I Was That Kid

     Not long ago, I was pouring orange juice and looking back on my wild youth. The first grade was an especially dangerous time. The kendama of the day was Betty Spaghetti, collectible bendy dolls with long rope hair from McDonald's. There were three different dolls, and I had all of them, as did most of the other girls in the class, except for the girls who always went to Wendy's. Every day, everyone would bring their dolls and play. The three bossiest girls would make the others go away, since there were only three different dolls, and two of one kind was forbidden. The bossiest of these girls always got the pink doll, whom we named Miranda (I always got the blue one, which I named Kitty). Then, we would play. It would begin with Miranda and her posse, Kitty and Hannah, having food and talking about boys. Miranda would then tell us we were going shopping at the imaginary mall, and btw guys, Kitty and Hannah were paying for all of it because Miranda was nice enough to be their friend. Kitty and Hannah promptly staged a coup against their tyrannical BFF. Without fail, whoever had the Miranda doll would stop the game, take away all the dolls, and leave. She later would be taken to the principal's office for not giving the dolls back to their owners. This happened nearly every day for a week, until Betty Spaghettis were banned from the school. The dolls from Wendy's were never banned, however.There was always a war going on between the Wendy's girls and the McDonald's girls, and many of the McDonald's clan were sorely tempted to cross over. We lost a few good souls to Wendy that week. No one was safe. You had to watch yourself.

     We were all lost in our own little worlds, as many kids are. We didn't care whether we were invisible to anyone but each other. It was a fairly small PK-12 Christian school, much like the one where I attend school now. The younger students at my school are not invisible to us. If my shy, freakishly quiet first-grade self had known that the high schoolers--nay, even the third graders--were aware of my existence, I would have been mortified. I realized not long ago that not only did the entire student body know who I was, but I was also a bit infamous after certain events went down in the first grade. I was That Kid.

     As aforementioned, I was very shy and very quiet. I was short and gangly and wore clothes from Other Mothers. I had a perpetual half-asleep perma-grin and classic Smith ears. I'd also cut off most of the front of my hair when I was little, so I had massive bangs that reached halfway around my head. I was that weird little girl who'd stare into the middle distance when people talked. For illustrative purposes, here's my school picture.

     This pretty much what I looked like all the time. I could have been furious when they took that picture. Or jubilant. I wouldn't know. I only had, like, one and a half facial expressions.

     I hardly spoke to anyone except my friend Amanda, and a kid I will call TJ. TJ was a stout boy with a crew-cut and a devastating insult for anyone who happened to have the misfortune of being not TJ. Any time I spoke to him, it was to fling a stinging comeback in his direction. He deflected it by crossing his arms across his moobs and screaming "COOTIES SHIELD" at the top of his lungs.

     I mostly remember TJ because he was the first person to talk to me on the first day of school.

     This moment ignited a longstanding enmity between me and TJ that lasted for the next four years. Everyone in our class thought we were in love with each other. Looking back, I can see why. We often sat together in class, trying to one-up each others' mad RoseArt skills. Sometimes we'd "race" each other on the swings at recess, trying to reach the highest altitude first. I always insisted on being a pony/tiger during these races. We would attribute our opponent's slowness to their gender, or that they were acting like a pony/tiger and if our swings' trajectories even remotely lined up, we'd shriek, "Get out of my shower!" because it was the only true course of action one could take in such a duel.


     One one of these racing days, TJ and I noticed a group of big kids (4th graders were terrifying, tall, ancient sages to us) out with a few younger kids on the football field. Long story short, we saw some pretty aggressive physical bullying that day. I went home very upset, and my mom called the school.
     The next morning, the principal announced a rally. The entire school filed into the gym, even the junior highers and high schoolers--creatures so ancient I had actually doubted their very existence. My principal, who looked like Tammy Faye Bakker, took my hand and pulled me to my feet. She told me to point out the boys I'd seen hurting people yesterday. Everyone was watching me. I panicked. I only recognized one boy, who was sitting with two other fourth grade boys. I pointed him out.

     The principal accused all three boys of bullying and sent them to each class to apologize. I tried to tell my teacher that two of the boys had done nothing wrong. I don't think I got the point across.

     Later that day, the entire school was told to go outside and march laps around the football field for as long as the teachers thought necessary. They said it was because bullying had occurred, and that I had not only been the one to point it out, but that I had also lied about who was involved.

     Being an oblivious 6-year-old, I happily marched around and picked dandelions. It didn't occur to me that we were being punished, and that it was because of me.

     So I wasn't exactly invisible in the first grade. In fact, everyone knew who I was. I guess I had a kind of notoriety that I was unaware of until a few years ago, when I ran into TJ, my old nemesis, who told me about it. I was That Kid, who messed up everyone's day one Tuesday in October, and I didn't even know it.

     As I stood there in my kitchen with my orange juice, pondering this, my inner, shy first-grade self cringed. Then, feeling nostalgic, I pulled out my first grade pictures, and cringed again.

Words and art copyright 2013 by Sabrina Smith