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Vanquishing Josie Pye

There is a crack in everything.

That’s how the light gets in.

LEONARD COHEN, “ANTHEM”

I WAS ABOUT THIRTEEN when I delved into Anne of Green Gables for the first time. I had tried reading it a couple of years earlier, but Maud’s sophisticated language and thousand-dollar words were too rich for me then. People regard Anne as a children’s book, but really, it’s well suited to teenagers and adults. It wasn’t until years later after a couple of rereadings that I grasped the orphan connection, but I did feel an instant affinity as a young teen to dramatic, dreamy Anne. I adored Matthew’s gentle, fatherly ways and rued the fact that I had not been born during the Victorian era and that Gilbert Blythe did not attend my school, the Mennonite Brethren Collegiate Institute. I also felt a strong kinship to Anne’s loyal best friend, Diana Barry.

I, too, had experienced the mercy and shelter of a bosom friend. Lori, my best friend from kindergarten through sixth grade, and I were inseparable during those years. Together, we’d fly backward off the monkey bars, practice our loopy Ls in cursive while sitting in her family’s pop-up trailer, and watch Another World in her cool basement with her mom and aunts. My family called me Lori, too, so we had the same name. The two Loris belonged to each other in the extraspecial way that all first best friends do.

In seventh grade, Lori and I were set on different paths, she to the local public junior high school and I to the private Mennonite school through which my dad had paid his own way in the 1950s. I was distraught to leave Lori and my other friends, and I begged my parents to let me go on with them, but my parents held firm. They would scrape and save and do without so Dan and I could have braces on our teeth and a private Mennonite education. Eventually, Lori and I drifted apart as kids do when they go to different schools, though we were to become extremely close again as young adults.

By the time I picked up Anne’s story in a serious way, I was ready to sit at her feet and learn from a master. She could tutor me in choosing joy, grace, and dreams amid the hopeless, lonely mess my second year at MBCI was becoming. She could show me how to cope with a mean girl whose purpose in life was to make another girl’s life miserable. In grade eight, a former friend, Viola Goossen, had turned into my own personal Josie Pye. Snub by snub, jab by jab, I was shrinking into the smallness of a middle-school target girl.

The lowest moment of all came in Mr. Warkentine’s math class, my own personal dungeon. When Viola Goossen dropped her pencil case, scattering pens, pencils, and gum wrappers all over the floor near my desk, it seemed to be a chance for me to gain a shred of approval from her. Despite her protests that she could do it, I dropped to the floor and quickly scooped up all the flotsam from her case and stuffed it back in. When I looked in her dark eyes, I saw confusion and disdain, and at once I knew my social standing, which I was trying desperately to boost, had plunged even further. She sat back down at her desk, scribbled and passed a bunch of notes to her cronies, and together they whispered and whispered and whispered.

I was in the middle of an exile that lasted about six months. I didn’t know that it would ever end.

It’s true I hated Viola with the kind of bone-deep animosity that can only be bred when one junior-high girl turns on another, and then, by the power vested in her by her peers, compels the entire grade eight community to do likewise.

Far beneath the hatred was a layer where old affinity, a tiny pebble of love, lived. A pea under twenty mattresses and twenty feather beds. This made everything worse. If only I could loathe her efficiently, like clean-burning coal, without the sediments of former loyalties and attachments. But there I was, in my dungeon and other places at school, dodging emotional bayonets and wondering how things had gone so wrong between us.

Viola and I used to hold hands at the Sunday school picnic and warble “It Only Takes a Spark” side by side at Pioneer Girls. We whispered confidences after church in the lobby and at the mother/daughter banquet. Viola and I were bonded, not just because we shared a sense of humor and the inability to earn our Pioneer Girls sewing badge. We were both slap-nuts boy crazy, so that probably helped propel our friendship in childhood and repel it in junior high. What we understood about each other went deeper than crushes on the boys at our church: Viola was adopted too. On some level, we understood that we were both “other,” that we both had vaporous, exotic birth mothers out there, mothers who were not our mums. We spun a million daydreams on the same spinning wheel.

