My father got custody of my twin sister and me when we were twelve, in sixth grade at Perry Middle School in Perry, Ohio. He had to snatch us quickly, in the middle of the day, one of us at school, the other being kept home, while Mom wasn’t around to cause a scene. (Mom had a habit of forcing one of us to be home from school at all times to prevent said snatching, but she had gone off somewhere, leaving me alone and bored on the living room sofa, staring out the front window when dad pulled up. I fantasize what it looked like for Grace, at school. A summons from the principal’s office? Was she in English or Math? Did Dad walk her down the hallway or did he meet her out front?)
Dad took us to his efficiency apartment above abandoned storefronts on High Street in Fairport Harbor, a small Ohio town most known for its beach. We had a single box of donated clothes to wear, having not stopped to pack. It was late autumn and he enrolled us at the Fairport school, which was a step down from Perry Middle School, with its nuclear power plant money and McMansion class students. We went from having lockers and schedules and being Practically Teenagers to, well … the top grade in a 1920s brick box of an elementary school straight out of “A Christmas Story”.
I faced my new sixth grade classroom, with childish posters on the wall, an alphabet above the chalkboards for Gort’s sake, and a big banner for the Fairport Mariners and I … stuck my tongue out at it, because I knew that the truest loyalty in the world was to your public school sports teams.
Too bad the whole class full of kids was between me and that Mariner’s sign.
Look, I’m pretty sure I was awful. I complained loudly about how easy the math test was that day, a mimeographed multiple choice insult. I was learning ALGEBRA a minute ago. Everything at our old school was more expensive and nicer and challenging. There is nothing more important to a pre-teen than appearing older than you are, than achieving TEEN. Here we were shoved backwards with a bunch of kids who didn’t even know what they should have had.
We had RECESS. Fucking recess? I leaned against the brick building and played with my YoYo, too cool to deign look at the playground equipment.
The kids teased us immediately. For how we dressed (donated clothes earning us various epithets about thrift shops) and how we talked. A slight shift down I-90 and suddenly I was a valley girl? “Say ‘Totally awesome!’ Say it again! NO, say it like YOU say it!”
Something I did must have crossed a major line. There was a girl who had maybe been friendly. She’d talked with me, and she was the one who kept trying to get me to say “Totally Awesome” which I did end up doing, complete with copying the little dance-move she insisted went with the words. Arm up, arm down, head shake, “TotALy AWEsome.” I didn’t get the point, other than I was being mocked. I remembered kids at Perry trying to get the girl from South Africa to say “pip pip cheerio” and wished I’d done something to stop it.
So anyway, this girl, the Totally Awesome girl, asked if she could walk home with me this one day. It was suspicious and strange, because she’d been pushing me away and saying we weren’t friends. I ignored my suspicions and said of course.
When I stepped out of the school building that afternoon, all the kids from the entire class, and then some, a whole mob of kids, were waiting on the sidewalk, spilling out into the street, outside the playground gates. Totally Awesome Girl was at the center, by the gate, waiting with a triumphant grin, like she’d just become class president.
As usual, Grace was at my side. We were split into different classrooms – that was the rule for identical twins in Ohio. Fairport only had two sixth grade classes – and the one Grace was in was a combination fifth-and-sixth grade. (I felt sorry for her for the taint of fifth graders, but she got along better in her class than I did in mine.) We always left school a little late because we met up in the hallway before leaving, and we were both the kind to dawdle over our work.
I wrapped my arms around my books and crossed the playground. I said, “Hello,” with a little nod to Totally Awesome Girl like this was a business meeting. I walked into the midst of that crowd already knowing this was a sacrifice and I was the lamb. The first shove came right away. I staggered, but made a decision, planting my feet. Grace took off running. I kept my back straight and walked forward. Slowly. They jeered and shouted and spat and pushed and I walked with deliberate stillness, one foot in front of the other, against the force of other legs and arms, like I was walking against the wind.
Grace ran a block ahead and stopped, looking back. Later she told me she was trying to WILL me to run. Why wasn’t I running?
I felt numb. It was easy not to cry. Backyard football had taught me to keep my feet when shoved, and it took a lot of concentrated effort to get me down. They achieved it twice, but I got back up unhurriedly. The only bad injury came when we passed a chain link fence and they threw me into it. A twisted, broken bit of wire stabbed my shin right on the bone. There’s still a dark divot in the skin decades later. I wanted worse injuries. To show how brave I was being. They declined to give them to me.
I dragged my own personal crowd, my own whirl of violence, steadily homeward, while Grace ran ahead one block at a time, looking back.
Kids dropped away as I crossed High Street and made it another block, and another. I remember some boys looking frustrated, like they’d invited me to play a game and I’d coldly refused. Soon it was a small cadre of girls. Totally Awesome Girl was the last to give up, when I was within sight of the apartment. Grace was waiting for me, outside the apartment building, poised like she was unsure whether to lead me up the stairs or come to my aid. In the end, she didn’t have to.
At the time, I believed I hadn’t cried. Now I’m not so sure I looked as stoic as I thought I did. But I felt fierce, ugly pride in what I had done, how I had passively beaten an entire mob.
The next day, Grace was afraid to go back to school, but for me, the affair was done. They couldn’t bring anything more against me. I felt powerful and eager for worse.
Worse didn’t come. By New Year’s we were back in our own house in Perry, my mother having been evicted, and my biggest sorrow was how they didn’t put our pictures in the school year book because we had missed picture day and they didn’t know we would be coming back.
