly will be into this idea, so we should be able to perform it for the school during an assembly. Please sign this sheet and let me know what character from
Star Wars
you'll be trying out for.”

A hand shot up.

“Yes?”

It was Earl, the biggest kid in our class. He was so big that, on the first day of school, he sat down on his desk and broke it in half, sending him crashing onto the floor with a deafening thud. I'm not even kidding—and it should be entirely illegal that that incident isn't on video. Earl wasn't fat, just man-sized. I loved him because he was an instant character. He was just
more
than the other kids.

“Uh, I haven't seen
Star Wars
,” said Earl the boy-man mountain. “I don't know who to audition for.”

My mouth fell open. “What's wrong with your parents, Earl? You haven't seen
Star Wars
?!”

He shrugged.

I sighed. “You can audition for Chewbacca,” I decided. “His character is pretty much one-dimensional. You'll get it.” I looked around the class. “Anyone else?”

From a far corner of the room came a sound. It was our fifth grade lunch monitors, starting to giggle.

A bit of background: our school didn't have a cafeteria, so for lunch kids had to stay in their classroom and eat. Throughout the lunch period, three “mom volunteers” went from class to class to keep an eye on everyone. And the fifth and sixth grade students were assigned to sit with the younger kids, monitoring them, presumably because they were more responsible than we were.

And now ours were laughing at me.

I put on my game face.

“Did you have a question about auditioning?” I asked. “You guys can audition if you want to, even though you're, like, a foot taller than us. You could be extra Wookiees.”

With that, the girls burst out laughing—and my tenuous hold over the rest of the class went up in flames.

As the other kids went back to talking and eating, the two older girls walked toward me. I hopped down from the chair, and they walked right up to me, so close I could see the pores on their little prepubescent faces.

“What's wrong with you?” said one of the girls—the one with the My Little Pony sweatshirt. God, I loved that sweatshirt. My mom wouldn't let me wear commercial products or logos.

Nothing came out of my mouth. She gave me the stink eye.

“Are you looking at my boobs?” she said.

“
No!
” I shouted. “I just like your shirt. My Little Ponies are great.”

“Oh,” she said in a mocking tone, but I wasn't really clueing in. “I like your shirt too.”

“Thanks! It's not really a shirt, though. It's a fisherman's sweater. The tooth fairy left it for me.”

Her friend laughed again. And I joined in and started laughing right along with them. We were all feeling pretty hilarious—until I realized they were getting mad.

I wasn't socialized enough to understand what was happening here. I was six years old. As far as I knew, everyone was my friend. Even Damon, the boy who hated girls, who'd put on a clean white shirt to come to my house. I didn't know about schoolyard bullies. I hadn't seen those movies yet.

The girls stepped into me, and I had to back up because they kept stepping into me, and finally they had me back against the far left-hand corner of the front of my class, right beside the pencil-sharpening station. I could smell the shavings because my sense of smell is very keen.

“Who do you think you are,” My Little Pony girl spat in my face, “queen of the world or something?”

Queen of the world?

“No,” I said, though I wasn't sure, because I had
no
idea what she was talking about.

“You think you're queen of the world with your stupid play? Well, you aren't. Your glasses make your eyes look huge.”

That was it. I walked out of my classroom, down the hall, and straight to the office.

When I got there, another fifth grader was manning the secretary's desk while the secretary was at lunch. (In retrospect, either my school had NO MONEY for support staff, or my school was run by Wes Anderson.)

“I need to use the phone. Now!” I said.

“What for?” the boy asked, trying to look official and sitting up straight in the giant secretary chair, swiveling slightly back and forth.

“I need the phone, now!” I said. “Don't make me say it again.”

The boy turned the phone around and pushed it toward me.

I picked up the receiver and dialed my home number.

“Mom? Remember how you thought I should try putting on
Star Wars
at school?”

“Oh my God!” she said. “Do you have a sore throat? Do you think it's strep? I'll come and get you and take you to Dr. Cotton right away.”

“No. Mom. I'm fine. I'm calling about my play! You told me to do the auditions here, remember?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that was a bad idea.”

“Why?”

“Mme. Misbet didn't help me at all and her press-on nails are gross! I had to scrape my fingernails across the board to get attention! Some kids haven't seen
Star Wars
! Some older girls asked me if I thought I was queen of the world or something, and said I have huge eyes, and all just because I was holding auditions! I want to come home.
Nothing is perfect.
”

“Kelly, you can't come home.”