It’s a little bit tragic that Viola and I failed to make the transition from church friends to school friends. Little girls who adored each other, we could have provided such empathy and support for each other in those knotty, messy years of forging an identity. Instead, our posture upon entering the same junior high school was almost instantly that of competitors, first for boys and then for social standing.

She won—no contest. Viola was prettier than I, and she was definitely more confident. Her power was her defining quality in those years. (Where does that come from, that innate supremacy that tolerates no opposition? Why is it obeyed so unswervingly? This mean-girl thing melts my head.)

When Phoebe comes home from school with tales of so-and-so Bee-All, it makes me go all crazy Mama Bear.

“Why does Ava get to tell you that you can’t play with Brynn? Who made her the boss?”

“Why do you let Emily form a club with your friends? Who made her the boss?”

Nobody ever seems to have an answer for that question. It makes me want to stomp around and growl and throw things.

I’m dreading the middle grades for Phoebe, not because she isn’t liked by her peers, but because I know how things can go south fast with girls and friendship at that age. I’ve already comforted her too many times because of a snub or a jab.

Once she invited a girl over to make Halloween lanterns out of milk jugs (I do have my Martha moments, though they may be few and far between). The girl happened to be chummy with another classmate who lived a few doors down and asked to go see this other girl. I said yes against my better judgement. Ten minutes later, my girl came back home, slamming the door and crying her eyes out. “Nina wants to stay at Bailey’s!” she wailed.

I knew Nina wasn’t being mean, nor was Bailey. I knew that both their moms, had they figured it out, would have not been okay with Nina ditching her playdate at our house. They were good girls, with nice moms, who hadn’t meant to hurt anyone’s feelings. But oh, it stung anyway. It was just one of those times when nobody meant to pull the trigger, but my child got grazed by a bullet anyway.

I do aspire to be sanely involved in my children’s social conflicts, so I refrained from making a big deal out of it. (Actually, that’s not entirely true. I do aspire to be sanely involved, but nothing makes me crazier than when my children, especially P, get picked on, bullied, slighted, and hurt in any way. Every mother that ever lived: You feel me. I know you do.)

Maybe it bugs me so much because now I get it. Alpha girls don’t rise without our permission. When they don’t get checked, their power runs amok. Viola, for one, got no pushback from me. I unquestioningly bowed down to her and her posse for all the good it did me. Actually, it harmed me, as it does anyone who has ever curtsied to a queen bee for no reason other than not wanting to get stung.

It seems to me it started in the locker room after gym or volleyball practice, early in our first year. As I was changing my clothes, I turned to see Viola staring at me and then slowly turning her head to whisper something to her friends. They all shot looks at me and then started giggling. As a unit, they turned their backs on me and left me alone with the smell of sweat and Love’s Baby Soft.

I scrambled to get back in Viola’s good graces. In the pencil-case episode, I crawled on hands and knees, flailing to stop the walls that were forming around me, forcing me out and pushing me down. And while nobody ever physically pushed me or shoved me up into the lockers and spit in my face, emotionally, my head was throbbing, and there was spit and mascara running down my cheek.

Viola was telling people I was a big, fat liar—which I was at the time. Looking back, I see that exaggerating was a way for me to try to curry favor from my peers. Lies appealed to me like candy, while the truth of who I was sat like a stone.

Not pretty enough.

Not cool enough.

Not lovable enough.

Not wanted enough.

Not enough.

Not.

Invisible.

