Weirdos are Living in My House

Chapter 8 Belonging

I wasn't having a very fun time in grade six. I didn't have much to do, and I didn't know how to fix things so that I would have stuff to do. School was all right. Nobody picked on me anymore. Nobody paid much attention to me, either, and sometimes I felt invisible, but at recess and lunch I could play foursquare and Chinese jump rope or regular jump rope or concentration with the other girls if I wanted to. I wasn't good at double dutch and fell a lot, so if they were playing double dutch, sometimes I had a turn, and sometimes I sat on the steps and read my library book. The school nurse said she was going to start charging me a dime every time I came in to get hydrogen peroxide on my skinned knees. She was only joking though. It was almost worth getting skinned knees to go into her little office, and have her say "Tsk, tsk, Sarah. What are we going to do with you?"

So that was school, but after Tammy and I got bored of each other, my after schools and weekends were empty. It turned out that there were dance lessons in Vancouver, because my mom signed my sister up for creative dance, which looked like fun, but it was for little girls. I didn't know if there were lessons for big girls. I tried asking, but she just gave me one of those "don't bother me, I'm studying" looks. I wasn't very good at ballet, so maybe that was why she didn't look very hard for lessons for me, but I liked it. My brother and Shane joined Junior Forest Wardens. They had nice red shirts with badges on them, and went off to do stuff on Saturday mornings. I don't know what they did, but I was jealous that they got to do it. I mostly watched TV on Saturday mornings and bossed my little sister around, and fought with my mom about cleaning up my messy room.

I tried CGIT, and liked it a lot, but then my dad asked what it was, and I said Canadian Girls in Training, and he said "in training for what?" which was a pretty good question. It was held in a church basement, and we'd just had a missionary come in and talk to us, so I said I supposed it was in training to be a missionary, and then my dad said he didn't know much about missionaries, but didn't you have to be very religious? I had to admit, I was not very religious. I just liked to sing in the choir and be an angel in the Christmas pageant. The only time I looked at the Bible was when some other girls and I snuck onto the auditorium stage at school. We'd take the enormous Bible off the shelf of the podium, and look for the dirty or gory bits in the Old Testament, and change the bookmark so the Principal would open the Bible to that page instead of the page he was expecting to read. The Old Testament was just chock full of sex and smiting, and one of the other girls knew where all the good chapters and verses were. If I'd been changing the pages instead of standing guard, I'd have got lost in the begettings at the front of the book, and it wouldn't have been nearly as much fun.

We had Health Class in Grade Six, and saw a film of Sammy Sperm and Olivia Ovum, so I had a slightly better idea of what went on for sex, but I still thought it was revolting. I was relieved that the thing that had happened at the farm, which had seemed like such a big deal last year when I was little, was really nothing at all, and there was no way any baby would have grown in my stomach, even if stomachs were actually where babies grew. I still kept the secret though, and it still hurt. As for smiting, there was a lot of attempted smiting every day on the boy's side of the schoolyard, from what I could see from the girls side. I don't think they had any jawbones of asses to hit each other with, though. Where would they have gone to purchase the jawbone of an ass, anyway? The Bible didn't explain things like that! I asked the other girls that, and they had no idea what I was talking about or why I thought it was so funny. I had that problem a lot. I'd say something that made perfect sense to me, but that no one else got, so after a while, I just stopped talking so much. My Grandmother would never call me a chatterbox now.

The principal never did read the verses we'd found. He always turned the pages back to the New Testament and read boring parables about loaves and fishes or good Samaritans. I think he was trying to tell us to share and be nice to each other. At the end of the year, my Social Studies teacher said they weren't going to be saying the Lord's Prayer or reading Bible verses in school any more in case it offended people who had different beliefs. I don't think there were any people who had different beliefs in our school. Mrs. Parmar, my grade three teacher in Dawson Creek, was from India, but almost everyone at Sir Guy Carleton was just boring old Canadian.