Popular

The popular girls pushed two lunch tables together and wore white t-shirts on class picture day so everybody knew they were friends. I was an expert on their lives: when Lucy K. started peeling the stickers off her oranges and sticking them on her Spanish binder, I started doing it too. But I did it at home so she wouldn’t know I was copying her. It was seventh grade.

They were like collector dolls, the popular girls. Each one had a different talent. There was the blond soccer star and the one who was almost cast as Cosette in Les Miserables. The good dresser. But the one thing they had in common was that they were all beautiful and they were all hard to talk to. “G-d made a mistake when he made Jessica pretty,” I wrote in my diary (4/15/91). “She is really mean. If I were pretty I would be nice to people and I wouldn’t talk about my sleepover party in homeroom so everybody who wasn’t invited had to hear about it.”

Most of my hostility was directed at Olivia and Betsy, my best friends who I transferred to public school with in the seventh grade. They were supposed to let me tag along and make it okay for the other girls to like me.

But on the first day, Olivia stopped me when I tried to sit with her in cafeteria.

“What are you doing, Rach?” She asked. “It’s sort of crowded here.”

“But I don’t know anyone,” I said. “Please.”

Just one week earlier, we had peeled cucumber masks off each others’ faces in her bedroom.

Finally she slid over. But only after she sighed loudly.

“I have Mr. G for math,” I said, unwrapping my sandwich. “He’s a nightmare. Does anybody else have him?”

When I looked up, everyone was staring.

“Um, sorry,” Jessica said, raising her eyebrows a little. “We were sort of talking about something.”

What they were talking about, was a mother-daughter shopping trip to New York City.  And now matter how hard I laughed or nodded or agreed nobody invited me to come along.

Afterward? I wrote Jessica A NOTE apologizing for interrupting her. A note. I told her I loved her dangly earrings. Then I wrote Olivia thanking her for letting me sit at the table and she responded that it was okay but I should really make an effort to branch out on my own because we were starting fresh.

I started thinking about all of this – not because I’m angry with Olivia and Betsy – but because I need to get this off my chest:

That summer I terrorized a girl named Debbie while I was at camp in Maine. I despised Debbie from the  moment I laid eyes on her: she was big all over with a frizzy chin-length tangle of black hair. Glasses that she was always leaving in the dining hall.

Her dream was to be a news anchor.

“Debbie, aren’t anchors usually little and blond?” I asked her.

My best friend Bienstock – who was in our cabin – likes to remind me of how I put Nair in Debbie’s shampoo. I feel worse about what I said to Debbie’s face. She never knew about the Nair. Her hair never fell out. It’s the stuff she might remember that is making me cry as I write this.

I have never forgiven myself.

And while I can’t go back – I can do this: I can be careful not to treat people badly because I am feeling badly about myself. It is hard sometimes.

At camp, Debbie shared the contraband candy that her mom sewed into the belly of a stuffed monkey. She wore a Disney t-shirt to the social. One night when I found a spider in my bed, Debbie picked it up with her fingers and brought it outside. “Charlotte’s Web!” Debbie said. “You can’t kill a spider!” That is what kind of person she was. A good one. She wasn’t popular and she didn’t care either. She is exactly who I want to be friends with.

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My favorite mints.  You can eat anything & you won’t taste/or smell gross. eatwhatever

Also: If you’re in San Francisco. Moonbabycakes are to die for. better than any cupcake I’ve had in NYC

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