The Bad Girls and Boys

THROUGHOUT THE LATTER HALF OF the fourth grade, each day after Catholic school, I changed out of my uniform and into my at-home outfit of choice: a T-shirt with a giant furry spider on it, an unbuttoned red-and-orange flannel shirt over it, and a backward black baseball cap on my head. So it’s pretty clear that something troubling and bad was going on inside me. It wasn’t puberty, either. I had at least six more years to go before that whole mess.

I think it was rebellion. A small kind, obviously—one that wouldn’t challenge my parents or my teachers or any type of authority figure for whom I felt unquestioning respect and unwavering fear, but one that would make me want to look like I was kind of thinking about it. It would have been cooler if my skin-deep transformation had something to do with my transfer from Catholic school to public school, if I had had it up to here with the Man telling me I couldn’t wear any colors besides virginal white and… maritime navy, if a nun had rapped my knuckles with a ruler one too many times and I had burst out of my school’s doors applying eyeliner with one hand and giving a few whimpering kindergartners the finger with the other, sauntering off into the sunset and, later, into wicked, godless Pine Lake Elementary.

The sad truth is that my Catholic school didn’t even HAVE nuns.

All I really had to rebel against, at that point in my life, was myself. I don’t think most of us Goody Two-Shoes are as pleased with ourselves as we seem. After all, getting positive feedback from teachers is nice, but having friends who think you’re fun is nicer. Good grades were important to me, but the rigidity of my rule-following was a compulsion, not a source of pride. Moving was going to mean starting over, and that was going to have to mean change. After all, I was only just on the very cusp of popularity that previous year, and I had known those girls for over four years. It seemed that liking me took a lot of time. I was worried I wouldn’t have enough years to work with when I started my new school, in the last year of elementary. One year was all I’d have before Pine Lake would join up with two other, bigger elementary schools (with even higher proportions of rich and pretty girls, though I did not know this then) in the hellhole that is middle school. I couldn’t even get a head start. I didn’t even know what public school fifth-graders thought was cool. Drugs, probably. Drugs, fast cars, making out, and other lascivious behavior. I was doomed.

The move to public school was definitely going to mean clothing “freedom,” wherein children ruthlessly inflict uniforms upon one another by silently condoning certain clothing brands and styles while prohibiting others. The accessories of popularity (besides the usual glow that comes with being admired by others) at my new, big school in the suburbs could have looked like anything, for all I knew, but I was sure they must be rougher. It wasn’t just going to be Starter jackets anymore. There would be daggers, maybe. Artful facial scars. I didn’t know! I couldn’t blindly plan for such extremes, obviously, but when the time came, I would be ready to dip a toe into trouble. I wanted to do whatever I had to do to make new friends, just so long as we were only talking about wardrobe adjustments and other social markers that I could ask my mom to buy for me.

The first stage of my transformation came unexpectedly, in the summer between the old school and the new. That’s when I fell in love with my first self-evident bad boy. It quickly burned out and was done with in less than a day, but that’s just the sort of thing you have to accept when you live life on the edge.

I saw him first on the very grand Titanic-like staircase inside the foyer of the old, historic-looking St. Paul building where my uncle was holding his wedding reception. The boy was roughly my age, maybe closer to twelve, blond, and adorable. He looked squinty and brooding—like someone who had seen the inside of a principal’s office or two. He was wearing a slightly disheveled shirt and tie, and I was wearing a black shirt, a floor-length black silk skirt with white and red flowers on it, and my hair in a half ponytail. It was not my best going-out look. Nevertheless, we made eye contact that smoldered as much as prepubescent eye contact can smolder, which is actually more than you might think. My face was flushed and my pulse quicker. I was dizzy with possibility. We were at a wedding, after all. In fifteen years at our own wedding we’d have an amazing story to tell our three hundred guests about how we met.

If I should have been thinking about how we might be slightly and technically related by that point (he was from my new aunt’s side; I hope you give me at least that much credit), I wasn’t. I don’t think ten- and eleven-year-olds think about that stuff, or at least I hope they don’t, because otherwise the fact that my ten-year-old cousin once told six-year-old me that he’d marry me someday when I was “older and prettier” might seem kind of creepy.

The rest of the night was spent like this: I walked around looking for this boy between speeches and meals and bathroom breaks, and when I’d see him I’d look at him, then look away, then look at him again. I never got closer than twenty feet, which is about how far out my anti-flirtation force field has extended since the beginning of my life. When people were dancing, I hovered around the edges of the floor, pretending like I wasn’t watching him, but I was. In my mind, he was an impossibly cool dancer. In reality, I think he was just jumping a lot? I don’t know. Boys don’t have to do anything to be cute on the dance floor if they are cute in the first place. They could just stand there, scowling with their hands in their pockets, and I’d be like, “Aww!”

