Freaky Little Tribesmen

I was always immensely relieved when Sweetheart climbed into bed with me. I was more afraid of the dark at that point in my life than I had ever been. I spent so many of my days in the dark that I should have been used to it, but I never adjusted. There was something about nighttime darkness that made it extra scary, more frightening than even the basement was. In the nighttime darkness, the house was quiet except for the box fans that rattled in the summer to keep the house cool. My old fear of being abandoned resurfaced, and I’d watch the doorway for hours to make sure my family wouldn’t sneak away and leave me using all that noise for cover. That they would never simply drop their home and all their belongings just to get away from me hardly even entered my head as a glimmer of an idea: if I was as horrible as my mother said, why wouldn’t they want to leave? My greatest fear was waking up one morning to find the beds empty and everyone gone, never to be found again.

My paranoia manufactured other dangers, too: bad men in the doorway that would swarm me and cut my throat if I closed my eyes; creatures under the bed waiting to grab me by the arm and drag me down to eat me up if I slept too close to the edge; phantoms in the corners that would swoop down to strangle me if I fell asleep. I became convinced that there was someone waiting outside my window with a rifle to shoot me dead if I moved. Somehow I got the idea that bullets could not go through blankets, so I wrapped myself up so tightly I could barely catch a breath. Even in the summer I huddled under a comforter, sweating till I was limp and sick. Only my head poked out, eyes roving the room in endless circuits: doorway, corners, closet, window, back to the doorway.

I’d have curled up at the foot of the bed to hide if I had been able, but this was prevented by medical equipment: after my surgery, I spent several months wearing what I called “night braces.” They were two thick sleeves that went from the thigh to right below the knee and buckled tight with a row of Velcro straps up the front. Once I had strapped them on, I slid my legs into two grooves carved one into each side of a blue foam block, and then I secured my legs to this block with thick strips of foam that went up along the sides and fastened to the top. The purpose of the block was to hold my legs wide enough apart to stretch the muscles I’d had fixed in my hips, and the two individual braces prevented me from bending my knees to ease the pull. It was a horridly uncomfortable arrangement. My muscles hurt. My legs itched. The foam block was as high and unyielding as a mountain; I couldn’t have rolled over if I’d wanted to, not without first removing the block and then strapping it back on. I was a huge bump in the bed. I was an easy target. I practically screamed: “I’m here! Right here! Come and kill me!”

I hardly ever slept. I was so thoroughly exhausted, I began falling asleep at school.

I was in the second grade by then. My teacher was a pleasant, bespectacled older woman named Mrs. Stevens. When I’d nod off at my desk with my head pillowed on my forearm, she’d let me sleep. Several times she even stayed inside with me at recess so she wouldn’t have to rouse me. I’d wake in the afternoon when the other children came marching back in, and dutifully resume my lessons. That’s pretty much all I remember about the second grade: sleeping. I was just so tired, that whole year. So very tired.

I didn’t have a lot of friends in primary school – it’s hard to make friends when you’re asleep. It’s also hard to make friends when you’re visibly different, like I was. A pronounced limp, high leg braces, a special padded chair, even a physical therapist who came to the school once a week and took me off into a private room to undo all my kinks and smooth out all my aches and pains – to my peers, these things screamed out, This girl is a capital-F freak! I was marked. Branded. The majority of my classmates teased me mercilessly. When I walked down the hall, kids would quack at me. They hid my library books. They laughed about me behind their hands. Sometimes, one of them would decide to keep me trapped inside the bathroom during a class break and guard the door until I cried, or purposely block my entrance into the only free stall until the teacher called us to line up. I’d have to hold my bladder till I could hardly stand it and then get scolded for asking for a restroom pass when I had just been to the restroom not twenty minutes before. And I hardly ever got to play anything fun when I did go to recess – nobody wanted me on their kickball or softball team because I would make them lose. If I joined in a game of Tag, I was unceasingly It. The little brats would taunt me by coming just within reach and then leaping out of the way seconds before I touched them, jeering and pulling ugly faces. It hurt me so much that eventually I stopped trying to play and sat off by myself, reading a book.

Enter my fellow freaks. I don’t mean to offend any of them by saying that – a few of them are my very good friends to this day. But when you put the limping kid, the God-obsessed kid, the WWF wrestling fanatic with a particular liking for off-color jokes and the girl who has always secretly desired to be a cat into the same little group and plop them down on an elementary school playground, what you get is that band of weirdoes on the bottom of the social totem pole. Over time we acquired other drifting, outcast souls: transfer students, band geeks, kids who couldn’t break into the It crowd because they were overweight or liked the wrong boys or had the wrong clothes or a multitude of other social sins as determined by the ruling-class kids, the kids with all the power, the kids who dominated the hallways and the playground and the classroom and had some unspoken permission to make everyone else’s life miserable. The Haves and the Have-Nots have always existed in this manner, in every school that’s ever been, anywhere in the world. We were the Have-Nots; it was that simple. But what we did have was each other, and we stuck together – a little tribe of castaways making ourselves at home in the borderlands.

