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    You Be Me: Friendship in the Lives of Teen Girls
    You Be Me: Friendship in the Lives of Teen Girls
    You Be Me: Friendship in the Lives of Teen Girls
    Ebook115 pages1 hour

    You Be Me: Friendship in the Lives of Teen Girls

    By Annick Press

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    About this ebook

    Girls in their teens form friendships that are astonishingly intense, yet these relationships are often broken and reformed, filled with confidences and betrayals, loyalty and fickleness.

    In these deeply honest essays, seven women present humorous, poignant, and revealing accounts of their own adolescent friendships. Whether it’s the power of cliques, learning that beauty may come with a price, or experiencing the thrill of finding a soulmate, this powerful profile of teen girls reveals the complex and rewarding nature of friendship.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAnnick Press
    Release dateSep 1, 2002
    ISBN9781554513406
    You Be Me: Friendship in the Lives of Teen Girls

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      Book preview

      You Be Me - Annick Press

      Friendship

      in the Lives

      of Teen Girls

      Edited by Susan Musgrave

      ANNICK PRESS

      __________________________________

      TORONTO + NEW YORK + VANCOUVER

      Contents

      Introduction

      Good in a Group

      Anne Fleming

      Acting Lessons

      Cathy Stonehouse

      Leaving Judith

      Gayla Reid

      The Gall of the Girl

      Lydia Kwa

      You Be Me

      Karen Rivers

      Beautiful Girls

      Judith Kalman

      The Popularity Plan

      Aislinn Hunter

      About the Authors

      Introduction

      IN YOUR YEAR BOOK, your best friend writes, Even when you are old and gray and senile and have no idea who I am, I will always love you. Your friend made a promise she wasn’t going to keep.

      No warning, no history of disease: one of your closest friends dies. You hate what they’ve dressed her in for the prayer service. She wouldn’t have been seen dead in it, you think, then hate yourself for having thoughts like that at such a serious time.

      You want to be liked.

      All you want is to blend in and not be noticed.

      You are lonely.

      You don’t deserve friends.

      You pretend, but you don’t belong anywhere.

      Whoever said friendship was easy?

      To have a friend you have to be a friend was the advice on a pottery mug my mother gave me for my fourteenth birthday. As usual, she was trying to tell me something.

      I didn’t have friends as a teenager—not the gold-standard, forever-lasting, I’ll-die-for-you-and-you-for-me friendships I suspected other people had. (After reading the stories in this collection, I know how wrong I was!) I never had the kind of soulmate who will lie for you, tell you the truth about your new haircut but go out in public with you anyway, listen to you without giving advice you don’t want to hear, lend you her favorite jeans and not hate you when you get grass stains all over them. That kind of friend was, for me, to remain an invisible friend all my life.

      All your friendships can be traced back to first days, writes Karen Rivers, days when fear lodges in your heart like an unpopped corn kernel waiting to explode. And how many different kinds of friendships we make. Friendships that, over the years, get broken and reformed, split apart and rebuilt. We have confidante friends, friends who are sometimes trustworthy and sometimes betray us by sharing our deepest secrets with someone they are trying to impress. We make new friends every year when school starts. Some of these friendships survive; others burn out in the time it takes to discover you don’t share your new friend’s passion for stealing vodka from her parents’ fridge or having seances in the graveyard after dark. Casual friends might loan us a hairbrush, but our best pals will share even their toothbrushes, in a pinch. Sometimes we make friends by accident, as in Lydia Kwa’s story: two girls who wouldn’t get to know each other under normal circumstances are thrown together by fate. And sometimes, strangely enough, we might end up with a friend we don’t even really like.

      Friends help us make it through the social meat grinder of our teenage years, and all through these stories you’ll find things that resonate with your own experiences. Maybe you’ll feel less fearful after reading what Cathy Stonehouse has to say, that the hardest thing to be scared of is yourself. Or identify with Aislinn Hunter when she writes, I spend the first day of high school worrying about how I look. Like Judith Kalman, you might be surprised to learn that beauty might come with a price. Sooner or later, we will all have to face one of the most difficult things in life: the death of someone we love, as in Gayla Reid’s Leaving Judith. And Anne Fleming’s story is for the rebel in all of us, the wild spirit that sends you straight to the back of the Bingo Bus, where you can be loud and awake and maybe doing an illicit thing or two.