He looked at me a lot, too, that evening. I am sure of this. Was I the only age-appropriate girl there, and also a person who was intently staring at him every few minutes? Certainly. Was I going to let that diminish my inflating sense of my own appeal? Definitely not. I spent a lot of time doing that thing where you pretend like you’re just going about your own business but are actually putting concerted effort into making everything you do a little bit cuter, just in case a certain person happens to be watching. I was all, “Oh I think I’ll just bite my lip and twirl my hair a little while I stand here… next to my parents” and “I always eat cake this adorably. I am an adorable and dainty eater, just naturally.”

After a couple of hours of this exercise in unfulfilled pre-sexual tension, I was forced to leave the wedding reception by my parents. They told my brothers and me that it was time to go, but I asked if we could stay a little bit longer. When they asked why, I think I just told them I was “having fun.” They weren’t buying it because I was a child at a middle-aged person’s wedding reception, so we got our things and headed out. As we walked through the foyer, I saw my true love on the staircase again. He loved that staircase. We locked eyes one last time, but I looked away quickly, because the pain was too much to bear.

This next part is when things got crazy: My family loaded into our car, which was parked across the street. As I buckled my seat belt and looked back longingly toward the house that contained my little blond soul mate, he ran out onto the porch. He came to a quick stop, out of breath (I imagine), and looked around wildly. It was like a movie, right when the music would have swelled and everyone in the audience would have started crying because love IS real. He was looking for somebody. Looking for ME.

My parents drove away and I twisted my head around as far as it could go, watching him fade out of sight. “Fate is a cruel mistress,” I wish I had whispered aloud to myself.

Some weeks later, at a family gathering, my uncle and new-aunt produced several envelopes of pictures from the wedding and the reception. My heart leaped. I had all but forgotten what the boy looked like, which is what always happens to me when I think someone is really, really cute. I tore through the photos, probably blatantly uninterested in almost everything: “Yeah, the bridesmaids, cutting the cake, the venue, the cousins, whatever! JUST SHOW ME THAT BOY.” Finally, there he was, in profile, at the far edge of a dark photo of the dance floor. I asked my aunt for his name. “Oh that’s Tony,” she said. “Bit of a troublemaker.” I think that was supposed to dissuade my interest, but I asked for the picture (embarrassing!). “Did you get a chance to meet Jack?” my aunt asked, clearly trying to facilitate a more proper arranged marriage. “He’s a very nice boy!” she said, handing me another picture featuring some non-hot ten-year-old. “Um, no, I didn’t,” I replied, setting the picture aside in the pile with everything else from the wedding I didn’t care about.

Tony was pinned to my bulletin board for at least a year after that. His presence carried me through my first year in a new home and a new school, his smoldering gaze the only constant on which I could rely. Under his watchful, semi-glazed eye, I metamorphosed from a quiet, leggings-wearing Catholic schoolgirl who never broke a single rule into a quiet, oversized-T-shirt-wearing public schoolgirl who also never broke a single rule, but who knew some people that did.

What was left of summer after that fateful wedding reception was spent unsuccessfully trying to convert the gazebo behind my family’s new home into a neighborhood clubhouse, which I forced on my little brothers and, like, one other younger boy from our block at least five or six times. Weirdly, most little kids do not seem to enjoy having a strict twice-weekly meeting schedule and a mandatory fort-building progress-report policy, no matter how many snacks you ply them with. In my alone time, which was plentiful, I sat on my bed in my new room, pretending to smoke cigarettes that I rolled up out of notebook paper (these I would hide, afraid that my parents would learn that I was pretending to smoke pretend cigarettes and would disown me) and envisioning life at Pine Lake Elementary. I was reading Cynthia Voigt’s YA novel Bad Girls, about two precocious and strong-willed tomboys named Mikey and Margalo. Shortly after I finished the sequel (Bad, Badder, Baddest), I started school and met the Mandys.

They were these two kind of punky girls in my class who I noticed—around the edges of our classrooms, the cafeteria, the parking lot where we had recess, always on the edges—and I decided that I, who feared rule-breaking more than death and cried if I ever forgot to bring my homework assignments to class, should befriend them. Mandy #1 was, at age eleven, already five-foot-six and in possession of a decent-sized pair of breasts. She looked sixteen and was hot in a way that made it clear she would be getting into trouble over the next ten to forty years. Mandy #2 was a more normal looking eleven-year-old, save for the blue streaks in her hair, dark lipstick, and very large sweatshirts. Both of them were bratty and sullen, though I always got the feeling that Mandy #2’s meanness was more of a display to impress Mandy #1 than something she really meant. Mandy #1 seemed very worth impressing.