I let the cracks do the talking then. There are cracks in everything, you know. We all have them upon birth. I happened to have an extra set, the fracture from the loss of my original family, the hurt that would kick up and give me trouble from time to time. Most people—especially adoptive parents—do not like to acknowledge the cracks. They don’t want to think about the loss, because what exactly was lost? They picture their baby abandoned on a doorstep in China or languishing in an overstuffed orphanage in Ukraine. They imagine their child’s birth parents—so messed up, drug-addled, and neglectful that the state had to step in and terminate parental rights. Even if the birth parents are good, decent folk who were simply not ready to have children, it’s still hard to think of your child losing them. It’s much easier to think about all they gained, which is you and a whole world of love and security.

Carissa Woodwyk, a Korean adoptee and therapist specializing in adoption, said it perfectly to a group of adoptive moms: “Because you get to love us, we have lost the people who were supposed to love us. We lose our original family . . . and this is deep in our bones.”[24]

Deep in my bones, the cracks yawned and howled during those early junior-high months. I fantasized almost constantly about being rescued by my birth mother, even though the thought of finding her was terrifying. I’ve learned there has always been a pattern with me: Whenever my confidence and heart are at a low ebb, I wish and wonder the most about lost connections and what might have been. Being rejected by Viola—and henceforth the grade-eight powers that be—was like being kicked in a place already bruised.

They treated me as if I didn’t exist—Christian private-school bullying at its finest, by the way—which reinforced my unlovable-ness with a boot to the shin. Plain old insecurity, which descends upon both those adopted and not adopted during junior high school, didn’t help.

I’ve heard that loneliness is experienced in the same part of the brain as physical pain.[25] This is why breakups, rejections, and loss of any dear human connection hurt physically. Being bereft, left behind, and left aches for real.

I knew, in two languages, that God loved me. Gott ist die Liebe, er liebt auch mich. Jesus loves me, this I know. But that fact had yet to dig deep into my soul, as it would the following summer. Then I would take God’s hand and invite Him to pull me up, to lift my head and heart and bind them to His. Then I would submit to grace and love like a waterfall. But that shining moment of transformation, at a youth conference on the campus of the University of Manitoba, was still almost a year away.

Mind you, I was dearly loved by my parents and grandparents. My grandma Loewen was an especially adoring presence. Though she spoke German and I spoke English, I could feel her love ringing through my life like a bell. But when you’re thirteen or fourteen and your peers have rejected you, it feels like the whole world has turned against you. I was lost that year, a broken girl who felt so isolated, so far from being accepted and feeling acceptable.

Thankfully, there was no Internet. Also, I was just thirteen, still harbored by my conservative Mennonite upbringing, and I had no access whatsoever to any numbing substances. So I found comfort in three things:

And of course my literary friend and role model was there for me while I was blacklisted at school. I found a friend in Anne’s melodramatic speeches (“I am well in body although considerably rumpled up in spirit, thank you, ma’am”[26]), which gave voice to my pain. Her deep sensitivity to rejection and insult reflected my own. I clung to Anne, distracted by her hilarious capers and inspired to find hope and beauty in the cruelty of eighth grade. After all, Anne was able to put that insufferable hag, Josie Pye, in her place; maybe I could do the same with Viola. I didn’t know it would get better, that it inevitably would blow over.

Josie Pye! How I long to travel back in time and flick you on the forehead, just once. There’s nothing like a Pye Girl to bring out infantile instincts. When we consider literary mean girls, Josie is pretty high up on the list. She’s no Nellie Oleson of Little House on the Prairie fame, mind you, but she’s still pretty mean. Snooty as all get out, her uppity nose just a-sniffing for signs of weakness, Josie roams to and fro over her turf, seeking those whom she may devour.

Enter Anne Shirley, an orphan dressed in dowdy clothing so lacking by the current fashion standards of the schoolhouse that it was almost beneath Josie to take aim at this easy of a target.

Luckily for Josie, the foundling had red hair and freckles, as well as a proclivity for getting into scrapes, which provided plenty of currency for such a girl to trade on. Her feral instincts also told her that Anne Shirley was vulnerable. Mean girls can smell defenselessness a mile away.

