They Called Me Beautiful

Eight: Befriending Maddie

Over the summer, Maddie and I were drawn together in a very strange way. We both liked to sit on the steps just outside the ladies’ restroom after church let out. People were less likely to pester us there than if we stayed in the auditorium, and the last thing either of us felt like doing after church was putting on a plastic smile.

So we didn’t.

I’m not sure who started the practice of sitting on the stairs. I think I did, because I was past the point of caring what people thought when they saw me sitting there all alone. Maddie still cared, was still capable of making an effort at being normal. So when I came out of the nursery one Sunday morning and found her sitting on the steps, I was so surprised I almost turned around and left her there.

But it was Maddie after all. The girl I wanted to be like. The girl I no longer knew.

I didn’t say anything. I just sat down beside her. She glanced at me, offered a “hi,” and returned to her own dark thoughts. I did the same.

Before then, when I’d be sitting there alone, sometimes people would walk past and try to engage me in small talk, most likely feeling sorry for me. That was no longer a problem with Maddie sitting there beside me. Everyone just assumed we were talking and would leave us alone.

But it was weeks before we started talking to each other. And even then we were guarded.

“Do you ever wonder if you’re really a Christian?” I’d whisper, and she’d nod silently.

Or we’d be sitting there watching the rain outside, and she’d lean forward and brush off the tops of her shoes and ask me, “Do you ever wish you weren’t Mennonite?”

Of course, I had, and I still thought a life on the outside would be simpler than one on the inside, but just the thought of leaving home, of leaving the church, scared me.

At first.

A few months of being Maddie’s friend, and my courage grew enough that I could honestly say, “I’m going to run away from home sometime.”

“Where would you go?” she’d ask, no doubt remembering where she’d run and knowing I had no such option.

I’d always shrug then. “Anywhere. Maybe California.”

She pulled out of me my longing to be an artist and confided her own dream of writing novels for a living. She’d always loved writing, whether it was poetry, short stories, or essays. When she was little, her mom called her a little songbird because she always seemed to be singing, but writing was really her first love.

Maddie wrote, not because she wanted to, although she certainly delighted in every moment of it, but because she had to. “There’s so many stories in my head, Kate,” she told me once. “And sometimes I can’t sleep till I get them out. I think the day I run out of stories will be the day I die.”

In school, her papers always came back marked with an A+, and if ever a paper was read aloud to the class, it was guaranteed to be one of hers. Once we had to write what the teacher called an abstract paper. Two hundred words on a subject of our choice, but we had to treat the whole thing very abstractly. I spent half a day poring over the meaning of abstract before I had the slightest clue what he was talking about. By then, Maddie had already handed her paper in. She’d written about fall.

“Fall” by Lane Proctor

Fall isn’t supposed to have days like this, Darcy says, blandly. Fall is for rain and falling leaves and dead things.

Her musings anger the rest of us, Greg and Matt and me. How does she know what fall is for?

Maybe fall likes to play dress-up too, Little Sal suggests from her corner. Maybe she is going to dance with summer tonight.