I don’t remember precisely when Danielle became my best friend. I know it wasn’t anytime during that second grade year, when I could barely stay awake long enough to account for my presence at roll call, but I know it happened. Certainly we were close by the time we hit the seventh grade, and by sophomore year we were practically joined at the hip in the particular way that adolescent girls bond, with equal parts of love and jealousy and a loyalty so solid it is very nearly fierce.

Danielle helped me have some semblance of an ordinary adolescent’s life. On sleepovers at her house, we’d smack each other’s hands in a bowl of cheddar popcorn and laugh over stupid movies till we cried. One night in early Spring, when the snow had scarcely melted off the grass, we put on bikinis and rigged the water hose to the porch as a sprinkler, then took turns dashing through the spray. Our giddy screaming turned to narratives of steamy porn-film shower scenes, complete with slurping, kissing noises. When we finally trooped back inside, throats raw from laughter, covered in grass clippings because the lawn had been mowed that morning and pocked with goose bumps, Danielle’s mother revealed that she had taped the entire thing from the second-floor balcony. Scandalized, we made off with the evidence. We vowed to destroy it. While we sat there on the bed with the tape between us, trying to figure out what to do with it, it occurred to us that we simply could not banish it without watching it at least once. So we did. And then we watched it again, and then again, and then again, till we had seen it so much we could quote one another. We giggled and kicked and shrieked. We swore eternal embarrassment. Then we decided to keep it, and Danielle probably still has it to this day.

Dani snuck me out when I wasn’t supposed to be out, just to keep me sane. On the relatively few nights I was permitted to stay with her, my mother would order me to stay at the house and not go anywhere else, period. No fast food. No Blockbuster. No drives for the hell of it. Danielle decided this was bullshit. Against my fear of being caught, I’d go out with her to a nearby playground and we’d play on the swings and climb all over the equipment like little kids. She’d take me to Wal-Mart to buy things I needed that my mother wouldn’t let me have, like Icy-Hot and Poise, and then keep them in her car and bring me a short-term supply every morning at school. One night, she dragged me to the theater a few towns over to see Monsters, Inc.

I only say “dragged” because I was paranoid of being found out. I wanted to go to the movie, if only to rebel, to do something I wasn’t supposed to do: I was seventeen and had never been to a mall or a theater or an ice cream place with a group of friends. I went only to their houses; that was it – and it was rare. When my friends got together I had to stay home, chafing under a load of chores like Cinderella before the ball. Going to a movie just to go, just because I wanted to and I could, was an absolutely exotic idea to me. You could’ve put me on a plane to Calcutta and I would have felt exactly the same way I did at the prospect of walking into a theater with Danielle: excited. Elated. Terrified.

I had lived my life so haunted by the way my mother seemed to know everything I ever did, thought, or dreamed about doing without ever being told that I was half-convinced she was omniscient. I couldn’t shake the idea that she would somehow sense my disobedience, that she would know about it the second I stepped out the door. Then she’d call to check on my whereabouts, and Danielle’s mother would tell her we’d gone to the movies – after which I’d never be allowed to leave the house again for as long as I lived, a consequence preceded by violent and possibly bloody punishment. My fear of this scenario had a life of its own. I almost didn’t go. I almost begged my best friend not to insist upon going anywhere public with me, ever. But in the end, rebellion won: I wanted a life too, damn it. I wanted a little freedom. And if I had to pay for it with my skin, so be it – I’d pay. We went to the movie.

It was exhilarating. I felt so alive. To say that sitting in a stadium seat staring at a screen made me feel alive sounds absolutely pathetic. But there I was, at a movie with my best friend, pointing and laughing and whispering and fighting over popcorn – I was doing those things. Me. I was out. I had slipped my leash. I was giddy with excitement; the world felt bigger, I felt taller, I thought that if I took a breath deep enough, I could suck up every atom of possibility that had ever existed. I almost felt detached from myself, as if nothing about that night could possibly really be happening and I was watching someone else have fun. That night, a rebel was born: if this is freedom, give me more.

In so many ways, that little taste of what it felt like to be untethered made the next year so much harder for me than it would have been otherwise, because I just couldn’t fathom giving it up. Forcing myself to submit to perfect obedience and the same old fear and helplessness I had always walked under almost tore me apart after that. But it was worth it, too, because it showed me what I could have instead of terror and helplessness and depression. It made life outside of those things real. It gave me something to live for, something to leave for. Way back in second grade, I never dreamed that I’d ever get out. The days ahead of me all looked the same. The days behind me all looked the same. I didn’t really know that there was anything else for me. I certainly never thought that sneaking out to a children’s movie would give me a reason to keep fighting, and that it would all come about because I was accepted into a group of misfit kids on a playground one day when I was eight. The universe works its magic well.