They Called Me Beautiful

Three: Shadows

It was in third grade that I started going by Kate. Before then, my mom had always told everyone my name was Katherine; she wouldn’t allow me to be called anything else. But at school she couldn’t control everything; and nobody could control Maddie.

It was all her idea, of course. “Katherine takes such a long time to say,” she complained to me during a game of Hide-and-Seek. “I’m going to call you Kate.”

And she did. I don’t think I ever heard the name Katherine pass her lips after that. By the time the nickname got back to my mom, all the other school children had adopted it as well. There was no going back to Katherine after that, no matter what my mom said.

Kate was my name; it was the one Maddie had given me. Maybe that’s when I first started to admire her, not as a friend but as someone who was somehow above me. It certainly wasn’t the first time I’d felt the touch of her sunshine smile, but it was one of the most memorable.

At school our circles of acquaintance widened, and more and more I found Maddie and me playing in different groups. I liked playing with dolls; Maddie liked running around wildly outside pretending to be an Indian. We each had our own little cluster of girls to play with, but Maddie was the leader of her group, while I was just a follower.

To be truthful, I wasn’t quite sure how to play the games she did. Her imagination was limitless. In my play, all I had to do was rock my doll and pretend to feed her a bottle. Maddie created whole worlds, with complicated names for each of her playmates and plots akin to those you’d read in a book. A whole bevy of little boys would race by the swings where I’d be sitting with my doll and a few little friends, and I’d know they were wild horses, created by Maddie to be caught by her and her Indian braves. The school steps would be littered with pretty rocks and sticks tied together with grass, and Maddie would be sitting cross-legged on the cement, calling out names and prices as her friends pretended to deliberate over their purchases. Even the teacher joined in sometimes, laughing as Maddie gave her a silly Indian name and told her she was chief for the day.

I don’t remember wanting to play Maddie’s games. If I had, I’d have had that much more of a real history with her, and maybe she wouldn’t have chosen me for her best friend later on at all.

When Irene and Damian started going to school with us, things were a little more complicated. We kept on with our games, but Maddie watched out for Damian, while I did everything I could to avoid Irene. To me, younger siblings were a bother, at least at that point; to Maddie, Damian was like a pretty stone she could show off. He had her bright eyes and endless curiosity, and what’s more, what really made the difference, he adored Maddie. He would do anything she said, even if it got him in trouble.

Maddie was never malicious though; she was just thoughtless. Her older sister, Annalena, was a different story. She seemed to hate both Maddie and Damian, perhaps for entering a territory that had formerly belonged to her alone. Tyrone, of course, was still in school, but he was in high school and didn’t interact much with the younger ones. Annalena, while sharing none of Maddie’s verve, was her own type of powerful. Bossy and aggressively possessive, she kept the older girls in torment when they didn’t do what she wanted and in bliss when her eye was turned kindly upon them. I should know; Bridget suffered under her tyranny for years.

But Annalena and I didn’t have much to do with each other. The stories I heard from Maddie were much different than those Bridget told me. Maddie worshiped her older sister, no matter how mean Annalena was. I think Anna was the only one then who had that sort of powerful hold over Maddie, and she didn’t even know it.

As we got older, Maddie and Bridget started to hit it off. “Maddie’s my best friend,” Bridget told me once. I couldn’t imagine it. My coarse, unsophisticated sister best friends with the fascinating Madeleine Proctor? It didn’t fit inside my head, but I envied her all the same. When Maddie came over to play, she played with Bridget, and I was lucky to be included in their long jaunts through the woods.