Rollercoasters, Big and Small

YOU ARE ELEVEN. You are wearing your prep school’s red uniform polo shirt and a khaki skirt. Your mom took you to the Red Door Salon inside Sak’s Fifth Avenue to have your shoulder-length hair blown out, and now she waves goodbye to you as you wait to board the Coach bus to Orlando. Living in South Florida, you’ve come to understand that field trips suck. You either travel to the Everglades and ride a scary airboat and eat alligator meat, or else it’s the sugar cane fields where you walk in the heat for miles and miles and at the end all you get is a small sugar cube to symbolize what you’ve learned. So when your choir group is set to compete at Universal Studios in Orlando, you see it as a positive opportunity, a ray of light.

You sit on the asphalt of the school’s basketball court while Richie D and Richie R shoot lay-ups, a term you only know because you watch them during recess. You are lined up in your performance order, tallest kids stand in the back row and shorter kids, like you, up front. The principal tells you that this is how you must sit on the bus, for reasons such as order, for reasons like preventing chaos upon arrival at the theme park. You are still the new girl from New York. Kids don’t understand why you wear your hair so fluffy, why you don’t have any pets at home, why you don’t have an accent like a real New Yorker. The unpopular kids have been kind; Danielle who accompanied you to see Toy Story and then you both ate endless breadsticks at the Olive Garden with your parents. And of course, Mikey, who confessed a crush on you on the first day of school, who asked your mother during carpool for a picture of you to put in his locker and to your dismay, she obliged, thought it was romantic. Mikey, with his big fingers and thick glasses and big butt, how on that first day you had sat down at your desk and he sat down next to you, crushed your hand underneath him and you let out a squeal.

You are not cool enough yet to judge these other kids, so you’ve had to take it, rough it out, until now. But because of height, because of your size, you sit next Maddy O’Neil, O’Neil like the surfer clothing company, and Natalie Castle, Castle like the princess she is and you wish to become. You’re actually smack dab in the middle of them, and there’s only so long they can ignore you. Eventually Maddy comments on your Sketchers, how her mom couldn’t find her the all white ones. She wears the same pair in black and white. She makes you take off your shoe, so you wear one of hers and one of yours. You wonder if it’ll be like this the rest of the day, the rest of your life. Natalie, jealous of the tryst between you and Maddy, asks if you want to try her Lip Smackers. It’s peach flavored and you put it on even though your mom told you never to share things like this; make-up, sodas, anything that could transmit germs and make you sick. Natalie asks if you want her to braid your hair. She has already braided Maddy’s into pigtail braids like Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. You say yes and turn around, your back to her, and she starts separating sections and asking around for extra hair ties.

When you board the bus, short kids first, Maddy runs to the back where there happens to be the only row of three seats. “The Three Musketeers!” she screams and it’s decided you will stay in the middle for the three-hour ride up north. The drive starts with simple questions, like who is your crush, who do you want to kiss, have you ever kissed, do you wear a training bra or a real bra or not even a bra yet, do you know what a period is, do you have an older brother or sister, do they have their period, and so forth. You tell them you have kissed; a boy in Turks and Caicos named Gregory, but you called him Greg, and even though it’s a true story, saying it aloud makes it more dramatic, makes it seem untrue, so you embellish the truth, maybe that you kind of felt his thing on your leg while you kissed. Then come the dares; I dare you to lick Natalie’s eyeball, I dare you to flash the bus, I dare you to scream your crush’s name. Flat land rolls on and on outside your window.

In a few weeks you will go to Maddy’s house for a sleepover. Natalie will be there too and you will swim in the pool, eat corn on the cob and grilled chicken made by her mother, you will play with Maddy’s dog, Lucifer, even though you are afraid of dogs. At night you will sit in the computer room and make “rollercoasters” by typing out hundreds of neon symbols on the black screen because if you don’t do it you will die, like the chain email says. When you scroll down, you feel as if you are riding a rollercoaster, the beautiful ups and downs. It will feel like heaven. At night, you all sleep in the same bed and at school, you will finally be popular. This lasts, of course, until Maddy asks for your AOL password and you give it to her, something your dad forbid you to do. When you are found out, you are not allowed to play with Maddy anymore, or Natalie, by association.

And you should mention that you didn’t win the choir competition either. Not even top three. But no one cared about that. The choir director didn’t even notice your mismatched shoes as you squinted in the sun, sang your heart out only to lose.