Yet in the first duel to which we are privy, Anne came out on top, which gave me an inkling of hope that maybe I, too, could prevail one day. In Anne’s case, it was the third week of the semester at the Avonlea school, which was “set back from the road and behind it was a dusky fir wood and a brook where all the children put their bottles of milk in the morning to keep cool and sweet until dinner hour.”[27]

Our Anne had already scrabbled to near the top of the class, being whip smart and as hardworking as a lumberjack. The task at hand on this day: to go up to the blackboard and spell ebullition. (Ebullition: A no-show in my thesaurus, but upon further digging, I discovered it means “the action of bubbling or boiling,” or “a sudden outburst of emotion or violence.”[28] I think we can all agree that Maud knew this would be an important word in Anne’s life.)

Anne spelled it like the champ that she was, catching Josie stealing a look in the spelling book and unseating her as the current head of the class in one fell swoop. (Where was Mr. Phillips, the teacher, when Josie Pye was cheating? He was mooning over Prissy Andrews, his sixteen-year-old student, because of course that was totally okay. Creeper.)

These schoolroom events were a boon to me in my time of need, and I’m sure a boon to anyone who has ever endured psychological intimidation. Our very own Anne of Green Gables swept Josie Pye of Pyeville “a look of freezing scorn.”[29]

Yes, you heard it here: Anne shot her nemesis a laser of subzero disrespect. Josie’s cheeks ignited. She rose from her desk and spelled ebullition wrong, despite her peek at the spelling book. She was rattled—and it was a win for Anne!

If only that were the end of the story. If only Josie Pye were not quite so Pye, a race, according to Mrs. Rachel Lynde, whose “mission in life was to keep schoolteachers reminded that earth isn’t their home.”[30] Anne may have won a battle, but the war raged on. In fact, Anne was almost killed in the midst of it.

I speak, naturally, of the Ridgepole Incident, when Josie tauntingly dared Anne to walk the horizontal beam along the edge of Mr. Barry’s kitchen roof. Anne took the dare and then several steps before tumbling from roof to ground, shockingly un-killed but much injured in ankle and in spirit.

Anne’s excuse was as lame as her leg: She couldn’t stomach Josie Pye’s scorn. “She would have crowed over me all my life,”[31] Anne wailed to a thoroughly unconvinced Marilla.

Throughout the entire book, Josie found that exposed spot in Anne’s armor and skewered it. If we were to spin a medley of Josie’s greatest hits, per se, it would sound like this:

I save the worst thing for last: “Josie Pye says she is just going to college for education’s sake, because she won’t have to earn her own living; she says of course it is different with orphans who are living on charity—they have to hustle.”[34]

This all compels me to speak in capital letters: WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU, JOSIE PYE? Why don’t you just shut your Pye hole, once and for all? All that plucking, poking, and stabbing, front and back! Was she raised by wolverines? (I will not compare her to a cat because that would be disrespectful toward cats. Plus, I don’t want to risk my own cats shooting me looks of freezing scorn.)

Josie’s digs must have picked at Anne’s scabs something terrible, no matter how she tried to push back. Feisty as she was, Josie Pye often succeeded in getting under Anne’s freckled skin. Proof: the famous scene when Anne tried to dye her hair raven black, only to stain it a striking hue of green. First, Anne hid under her covers in a puddle of shame and tears, her hair the color of mashed peas and carrots, only admitting her folly to Marilla when confronted. Then Anne was horrified when she discovered no amount of scrubbing would remove the green. Tearfully, Anne admitted that her fears were focused on the reaction of one person. “Oh, how Josie Pye will laugh! Marilla, I cannot face Josie Pye.”[35]

When Anne returned to Avonlea School, looking like a shorn sheep after the green had been hacked from her hair, she was still able to hold her head high because only Diana knew the real story.

Naturally, Josie immediately hit Anne with a comparison to a “perfect scarecrow,”[36] but we see how Anne was growing, learning the value of letting things go—to a point. Ms. Pye Hole was subjected to another icy stare before Anne heaped hot coals upon her head and forgave her.