I don’t remember how the three of us became acquainted because my fifty-five-pound pale little self was not exactly the kind of new kid that makes the other kids whisper in the hallways, “Where is she from?” “The wrong side of the tracks, I bet!” At eleven, for me, menstruation was a distant nightmare, and breasts were (to borrow a phrase that should, actually, explain a lot) a Phantom Menace. In any case, we met and hung out at recess, where the Mandys told me about how much they loved Marilyn Manson and The Prodigy. I was like, “Cool, me too, I love those guys.”

I didn’t have a lot in common with the Mandys, but I so wanted to, because bad girls seemed to me to be the coolest, most unbelievable thing to ever live after my five years in Catholic school. (There are, of course, Catholic bad girls, but it’s hard to identify them before the age of thirteen.) I believed, if only briefly, that my daily life could live up to the books I was reading. I wanted things to be different for me in my new school. I wanted to take my own personality and transform it entirely into something that everyone else would not only believe, but would love as well.

It was because of the Mandys that I made my confused and concerned mother buy me boys’ Oakley T-shirts, despite never having even seen a snowboard in my life. It was because of the Mandys that I discovered black nail polish and lipstick (and not a moment too soon!). These were little habits and items that were not hard to take on, and for a while it almost seemed like things might really work out for us. Bad, badder, baddest: It didn’t matter if I was on the mildest end, as long as I was still a part of the trio.

When I hung out with the Mandys after school, we’d work on designs for our clothing brand, which we called “FROGG.” Our “designs” were essentially baggy jeans and T-shirts and sweatshirts, each with a frog logo printed on them. The extra “G” was just to make it clear that our clothing brand was really cool and unique. We would crowd around my bed with a notepad and colored pencils, and I would insist on drawing the bodies, because I’m bossy. It’s not that we had ever grown closer, but in the space of these afternoons we would grow apart. Mandy #1 would say something like, “Can’t we have a V-neck or something a little lower?” and I’d say, “Umm, haha, I think that would be a liiiiittle inappropriate.” We did, however, find common ground in miniature pleather backpacks, which were having what we in fashion liked to call “a moment.” Still, we just weren’t on the same page, in personality OR in hormonal development. When they left my house, my mom would tell me “those girls need to take a shower.” She said, “Their bodies are developing a little quicker than yours, I think. If you know what I mean,” and I was like, “MOM!!!!!!!”

The Mandys went to the local parks after dark to smoke cigarettes with boys three years older than them, which is a thing I had previously believed only happened in YA novels but is actually real. I was never invited to their more dubious extracurriculars, maybe because the Mandys sensed that I was secretly a law-loving nerd who just wanted to make some new friends. It’s just as well, because if they had asked me to hang out anywhere where there would be cigarettes—or worse, boys—I would have taken up my standby get-out-of-scary-stuff lie from those days, which was “I have to babysit my brothers.” My poor parents. They have no idea how absent I made them sound over the course of my adolescence.

It’s hard to explain why I would want to be friends with two people who could have been best described as “kind of asshole-y,” but what I think it comes down to is that the Mandys, like bad girls before and after them, just did not give a fuck. This is the opposite of what I do. All I give are fucks. And it seems to me that it might be nice, on occasion, to get rid of some of them. I wanted to shoplift—if only in a theoretical sense, in a world where I knew that I could. I wanted to be able to skip school to hang out with my unbelievably hot boyfriend in a courtyard somewhere. I wanted to inspire fear and fearful admiration.

Bad girls require this intense outward level of confidence, this provoke-me-not attitude that I’ve never quite been able to muster. At a sleepover once, my friends (later ones, ones I’d made after rehab. Just kidding.) suggested that we watch Cruel Intentions. I called my mom to ask her if it was okay if I watched it. She said no. I didn’t watch it. I’ve blocked out what I did instead, or what exactly I told my friends (“Sorry, my mom says that I can’t watch rated-R movies until I’m of age”??). The rest of that memory could only be reached through intensive hypnotic regression, I am sure. For another example, in sixth grade, my brief and so-called best friend abandoned me entirely for the new popular girl, and I did nothing. The Mandys would not have let that shit go.

Bad girls don’t feel the need to act the way girls are “supposed” to act. They don’t wear pretty clothes or subtle pink makeup or waves in their hair. They talk back, often and loudly. They are viciously honest and witty and mean. They are independent and tough. They do things they shouldn’t, things that make their parents unhappy and their friends impressed. They don’t chase after boys. Boys chase after them. The fictional Mikey and Margalo were like that. The Mandys were like that.

I really ought to make myself a little bracelet that reads “WWTMD?”—What Would the Mandys Do? (Though if I’m about to do something that one of the Mandys [especially Mandy #1] would do, I should, to be honest, probably not do that thing. I could go to jail.) But maybe that way I’d do something halfway between what the Mandys would do and what I would do. Just a few times, just to know what being bad felt like.