I have always been an indoor person, even when I was a little kid. While I liked going outside to play (hide-n-seek or basketball with my brother and his friends), for the most part, I preferred being indoors. I liked to read and do other indoor stuff like write in my journal, look at my photo albums (remember those?) or even write letters. When I was in third grade, at “the little school” as my siblings called it, I got home an hour earlier than they did. First things first, I would have a snack. I loved my after-school snacks. Crackers or cheese, or crackers and cheese, or even those fluorescent orange crackers with peanut butter between their two layers. I’m sure those were organic and gluten free. That or they were radioactive and poisonous.
Next, I would read, or sometimes do my homework, just to get it over with (the homework, not the reading. I liked reading). Sometimes I walked around the property. My parents owned a 2/3 acre property, so there was plenty of room to roam. I would walk around, talking to myself, pretending to be popular and have a lot of friends. I even remember the name of my alternative-universe self: Lauren. It wasn’t that I didn’t have friends at school; I might have (it’s been a long time since third grade), but I don’t remember. If I did have friends, I’m sure I didn’t have very many, especially when I was still new. We had moved to our small town when I was little. The elementary school was kindergarten-through sixth grade. It had two sections, K-3 downstairs and 4-6 upstairs. As a third grader, I was in the downstairs part. Just another reason for my siblings to tease me: I was the only one of the four of us who went to the “little school,” as they called it. One brother, Sam, was in the upstairs part because he was one year older and one grade higher (literally) than I. My eldest brother, Zander, and my sister, Zoe, went to a different school altogether (the junior-senior high school), so they could all three flaunt their superiority mercilessly. Just Zoe and Sam flaunted, though. Zander didn’t care much about it, or he wasn’t in on the joke. It didn’t matter to him that I was the only one of us that went to “the little school.” I’m sure he was too old and sophisticated to care about silly stuff like that. Actually, he was probably busy getting stoned with his friends, who he made easily– then and still now. He is an outgoing, popular-type guy.
A lot of time, it was just the younger three of us playing together, Zoe, Sam and me. Sam made fun of me the most, but Zoe did her part, too. We have a “game” where, in the midst of a conversation, the three of us will notice, and then point out, the person who is being left out of the conversation, the person who just doesn’t fit in. Not only do we notice it and point it out, we literally, actually point at the person. Two of the triangle together pointing at the third. As the littlest and the least fitting-in of the three of us, I was the one most often pointed at. Usually we laugh at the triangle point-ee. Two of us laugh harder.
It wasn’t unusual for me to not fit in. I was the baby of the family, so I was always different from my siblings, and I felt like it. When we moved to that new town and our new schools, the four of us were the outsiders. I was sentenced downstairs to the “little school” and I was the new kid. If my classmates had any curiosity about me, it didn’t last long. Most kids had been there a long time (if you can have a long time in third grade). They all knew each other. It seems like the smallness of that fact would make my classmates more curious, not less, but it didn’t. I was different; I was from somewhere else. In my family, we had seen things, gone places, even been on an airplane before. (I’m not kidding). That made me different, and different is never good, especially in third grade when you are about 8. I was 8 when we moved there.
This feeling of being different, left out, being “not one of them,” is why I felt alone. And, when my school day was finished, I would take the bus home, and for one hour I would still be alone until my older sibs got home. It was in this hour that I walked around outside on the property, pretending I was popular, pretending I was Lauren. I pretended for a long time.
One hour is a very long time when you are a little kid. I can remember one time in particular when I got home and just missed my Mom terribly. I decided to walk to where she worked, which was about three miles away. I don’t know why I didn’t just call her, because at 8 years old I definitely knew how to use a phone. I do remember at that time I thought that it wasn’t that far away; we drove past the place every day we went into town, because our house wasn’t right in town. I was wrong, my little kid brain having misjudged significantly. I walked and I walked and I walked. When they had gotten home and their little sister from the little school was nowhere to be seen, my siblings had called the police, of course. It seems to me now that I was “almost there” when the police officer came to pick me up. He saw me along the side of the road, walking to where my Mom worked. To this day, I remember how far I walked and how I never got to finish that journey. I would never do it today, walk along next to the highway, partly because it is foolish to walk right next to the highway, and partly because it’s a really long walk. When the police officer took me to my Mom, she hugged and cried, so relieved to see her little girl. I’m sure it must have been a visceral reaction on her part. I never tried to walk to town again.
That was outside.
Inside, as I said, there were books, reading, and writing in my journal. There was Nintendo; there were card games. There was the pleasure of having snacks. As an adult, the idea of being popular is a thing of the past. I don’t have to pretend I’m Lauren anymore because as an adult I do have friends. There are still books, reading, writing in my journal–and writing other stuff, too. I don’t have a Nintendo anymore, but now there is Netflix, now there is wine. There are still card games. Best of all, there are still snacks.