Beatle

Chapter 1 (Continued)

Here's some more of Chapter 1:

      About two years had passed since that phone call, putting the date at around May of 1957.  As the school year slowly edged to a close, I couldn’t have been more relieved.  School was never much of a challenge or hassle for me, so I had no trouble with the academic aspects of it; it was all the social problems of seventh grade that I had to deal with, of girls who I thought were my friends turning on me, whispering secrets to each other behind their hands and giggling together at some exclusive joke that I obviously wasn’t in on.  My mother, who I confided in in the beginning, was never much help, telling me to “just ignore them and they’ll stop eventually.”  Obviously she had forgotten how the seventh grade dynamic worked, about how popularity determined your happiness and how there were some people that could make your life hell if something displeased them.

          Meredith Coolidge, my friend since second grade, was a perfectly nice girl at the beginning who turned positively nasty once we turned thirteen. She was of medium height, with perfect curly blonde hair and spotless pink poodle skirts with the saddle shoes I wanted desperately.  She always had a fake, overdone smile on her face, with a much too loud laugh so that when she laughed, everyone heard and everyone wished they were in on the joke. She had been popular when she was younger, but my group of friends wasn’t all that popular, so when she joined us, it instinctively became her duty to tell us all what to do. As an unsaid law, Meredith was the best at everything, was always the prettiest one out of all of us (and never let us forget it) and was the boss, in charge of everything including who was invited to her monthly socials, exclusively attended by only her closest friends, or those of whom put up with her to get into her parties but never told her. 

          Meredith also was dating the most popular boy in our grade, William Blake, a football player who Meredith was always at the games cheerleading for.  It seemed to fit, the most perfect boy dating the most perfect girl.  They were the envy of everyone, and Meredith knew it. William was tall with blonde hair that he slicked back in a fashionable look, always wearing his horn-rimmed reading glasses that he was blind without.   Despite the fact that they were very young when they first started to date, Meredith and William were very serious for the entire year, kissing in the hallways before class for abnormally long amounts of time, and holding hands everywhere they went.   

         They were sweet together, and I would have been happy for them except for the fact that a, even when Meredith was with William she was just as catty as with us, yet William saw right through that, infuriating me to no end, and b, I had just started to crush on William right before he and Meredith started to date.  And it wasn’t like he was much more popular than me and would never talk to me; William and I had been friends just as long as I had been friends with Meredith , it’s just that he got popular once we got to junior high and I didn’t.  We still talked in the hallways between class (when he wasn’t kissing Meredith) and walked home together after school (with Meredith, of course).  By the end of the year, the two of them were going steady, and with three empty months of summer to spend with the two of them acting like lovesick dogs, I wanted to escape Melrose like no one could understand. 

           Sure I did have other friends, like Mary, who was incredibly close to Meredith along with myself, and was someone who lied often and contributed to a lot of the trouble that went on that year in junior high.  Mary was short with a fashionable bob, her hair cut with Meredith standing by telling the hairstylist what she wanted.  She was called (by myself and Catherine) the “mail girl”, someone who went back and forth delivering messages between two fighting groups, more often than not getting the message wrong or twisting the truth to fit her needs. I also had Catherine, my very best friend since the second grade who shared so many of my interests we could have been the same person.  She was my height, her blue eyes always shining beautifully against her auburn hair that I envied so much.  We stuck together as much as possible that year, for if not for Catherine I most likely wouldn’t have made it against Meredith all by myself.