They Called Me Beautiful

Thirteen: Escaping Maddie

Maddie eventually got around to apologizing to me about Canada. The only problem was, I couldn’t see any fruits from her apology. She continued hanging out with Meghan and Clara more than she hung out with me. It felt to me like she had to force herself away from them in order to be with me, and that made me not want to be with her at all. If it was going to be a drudgery to her, how could it be any fun for me?

I was determined to be cool enough for her, to keep the conversation so lively that she’d forget why she wanted to hang out with someone other than me. But it was a losing battle. I could never be as outgoing and entertaining as Meghan and Clara.

They loved to gossip, and if there was any news worth noting at church, you could count on one of them to know it. I tried not to wonder how many times my own name crossed their lips. As much as I felt invisible, I knew they saw me. I’d been Maddie’s friend, after all. But when I felt the scum of their stares glazing over me, I knew whatever dialogue followed the mention of my name was undesirable at best.

I wondered how many of my secrets Maddie had told them, maybe even just inadvertently. She loved a good story herself, though she tried to be more conscientious about not spreading rumors. I knew how she was though; some stories were just too juicy to keep from slipping out. And no doubt mine was one of them.

One Sunday evening when Millers weren’t there, Maddie and I were standing down in the church basement talking, and I foolishly mentioned that my mom thought maybe I should go somewhere to get counseling for my depression. The only reason I said it was because I wanted Maddie to shoot down my mom’s idea, to say I’d been doing so much better, to say I just needed time and a little more resolve.

But she didn’t.

“She’s right,” she said instead. “I mean, I’m not saying there’s something wrong with you. I just think you’d be a lot happier if you were able to work through some stuff.”

I couldn’t believe it. To me, that was almost an even deeper betrayal than the one I’d suffered when she’d made new friends.

It was too much to handle. I literally walked away from that conversation. She didn’t chase me down. We never discussed it again. But I wondered sometimes if she was thinking of it, just the way she’d look at me.

In September, shortly before her twenty-first birthday, she started helping out at our church school. She only went half-days, but like with everything else, I was jealous of her job. All I had to occupy myself with was a couple cleaning jobs and whatever my mom came up with at home to keep me busy.

At school Maddie was like a princess again. The children all loved her, and the high school girls confided in her. My sister Leah, the main teacher for the lower grades, said sometimes it seemed like they forgot Maddie was a teacher at all and that she needed to exert her authority more. But Maddie was the popular one; Leah was the strict one, the teacher no one crossed but no one exactly loved either.

I felt sorry for her. I knew what it was like to be living in Maddie’s shadow.

So I tried again to escape it. Our bishop, a well-moneyed and generous man, offered to pay my way and Irene’s to go to Bible school. I wasn’t entirely excited about the prospect, but Irene, who had just graduated the spring before, was thrilled.

“Think of all the new people we’ll meet, Kate, all the friends we’ll make!” she gushed.

And Maddie wouldn’t know any of them. She wouldn’t be able to steal them. She wouldn’t be able to taint their view of us. Irene and I would be able to walk into that Bible school as free as birds. We could be whoever we wanted to be.

I started to catch Irene’s enthusiasm, and by the time we packed up our things and took a plane to Pennsylvania in February of ’13, I was thinking marvelous things were about to happen. Maybe I’d be able to forget about Maddie once and for all. She could have her friends; I was about to find some of my own.

But a shy, insecure girl placed in a fast-paced, stringent environment in which she knows no one isn’t exactly a recipe for success. I wilted. I’d enrolled in two classes but ended up dropping out of one, not because the schoolwork was too hard but because the teacher was so demanding. He was the kind to pick on students and make them answer vague questions on the spot. I left his classroom in tears more than once before I finally threw in the towel.

Irene fared better than I did, but not by much. “We’re still not like everyone else,” she whispered to me in stunned confusion one evening during a girls’ party. The other girls were bouncing around in their pajamas, long hair flowing wildly, but Irene and I were still fully dressed. I especially had never been comfortable with my body, not even hidden beneath the drape of a roomy nightgown.

Her words hit me hard. We weren’t like them. It wasn’t just the people at home. It was us. We weren’t normal.

I went through a period of hating my dad because of that. I was certain his abuse and verbal degradation had played a huge part in making my sisters and me the insecure girls that we were. We didn’t know how to interact healthily with other people, especially not guys. We were afraid of who we were. Or maybe we didn’t even know who we were.

Our dreams for hordes of new friends and a greater self-esteem were dashed. We left Bible school that year with tears permanently shattered upon our eyes. It didn’t help that when we came home, Maddie wanted to hear all about it. She’d never been to Bible school, and one of the first things she asked was if I’d found any guys I liked.

Maybe if she hadn’t started out with that question I would have told her how it really was, but I still remembered her telling me maybe I should seek counseling for help with my problems. I wasn’t about to admit she was right.

So I glossed over the hard parts and tried to rave about various ones of the girls that I’d found tolerable. She looked at the pictures I brought home, commenting only that I was by far the prettiest one there. I didn’t want to hear her praises. My beauty hadn’t gained me any attention from the guys. I could count on one hand the number of guys that had talked to me, and I wouldn’t even need to use all my fingers.

“He’s kind of cute,” Maddie said, pointing to a boy who’d never talked to me but who had seemed to be trying to get a seat at my lunch table more than once.

I just shrugged. I didn’t need her putting any thoughts in my head; I was having a hard enough time already keeping them out. “He never talked to me.”

She laughed. “Did you talk to him?” That’s what she would have done. I wasn’t brave enough.

She asked me if I was glad to be home or if I missed being there.

Again, I shrugged. “I miss some things about being there, like the schedule and—”

“The volleyball?” she interrupted. She loved volleyball, but she should have known better than to ask me if I missed it. While she was the best girl player in the youth group, I was one of the worst and always seemed to make a fool of myself when we played.

“I don’t miss that.” I tried to smile. “But I think I’m glad to be back. It’s nice not to have to do schoolwork anymore.”

“If I ever go, I’ll go just for the schoolwork,” Maddie said, grinning. “The social life scares me, but I miss doing school.”

Such mindless little comments, but each one a blade piercing my heart. Better at volleyball, better at schoolwork, better at social life no matter how she dreaded it. Maddie was better than me, and my going away to Bible school had done nothing to change that.

It wasn’t fair. Even if I wanted to escape her, I couldn’t.