      These compelling, no-holds-barred stories let me know that I’m not—and never was—so alone. Reading them, I felt I was in the company of long-lost friends. I hope you will feel that way too.

      —Susan Musgrave

      Good in a Group

      Anne Fleming

      Twelve

      IN THE DINING ROOM, filling out the forms that will match me up with a kid from Quebec for my pending visite interprovinciale, my mother and I have a big fight. You have to put a tick next to outgoing or reserved. Mom insists I am reserved. I say I’m outgoing. In fact, both are true. I’m socially outgoing and emotionally reserved, though I don’t have the wherewithal at age twelve to make that distinction. Mom wins the fight, as she usually does. I end up with a painfully shy and awkward girl with whom I have nothing in common. Describing her later to friends, I slap a thumb-and-forefinger L to my forehead and say Loser! But that’s not the point here.

      The point here is about being socially outgoing but emotionally reserved. This means a number of things for my friendships: 1) They tend to be less about the exchange of intimacies than the exchange of jokes; 2) They start in the public sphere—in class, in the halls, at band rehearsal, in the showers after swim practice, on the way to track meets, on ski team road trips—and stay there unless the other person initiates. Calling people up and asking them to do things makes me feel like a porcupine with its belly exposed. Bad enough to reveal you like someone, but to reveal you presume they might like you too? Aaaaaah. Too vulnerable, too vulnerable; 3) I am good in a group.

      I love groups. Yeah, they can be exclusionary and dangerous, cliquey and inwardly conformist and yada yada, but even so they can be fabulous. And then there are the moments of true groupness, those rare but exquisite times when it feels everyone is equal and respected and liked, when it’s clear you’re all wonderful, inventive, funny people and that you’re in this together, whatever this is. Your hearts expand, sproing-sproing-sproing like the Grinch’s, and what you feel is love for the whole world, for the variety and splendor of humanity.

      Thirteen

      ON THE WAY to the subway that’ll take us to indoor track practice, we jostle and smoke and talk about quitting, though none of us is really addicted. Andrew’s already quit. Lorelei’s going to. Yeah, me too, says Chris, lighting up.

      We roll our student transit tickets in our fingers till they’re soft and pliable, then peel them apart to drop one-half in the fare box, print side up. Ariel goes further and does it with a child’s ticket. She’s five-nine and has to start doing a sort of bent-knee duckwalk at the edge of the fare booth to pass for under twelve. We snigger on one side of the turnstile and guffaw on the other.

      We biff the punch-button on the transfer box with our fists, snag our unneeded transfers and fold them in half, then slip them between our first and second fingers, fold the sides down left and right, and blow into the slit, making a high-pitched whine that out-decibels the blade-of-grass-between-the-fingers trick by an impressive factor. Decent.

      We don’t even dare each other anymore, just do it if we feel like it: stand on the yellow warning strip lining the platform’s edge, confident and adrenalized, all in a row. Subway’s not going to hit ya, but it sure feels like it the first time, feels like it’s going to take your nose off. By now it’s kind of a mystical thing, planting feet on yellow, hearing the thunder and squeal of the approaching train, feeling the warm musty breath of the tunnels washing over you like dragon wind as the hurtling silver train pistons air ahead of it, whoosh, into the station. Then the harder bam of air from the train front hits and the racing metal’s suddenly a handsbreadth from your face, and there you all are, cool and daring, loose-kneed and easy.

      We saunter onto the train, take up a lot of seats, put our feet up, swing from the hang rails, fake each other out with kung fu kicks checked at the last second. Ditto with eye pokes and face slaps. When it comes to tripping, though, there’s no pretending. It’s real, it’s constant. Right then it’s the entire point of our existence.

      We make sidelong agreements to car-hop next stop without telling this week’s target. Act casual coming into the stop, snake into action, leave whoever it is gaping in their seat or tearing after us trying to join us in the next car before the doors close. Maybe the kid manages to stab a hand through the converging rubber of the doors and yank them apart or maybe the rubber sandwiches a torso or a leg, doesn’t matter, we’re killing ourselves. Even better is leaving the kid on the platform, the look on that face. Next stop we all get out and wait. Unless the kid’s a real idiot, then forget it. Decent, man. We’re effin’ great. We don’t even know how young we are.

      At the exhibition grounds, at the grand old-smelling warehouse-like track where the feet of national-level university athletes make the raised red-rubber-covered wooden running oval thunder, we stretch and train, inspired, ambitious, and

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