by Karina Yan Glaser
Hope wasn’t something I spent a lot of time thinking about when I was growing up. If I had a word to describe childhood, it would be survival. I know a lot of people can relate to that. Growing up, I changed schools almost every year. Already a shy kid, I found changing schools every year to be pure torture. However, all that change taught me a very useful trick: invisibility. I spent a lot of time in school libraries, hidden in the stacks, content to spend recesses and lunchtimes with familiar books.
The year I entered sixth grade, I (surprise, surprise) entered a new school. It was a Catholic school, and I didn’t even know my mom had put in an application for me to attend until a couple of weeks before school started. I had taken a test to get into this school, but I remember thinking it was a test to get into our public school’s gifted program. My teachers tested me for gifted programs every year since I was a good student, but I never scored high enough to get in. I was not very good at standardized tests. All I can recall is one day in late August before sixth grade, my mom brought me to a building that had a gigantic cross in front of it. Our family wasn’t religious, so that was a surprise.
“We are buying uniforms,” Mom informed me. “This new school makes you wear uniforms.”
“A uniform?” I gaped.
I had gone only to public schools in the past, and at all of those schools I could wear whatever I wanted. Or, I wore whatever my mom made me wear. I distinctly remembered going to school in terry-cloth shorts when I was in first grade. When I entered the schoolyard where we gathered in class lines before school began, everyone pointed at me and yelled, “Short shorts! Short shorts!” When I came home and told my mom about it, she shrugged.
“Those are the style shorts I wore for school in Hong Kong,” Mom said.
I refused to wear those shorts again, even though they were comfortable. Instead, I wore jeans like everyone else and suffered through the California heat.
At least now, with the uniform, I wouldn’t have to worry about wearing the wrong thing to this new Catholic school. Mom led me past the cross and into the building. We entered an auditorium that was filled with tables. On top of the tables were rows of folded-up clothes. A woman whose blow-dried hair easily gave her an extra three inches of height welcomed us.
My mom pointed to me and said, “She is a new student here.”
The woman smiled, asked me what grade I was going into, and led me to one of the tables.
“There are three different color pinafores,” the woman explained, pointing to the light yellow, light blue, and light pink jumpers. “Underneath you have to wear a blouse.” She pointed to a blouse with an elaborate collar, what I imagined someone would wear in Victorian England. One side of the collar was embroidered with swirly script. The woman explained that the monogram was of the school’s initials.
My mom bought me one pinafore in each color and a few blouses. The woman with the hair led us to another table with navy-blue shorts and white shirts. These were the PE uniforms, and the shorts were very much like those unfortunate shorts that made everyone laugh at me back in first grade! Life had truly come around full circle.
Armed with cotton-candy-colored pinafores, Victorian blouses, and PE shorts like those my mom wore when she was a child, we headed home. Two weeks later, school began. I returned to the building with the huge cross, only this time I was wearing a yellow pinafore that went well past my knees. Since I was new, someone from the front office showed me where to wait. She led me to a group of girls who were also in sixth grade. And . . . none of them were wearing yellow pinafores. Some kids were wearing the pink ones, but most of them were wearing blue! I slowly turned around, taking a closer look at the rest of the school, where hundreds of kids were milling around the courtyard waiting for the school bell to ring.
Not one person was wearing a yellow pinafore.
“You must be new,” a girl with a white bow in her blond hair said to me.
I nodded, noticing that she was staring at my pinafore with sympathy. I looked back at her and noticed that her hemline was much, much shorter than mine. It was at least three inches above her knee! And her blouse didn’t have an elaborate collar. Hers was a crisp, white blouse with no school monogram.
I felt betrayed by the uniform lady, who had led me astray in every way. It was as if I was back in first grade, when everyone was pointing at my short shorts and laughing.
My transition to sixth grade was definitely the most difficult out of all my school transitions, and not just because of the uniform. Most of the students had been at the school since preschool, so there were friend dynamics that I didn’t understand and coursework I had never learned. I got a D- on my first science test because the majority of the questions were review from the previous year. On the first non-uniform day of the school year, everyone in my class wore a special brand of T-shirt that turned colors in the sun. I had never seen shirts like this before. There was obviously an unspoken code about clothes that I knew nothing about.
Furthermore, the class I entered was very heavily skewed toward boys. Two-thirds of the grade were boys. Maybe I, a non-Catholic, was accepted into the school in the first place only because they needed more girls! There were sixteen girls total, and they were split into two main cliques. One group liked sports and school, and the other group liked makeup and boys. I was in a third group, all by myself. I was the one who went to the library and read during recess and lunch.
One of the biggest changes was being at a Catholic school. I had never been exposed to religion, so seeing crosses and artwork of Jesus and Mary at every turn was a real eye-opener. There was mass every Friday, and everyone took communion. I had no idea what communion was, and when I asked the teacher, she said it was the body and blood of Christ. That made me incredibly uncomfortable. Thankfully, I wasn’t allowed to take communion, because to do that you had to have been baptized in second grade. Instead, I was told to cross my hands over my chest, and when I got to the priest, he thumbprinted a cross on my forehead. The only other kids in the school who had to cross their hands over their chest were the kids younger than second grade.
