They Called Me Beautiful

Two: My Angel Maddie

Until last year, I never knew a world in which Maddie didn’t exist. She beat me into it by seven months, from October of ’91 to May of ’92. Our moms were good friends, so I’m sure we had play dates from little up. I don’t remember back then though. It’s strange to me to think of Maddie being helpless and vulnerable, dirtying diapers and crying when she fell down. It’s stranger to imagine me being right there with her, following her around no doubt, even at that age.

Our families were close. We had the same number of siblings, two sisters and a brother. My oldest sister, Leah, was best friends with Maddie’s oldest sister, Cassandra. Our brothers, my Stefan and her Tyrone, used to spend hours playing Flight Simulator at each other’s houses. My next oldest sister, Bridget, didn’t get along too well with hers, Annalena, but sometimes they’d make play at being friends. And later, when Maddie was two and I was almost, along came the last two members of both our families. My sister, Irene, made her appearance only a couple months before Maddie’s little brother, Damian, made his, and the two of them were at odds ever after that.

Maddie used to laugh at them, especially after they entered the youth group and started making their own attempts to grow up. “Damian thinks he’s all that, and Irene can’t wait to put him in his place,” she told me once after a particularly ugly showdown.

But I never found any amusement in their bickering. I knew the reason Irene pretended she couldn’t stand Damian; she loved him. I could never understand why. He always annoyed me, like a boy version of Maddie, without the humor, without the electric personality, but with base replicas of her radiance. But Irene loved him, and he never returned the favor.

That made me hate him all the more.

But I couldn’t go telling Maddie that. So I laughed along with her, like everyone did.

She was always like that, from little up. She knew what people wanted, and she gave it to them, even if she hurt herself in the process. It was like she thought the rest of us were better than her, that her own needs and desires had to come second to everyone else’s. It sounds good, saying it like that, but I knew how wearing it was on her. And how detrimental.

If she could only have truly been the girl everyone else saw, she would have been the closest thing to an angel on earth. But strangely enough, I was the only one who thought of her as an angel, and I was the one who knew her the best.

She wasn’t always dark. No one is. I remember going to the preschool Sunday school class with her, and she was the one forever trying to get our teacher to let us sing one more song. She loved to sing. A happy little hum was most often the indication that Maddie was coming.

When we played with our dolls, she’d make them sing, no matter what they were doing. Once we were having a pretend funeral for one of the boy dolls, and she started humming a sad little ditty. I asked her why she was singing at a funeral. We were still young enough not to have been to an actual funeral before, and I couldn’t figure out why anyone would sing when they were so sad.

“It makes me feel better,” she said simply. “Maybe it’ll make the dolls feel better, too.”

So I joined her. That was just an early indication of what our later lives would be like: Maddie taking the lead, me following docilely. She always seemed to know what she was doing, while I was the one standing around waiting to take a cue from someone. Most often, my cues came from Maddie.

“Let’s hide from the cars,” she’d say after church, and we’d dive behind the steps every time we heard a car coming. My heart always pounded when we played that game, and sometimes we’d giggle so hard my chest would hurt.

Life was never dull with Maddie. And at first, there was no one that could come between us. She was my closest friend, and I was hers, before we even knew what real friendships were.

Our early school days together were happy ones. I was the only one who knew that Maddie still wet her bed. She was the only one who knew I was terrified of germs, being hit by lightning, and pretty much anything else remotely scary. We were good for each other, in the beginning.

Almost like equals we were, for the only time in our lives.

I think the first time I realized she was different from me, better than me, was at her seventh birthday party. I was at her house, along with a bunch of other little girls, to play games and eat cake and ice cream. She had the cutest pink elephant cake that her mom had decorated, and it made me sad to watch her mom slice it up for us to eat. It tasted as good as it looked, and we all got a big scoop of vanilla ice cream to top it off.

As Maddie helped Cass dish out the ice cream, I saw her lick off one of her fingers and then place it on the lip of the bowl she was ready to hand to me. I felt sick to my stomach as I took it from her.

Five minutes later, everyone else was done eating and ready to go play some more, but I was still sitting there staring at my ice cream. Maddie’s mom bent down beside me and quietly asked if something was wrong.

I started crying; Maddie was watching me. “You don’t have to eat it, Katherine,” she said. I cried harder as she tried to take it away.

“Do you want it?” her mom asked. She must have been frustrated, but she didn’t show it.

I nodded, finally blubbering out what the problem was. “But Maddie licked her finger and touched the bowl with it.”

Neither of them seemed to understand my phobia of germs, but Maddie’s mom graciously got me another bowl of ice cream. Such a small thing, but it disturbed me greatly and served to widen the already budding divide between me and Madeleine Proctor.

Maddie seemed to grow up faster than I did, and it wasn’t just the slight age gap. Her oldest sister Cass ran away from home when Maddie and I were seven. That did something to Maddie, not that I noticed it while it was happening. She probably didn’t either. But I have to wonder now if that’s what opened the gaping hole in her chest, the one only I saw.

Cass came back, after a few years, even became Mennonite again, but only after drugs had wasted her body and two children demanded her attention. Maddie was never embarrassed by her, even when she was out in the world.

Remembering it now breaks my heart, the way Maddie would raise her little hand at school and ask the teacher to pray for Cassie. I didn’t think of it then. I was too young, and my own sister Leah was such a straight and simple Mennonite that I could never imagine her being like Cass.

I just tried to keep up with Maddie as best as I could, but if I had been able to analyze the situation, I would have known that our idyllic friendship was fated to be short-lived. She was Madeleine Proctor, after all, and I was just Katherine Hershberger.