“But everything is terrible! All the kids are laughing at me, and the teacher thinks I'm gross, and I'm not going to be able to do my play!” It was bad enough having to downscale from a profitable penny carnival to a pro bono school production. But getting bullied by a pair of fifth graders? “It's just not worth it. This was a dumb idea. I'm just a kid. I hate being a little kid.”

“Wait—what do you mean, your teacher thinks you're gross?”

“I broke a cookie in half and gave her half, and she looked disgusted and said, ‘Why would I eat that? You ate half of it.' Like I was some kind of animal.”

“That isn't nice at all! Is she always like this?”

“Yeah, I guess. She's pretty harsh. But she's French Canadian. She can't help but yell and wear
ceinture fléchées
and talk about maple syrup.”

“Kelly, I think this is why you got that stomach ulcer earlier this year! Your teacher is stressing you out. I'm going to come down there and talk to her. Do you want me to come down? I can. How can she call herself an educator?!”

“She doesn't. She calls herself
une professeuse
. And I'm upset about the play, not her. And my ulcer is gone as far as I know.”

“You were the only diagnosed ulcer case for a six-year-old in the entire country.”

“I'm not sick, Mom.”

She paused. “Kelly, I don't want you to get another ulcer. But you can't just come home because things aren't going your way. You just have to ignore these people who are getting you down. Don't let them get to you. You're sweet for offering your teacher the cookie, and you're innovative for trying to turn a movie into a play for your friends to star in. You aren't doing anything wrong. Hey, remember when you went to Montessori kindergarten when you were four?”

“Yeah, for half a day. And . . . I called Dad to pick me up!” I stomped my foot on the office floor. “I should have called him instead of you.
He
would have come here right now to pick me up.”

“No. That's not my point. My point is this: when you were only four years old, on your first day of school away from home, you stood your ground. Do you remember what you did?”

I sighed. “Yeah. They wanted me to take a nap with the rest of the kids, and I told them I didn't nap, and then they said I couldn't be there if I wouldn't nap with the other kids, so I told them I needed a phone and I called Dad and he picked me up.”

“Right. So you see?”

“No. You
picked me up
that time. Why not now?”

“We picked you up then because you were standing your ground. You weren't running away or buckling to pressure. If you had laid down and pretended to sleep, that wouldn't have been
you
. Telling your teachers you had to leave—that was
you
. Me coming to pick you up because of this queen-of-the-world thing is not you. You are queen of your world. Everyone is queen of their own world.”

“Even Dad?”

“Even Dad.”

The second I walked back into my classroom, I heard the voice I dreaded.

“Kelly, come to my desk.” Mme. Misbet was back. “Where were you? The lunch supervisors told me you ran out without asking for permission.”

I positioned myself so that I didn't have to look at the tadpoles next to her desk. “The supervisors were being mean to me,” I said, forcing myself to make direct eye contact.

“I think you're lying,” she snapped. “I think you're making excuses for your behavior.”

I took a deep breath—through my mouth, so I wouldn't smell the tadpoles. “My behavior? What did I do?”

“You left the classroom without asking. And apparently you tried to get the class to participate in some sort of a play? Without permission you did this.”

“I asked you to help me with the play and you wouldn't. You didn't tell me I couldn't do the play.” I looked down at the wafer cookie, still on her desk.

And then, suddenly, I realized what my mom was talking about: as long as I wasn't doing something wrong, I could just be myself. Some people just weren't going to listen, weren't going to understand, and that was fine, as long as I didn't take it personally.

“Don't you have anything to say for yourself?” she asked.

“No,” I said. Then, in one giant adrenaline rush, I picked the wafer cookie half off her desk, shoved it into my mouth, and said, “Your tadpoles are disgusting.”

That's what the queen of the world would have done.

SHE'S A
DARLING,
SHE'S A
DEMON,
SHE'S A LAMB

A. REAL. JOB.

It was February, and I was ready to break some news to my peers—news that I was
way
more sophisticated and ready for life than they were. I stood up on the lost-and-found box and casually leaned against the ice cream machine.

“Guys, I got a job. You can add
employee
to the long list of things I am!”

My quiet but thoughtful friend Arif, who always seemed to wear proper dress pants, shook his head.

“No. Nope! You're thirteen. You can't work.” His arm shot out for emphasis. “TOTALLY ILLEGAL!”

“I'm
not even
thirteen!” I eagerly corrected. “I'm twelve.”

I sat down on the lost-and-found box beside Aimee. If I had a best friend, Aimee was the closest thing to it. She was a lot like me: underdeveloped, brunette, and loud. Together we looked like cloned prepubescent Winona Ryders with hyperactivity disorders. From a distance, the only way to distinguish us was the pair of giant glasses on my face.