But hope comes in small and unexpected ways. A month after school began, a girl in the sports-and-school girl clique asked if I wanted to walk to class with her. The next thing I knew, I started hanging out with that group at lunch instead of hiding in the library. When they found out I was a gymnast, they begged me to show them what I could do during recess.
“But I’m wearing a dress,” I said, gesturing at my blue pinafore. (I never again wore the yellow one after the first day of school.)
“Don’t you wear shorts underneath?” one of the girls asked. She flipped up her skirt to reveal plaid boxer shorts, the kind that boys wear as underwear!
“I’ll wear something tomorrow,” I promised her.
When my mom picked me up later that day, I told her I needed boxer shorts.
“Why?” she said, horrified.
“Mo-om, please!” I begged. “I have to wear something under my dress so I can do sports with the other kids during recess.”
“Wear your PE shorts,” Mom told me, as she drove us home. She did not stop at the store to buy boxer shorts.
It turned out that no one cared that I wore PE shorts under my pinafore. What they did care about was the way I could flip and tumble on the grass. And slowly, I began to fit in more. I was invited to birthday sleepovers and introduced to rollerblading (I was terrible at it) and TP’ing the houses of boys in our class late at night (I never understood the point of that) and shaving my legs (my mom was not very happy to see all the cuts I came home with). For my birthday, even though I didn’t have a party or a sleepover, a few of my friends came to school with gifts. Inside one of the wrapped packages was that elusive T-shirt that changed colors in the sun.
I was shocked when I didn’t have to switch schools for seventh grade and even more shocked that I stayed at the same school in eighth grade. I had never stayed in the same school that long before. By then, I had gotten used to Catholic school and no longer shuddered at the images of Jesus nailed to the cross hanging in every hallway. I had joined the school sports teams and learned how to play volleyball, a sport I had never heard of before.
Eighth grade was the final year at that school; we would all be moving on to different high schools after graduation. One of the big events of the last year was the eighth-grade musical. It was a Big Deal, which I knew from watching the eighth graders perform it when I was in sixth and seventh grades.
There was a buzz in the air the day the music teacher was going to tell us which musical we would be doing. We held our breath as we waited to find out the selection. Finally, it was announced.
We were doing The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
Tom Sawyer! All the girls looked at each other and sighed. We knew they had selected a musical that had a lot of boy leads because there were so many boys in our grade, but it was still a disappointment. There was only one lead girl part in the whole musical: Becky Thatcher. And nearly every girl in the grade was going to audition for the part, including me.
Even though I had learned a lot about the school culture in the past couple of years, I underestimated the ruthlessness around the eighth-grade musical. Getting a good part was a badge of glory, it seemed. On the day of auditions, while all the other girls auditioning for Becky paced around the classroom mumbling lines to themselves, I sat with the script on my lap and took deep breaths. To me, singing a song and saying some lines was a lot less stressful than doing flips on a balance beam that was only four inches wide. We were all auditioning at the same time, just standing up when our name was called and singing the one song Becky had a solo in. When my turn came and the pianist started up the jaunty tune, I took a deep breath and belted out, “Ain’t nothin’! ’Cause I’d druther go a-fishin’ with you!”
Honestly, I was surprised that I could sound so loud and in tune. Our music teacher looked surprised, too, as did the other kids in my grade. I was known for being pretty quiet, my teachers often asking me to speak up in class. I guess all that singing practice in the shower was useful for something.
In the end, I got the Becky Thatcher part. The other girls in the class were resentful at first, but then we discovered that Becky had to kiss Tom in the musical, onstage, in front of everyone! The guy chosen to play Tom was not particularly well liked, so I think the other girls felt as if they had dodged a bullet.
The first time we practiced the kiss was in front of the whole eighth grade, who, in the fashion of thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds, were completely immature about it. There was much laughing and hooting and teasing. I fled the stage afterward in embarrassment. But, besides the kissing scene, being in the play was a lot of fun. I loved the feeling of being backstage, waiting in the wings for a scene to begin, stage lights illuminating the set and a quiet expectation filling the auditorium.
It is not lost on me that the first glimpse of hope I felt at the new school was an invitation from someone to join them. It’s funny how one invitation can change so much, but it did. I still remember it now, decades later, when I see someone enter an unfamiliar place for the first time. I know what it’s like to be new and invisible and uncertain, and I know how much it means to have someone reach out.
So now, when I have an opportunity to welcome someone into a new situation, I walk over, just like my friend did so many years ago, and I extend a hand. I extend hope.
KARINA YAN GLASER is the New York Times bestselling author of the Vanderbeekers series. She is a contributing editor for Book Riot and lives in Harlem with her husband, two daughters, and an assortment of rescue animals. One of her proudest achievements is raising two kids who can’t go anywhere without a book. Find her online at KarinaGlaser.com.