Anne’s grace toward Josie is a thing of beauty. Other than a few frozen glares, Anne responded to Josie time after time by trying to forgive her and turn an enemy into a friend. When Josie took first prize at the provincial fair for her knitted lace, Anne felt glad, and gladder yet because she knew that this rejoicing was a sign of mercy and blessing upon her own soul.

Looking back on Anne’s actions from my current perspective as the mother of a girl, I can see how much she has to teach both me and Phoebe about dealing with mean girls. She stood up to Josie when necessary with those looks of icy scorn and valiantly tried to see the good in her, despite little evidence of any goodness. Anne refused to get mired in the muddy waters of hating her enemy, an enemy who did not stop trying to belittle and shame her. Even when Anne had walked through the valley of the shadow, scooped hollow by loss, even then Josie made a crack about how Anne’s hair looked redder than ever when she wore her black mourning clothes. No, the Josie Pyes of this world won’t stop, unless someone stops them.

Anne, so saturated with feeling for her fellow hurt creature, somehow knew that there was a reason Josie Pye acted the way she did. She reminds me to ask myself, How have the Josie Pyes of the world been hurt, so they in turn hurt others, maybe even me and mine?

During my own lonely period in eighth grade, I paid close attention to how Anne responded to Josie. How I wish I had had the starch back then to shoot even one look of freezing scorn at my foes! Instead, I bent from my brokenness, pulled to the ground and trampled.

If I could go back in time to pay a visit to Josie Pye, I’d make a stopover in 1981. I’d park my blue Doctor Who TARDIS in the lot of my alma mater, and I’d make my way to the dungeon, just after stopping in the cafeteria for Mrs. King and Mrs. Dick’s chocolate chip cake. I’d tell them that their cake is an unsurpassed masterpiece of pastry perfection and give hugs all around.

Once I found the girl I was, I’d hold her in my arms for a long time. I would tell her she is loved more than she knows and worth more than gold. My words might sound like this:

Hang on, it’ll all blow over soon. There, there. It does get better. You wouldn’t believe it if I told you, but someday soon you are going to have the best friends in the whole wide world, friends who make you laugh and who value you and your gifts to this world. You’re even going to give your mother a heart attack when you insist on ten bridesmaids at your wedding! And Viola is one of them (just kidding)! But seriously, look around you. A few of your lifelong friends are in this very room, believe it or not. You feel like you are too sensitive, but oh—how the world needs feelers. How this dented old world needs people to notice things, to offer compassion and tears and kindness! How the broken road is consecrated because it leads cracked people like us to Jehovah Rapha, the God who heals. There is a crack in everyone—that’s how the light gets in.

When Viola Goossen drops her pencil case, gently but firmly hold yourself back. Let Viola get it. Don’t bend. Throw your shoulders back and be bold, be strong—not because you are those things, but because God is with you. Don’t bend. You are weak, but He is strong. Stop lying, especially to yourself. It tastes like candy, but it’s really poisonous. The truth nourishes and makes things whole. God will help you forgive Viola and see her through His eyes. You’ll never be friends, exactly, again, but in time, you will remember her as she was to you once, your fun, laughing pal. You’ll forgive her and wish her only love and good things. You’ll come to realize that Viola didn’t know how much her actions hurt you; she, like everyone else, was dealing with her own cracked places. And when you figure that last part out, it will change everything.

As Mrs. Lynde remarked, this earth is not our home. In this life, we will always have the Josie Pyes with us, the hurt ones who hurt us.

This earth is not our home—it gives me hope and a fresh yearning for a someday world with no more cracks, only wholeness, in a place lit by God Himself, where the light infuses everything and everybody. When this life is over, this is what I long for: that two old friends will clasp hands, sing songs, and laugh again by an unimaginable Lake of Shining Waters, rejoicing because the lion and the lamb have lain down together at last.