They Called Me Beautiful

Four: Losing Maddie

Watching Maddie grow up without me hurt. We still played together sometimes. She’d have me over or she’d come to my house, but whenever Bridget was around, I always ended up being left out. They’d pretend to be great hunters and go off in the woods while I had to stay “home” and keep the fire going to cook the meat when they got back. Bridget could jabber a mile a minute, just like Maddie, but I rarely had anything to say. Even if I did, it got easily lost in the loud jumble of their confident voices and ready laughs.

I knew I was losing her, but I didn’t know what to do about it. I was only eleven. What did I know about relationships? All I wanted at that point was someone to play with, someone to share secrets with.

So I made up my own world. My friends were paper dolls I’d cut out of magazines. Their lives, their conversations and problems, became everything to me. Even when Maddie came over, I’d be wrapped up in them. I could play for hours on my bedroom floor, whispering dialogue and moving dolls from one piece of play furniture to the next.

“I’m going outside, he said,” I’d say, picking up a doll named Arthur and bobbing it across the carpet and through the gap in the Lincoln logs.

“You don’t have to say ‘he said,’” Maddie would tell me. “Cause you’re making him say it, so it’s obvious.”

I didn’t care. What Maddie said didn’t matter here. It didn’t matter that she thought my games were babyish and boring. It didn’t matter that she played them horribly. I’d finally found a way of blocking her out.

But it didn’t last. I had to grow up sometime, and when I did, I wanted her. We were twelve by then and had both started our periods. It wasn’t something we talked about, being chaste little Mennonite girls, but she walked into the bathroom at school one day and heard me crying in one of the stalls.

“What’s wrong, Kate?” she asked, taking the stall next to mine.

It was like a sunbeam in the midst of a storm, hearing the concern in her voice, and even though I was painfully embarrassed I told her I had cramps.

“Annalena gets them really bad all the time,” she said. “But I haven’t ever gotten them.”

I wondered if she really was an angel. It wasn’t fair, the way she floated through life. Once she even confided to me that she sometimes thought maybe she was actually a princess because of the way grown-ups respected, even almost feared, her. I didn’t tell her that’s just the way she was; I thought she might be a princess, too. She certainly should have been.

She and Janae even had a game they played in which they were princesses living in a palace. They had handsome brothers and very daring suitors, and when I compared their exotic games to my own exploits with my paper dolls, I felt like such a baby. I hadn’t even thought about boys except to dislike them until Maddie offhandedly mentioned that in the game she and Janae liked to play her boyfriend’s name was Kendall.

I hated him.

But it got me to thinking. What would it be like to have a real boyfriend? I wished I could ask Maddie, ask her how she knew how to pretend she had one. I even wished Leah would get a boyfriend so I could watch her with him, but Leah went off to another state to teach school instead. It wasn’t fair because Maddie had Cass and her many boyfriends to observe and copy.

“Damian said Allen asked him if I liked him,” Maddie told me one day. “I kind of did, but I don’t now that he asked, so I said no.” Then she laughed at herself, and I couldn’t imagine being as free as she was. I just wondered if anyone cared whether I liked them or not.

The only boys I knew were either mean to me or ignored me. I’ll never forget those times I was picked last for games at school or scowled at when I came to join a team. Once one of the boys even spat on the ground as I walked over. I knew he thought with me on his team he’d lose, and I began to think things like that myself.